Something about a moving train – its strangers, its shifting corridors, its sealed compartments – has long tempted writers toward mischief and menace. Here that fascination is gathered into a suspenseful anthology of vintage crime.
Assembled from the golden age of the genre and before, this collection brings together tales of theft, sabotage, and sudden death played out on the railway, featuring such accomplished hands as Freeman Wills Crofts and Baroness Orczy.
This locomotive anthology features Freeman Wills Crofts' forensic precision in Crime on the Footplate, Ronald A. Knox's razor-sharp deduction in The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage, and Baroness Orczy's iconic sleuth solving The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway. Readers will also join Ernest Bramah's legendary blind detective Max Carrados in The Knight's Cross Signal Problem, Craig Rice's witty duo in Once Upon a Train, and Johnston McCulley's comical criminal in Thubway Thame's Bomb Scare, plus many more murderous train stories.
The enclosed, anonymous world of the carriage – where anyone might be a suspect and escape is only ever one station away – proves the perfect stage for ingenuity and dread alike.