Rail murder

IT’S trainspotters’ paradise. York-born author Andrew Martin, creator of the “steam detective” series featuring policeman Jim Stringer, has been invited aboard a Wear Valley Railways special to discuss and read extracts from his latest book The Last Train to Scarborough.

The hour-long Sunday trip actually runs from Wolsingham Station to Stanhope, with the splendid starting time of 12.55pm, in what is surely one of the most romantic of venues for this year’s Durham Book Festival.

Son of a railman, Martin, is up to six in the series about railway murders – the seventh will plunge Detective Stringer into the Great War of 1914-18 – and admits: “I find many aspects of modern life very worrying, which is probably why I write historical novels.”

He’s looking forward to welcoming passengers for the 12.55 to discuss all aspects of his work – another of his books is titled How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts – and he plans to read from The Last Train to Scarborough on Stanhope Station’s platform.

Asked about the Scarborough connection, he explains that his fascination with the resort includes the fact that its station still has the longest platform seat in the UK. “They needed it for all the excursion passengers at the turn of the last century. I prefer to set my books in this period because of the romance of steam and the fact that many people used to carry a revolver in those days, which makes life a little more dangerous,” Martin says.

His steam detective novels have also travelled the length of the country in search of adventure.

“The character of Jim Stringer started off in the North but then he went to London to work on the Necropolis line which carried the bodies to Brookwood Cemetery (in Surrey) from London. It was the biggest cemetery in the British Empire with its own line. Then Jim gravitated back to the North because I’m from York and find it easier to write about this region. I like the drollery of the language up here which I try to get into the books,” explains Martin, who is also a regular freelance writer for The Guardian. “Although, I’ll write for anyone who’ll have me,”

jokes the writer who created a recent BBC documentary, Between The Lines, on how the railways have inspired film and literature.

His railway novels have a plausible background based on history but he admits to slipping in the odd modern phrase that sounds Edwardian “or even stuff that I’ve made up which fits those times”.

“The basic geography, I hope, is accurate but there is great deal about the railways at that time which isn’t known. You wouldn’t get anyone who knew it all, so you do have a certain license. I’m just creating the seventh novel where Jim goes off to fight in World War One because the North-Eastern Railway raised its own battalion.

You do have to get on top of the facts here because so much is recorded.

“But even here when I talk to military experts and say ‘could this have happened?’ and very often they reply ‘well, I don’t know, I suppose it could have’.

And that’s the type of answer you’re always looking for. As long as they don’t say ‘it’s absolutely out of the question’,”

Martin says of the new work, which will be called The Somme Stations.

He’s keen not to portray the Somme soldiers as victims of a great big war machine without autonomy as individuals. “Too often the plots are deliberately heart-wrenching and I feel one has to avoid that kind of sentimentality,” Martin says.

Although he’s now Londonbased, the author does feel he has a responsibility when writing books about the North- East and Yorkshire.

“One thing I’ve tried to do in these books is to show that there were great regional differences in those days. I’ve written novels set in Halifax, Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Whitby and York and tried to show that these places were like little city states. There was much great civic pride and more autonomy and confidence about themselves.

“In Halifax in 1903 you could post a letter on a tram at midnight. I think it was a vibrant place where everyone knew who the mayor was. He was the area’s celebrity, not some American singer. I’m trying to show how these places were unique and when people travelled from Halifax to Blackpool it was usually the first time they’d seen the sea. It was a knock-out experience which we find hard to imagine now,” he adds.

■ For ticket information and booking on the Wear Valley Railways Special Event on Sunday ring 0191-375-0763 or go to galadurham.co.uk Venue information: Wear Valley Railways 01388-526203 and weardale-railway.org.uk