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The Excursion Train by Edward Marston is an old fashioned detective story set in Victorian England. It has everything you might expect from such a tale: Cockney accents abound, officious Scotland Yard detectives dip their toe in the seedy underbelly of London, great big steam engines are the locations for nasty murders…It all has a warm familiarity to it and makes an easy read, but the characters and dialogue remain stifled and lack any real charisma. The central character, Detective Robert Colbeck (another Robert!), is described as a dandy type; handsome and well dressed. You would imagine him, then, to have luck with the ladies, and this he does, having secured the affections of Madeleine Andrews. But there’s not a hint of passion between the two young people: in fact, the passion lies in the world of the killers and those related to them; in other words, among the lower classes. Marston seems to highlight the class difference by keeping Colbeck’s emotions in check, thus ensuring us that he is a gentleman. Well, he may be a gentleman, but he’s a bore..by the end of the book, I was thinking, “Just kiss her already..!”

Back to the important stuff, however, and the mystery at hand is quite an intriguing one. A man named Jacob Guttridge is found dead on an excursion train scheduled to bring a crowd of Cockney troublemakers to a prizefight. His death, strangulation with a piece of wire, is gruesome and pointed…Guttridge was a hangman by trade and so had many enemies, particularly as he wasn’t the most precise of hangmen, often leaving the victims to hang mercilessly for minutes before they finally passed on. Guttridge’s death leads Colbeck on a trail through the town of Ashford, and other places, where he encounters more murders..and even an attempt on his own life.

The Excursion Train is a light read, and particularly suited if you like old fashioned settings, or…trains! Colbeck isn’t known as The Railway Detective for nothing. There’s a prequel to this book (The Railway Detective) and a sequel (The Railway Viaduct). After that I think Edward Marston ran out of train ideas…!