Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1300 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
In York, Winter, 1906 - two brothers have been shot to death. Meanwhile, Jim Stringer meets the Lost Luggage Porter, humblest among the employees of the North Eastern Railway company. He tells Jim a tale which leads him to the roughest part of town, a place where the police constables always walk in twos. Jim is off on the trail of pickpockets, 'station loungers' and other small fry of the York underworld. But then, in a tiny, one-room pub with a badly smoking fire, he enters the orbit of a dangerous, disturbed villain who is playing for much higher stakes...

Customer Reviews

"I had lost my job on the footplate, joined a criminal band, and was about to become a father...all too bloody drastic."
James Harrison Stringer, now working as a detective for the North Eastern Company Railroad in York, England, has been fired from the job he's loved--being "on the footplate" of a locomotive. He had wrecked a locomotive and its shed because someone else failed to warm up the brakes. Though he still has a chance to work at the terminal and watch the various lines as they operate, the 23-year-old Stringer still sees the railroads as a world in which the power, movement, and downright excitement of being in a locomotive cab will never die.

When a hotel porter at the Station Hotel in York is found with his throat cut, and soon afterward the Cameron brothers, "Brilliantine" and "Crackpot," whom Stringer has encountered in a snooker parlor, are shot to death near the York goods yard, the seemingly quiet life off the footplate suddenly ratchets up. Stringer goes undercover to trace the "bad lads" and those masterminds putting them up to crime. Wearing an old suit and a pair of spectacles from which he has removed the lenses, Stringer believes that no one will recognize him from his former jobs on the railroad. (Oddly, he also believes that a pair of glasses with no lenses will fool everyone into thinking they are real.)

He insinuates himself into a gang run by Valentine Sampson and Miles Hopkins, and each night returns home to his loving wife Lydia, who types up his reports for Weatherill. Lydia, a suffragist, pregnant with their first baby, due in a month, does not look forward to motherhood. Stringer's discovery that the gang plans to rob a safe containing the wages of railroad men who have been out on strike leads to additional complications when the use of acetylene torches creates emergencies.

Martin creates a broad panorama of York life in 1906, concentrating on life in the railways as they dominate the life of the community. The 23-year-old Stringer, while not fully realized, is still a character with whom the reader will develop sympathy. The slang of the railroad and of the period may be disconcerting for readers initially, but as the story develops, the unfamiliar language becomes less of a problem and adds significantly to the atmosphere. Filled with local color, Lost Luggage Porter provides a fascinating glimpse of life in 1906 as the railroads become the link to the future. The story creates an indelible portrait of ordinary existence and its values--a must for any fan of early railroad lore! n Mary Whipple

The Glory of Steam
The third in Andrew Martin's Edwardian era 'Jim Stringer' novels is the finest so far. Like the earlier books, The Necropolis Railway and The Blackpool Highflyer, this is less an out-and-out thriller than a study of a period and place: the evocation of the time and the landscapes that the naive hero passes through (the grim back streets of York, the countryside beyond the city, the boat train to Paris) is extraordinarliy vivid and intense. Jim Stringer is an almost Palin-esque Northern train obsessive, albeit one who appears to be growing up a bit in this book, even if his wife remains the sharper of the two: this relationship allows for some delicious social comedy, especially in the episode when Jim's father visits the couple and is exposed to his daughter-in-law's progressive attitudes. Furthermore, Andrew Martin has a truly Dickensian eye for the 'killer detail' - the apparently casual, off-centre observation that illuminates a lost world in a tiny phrase. These books are much more than genre fiction and deserve a far wider public.

Excess baggage
Quite enjoyed The Blackpool Highflyer, less so the Necropolis Railway, but I'm really struggling to finish The Lost Luggage Porter. All the faults of the previous books are magnified - too much superfluous social history, little character development, no pace in the narrative and far too slow a develoment of the plot. But worst of all, the hero, Jim Stringer, has become plain uninteresting. His original awkwardness and innocence has now become tedious and tiresome stupidity. He clearly does't enjoy his new job (railway police) and neither do we. Sadly, after a bright start,it does not look as if the Stringer series will make the grade.