The Blackpool Highflyer: a very short review

Andrew Martin has found quite a bit of success with his Jim Stringer series of railroad-themed detective stories. Our hero is a railway worker and amateur sleuth; the books are set in the glory days of the English railroads, principally the first decade of the 1900's.

The Blackpool Highflyer, second in the series but the only one I've read so far, is charming and completely fun to read, with just enough mystery to justify Martin's true delight, which is to relive this particular period in history with as much attention to detail as he can possibly summon up.

In particular, Martin works extremely, extremely hard to match his descriptions and dialogue to the language of the day, for the English that was regularly used in, say, 1905, is already quite a distance from the English that is used now, just 120 years later.

This means peppering his text with lots of unfamiliar-to-me words. Some of them were railway jargon, others were variant spellings of words I know, and still others were amusing curses of the day.

But more interesting to me were those passages that were entirely full of ordinary words, but were used in a style that so far pre-dated me that it seemed somehow foreign and from another language (though it was merely from another time), sort of like the effect when you are first struggling to understand something written hundreds of years ago.

She was pointing at the letters spelling 'Dean Clough' standing up on the roof of the building just beyond the North Bridge. Each letter was taller than three men, and although the North Bridge was high enough to fit the goods station underneath, those letters towered above it. The Dean Clough Mill seemed to have been built by men who'd never seen another mill, and so had no notion of the correct size, but what they did have was an endless supply of bricks. You could fit twenty mills of the common run inside it. It was built by the Crossleys, who also -- along with a certain Porter -- put up the brass for the orphanage where young Arnold Dyson now lived.

The whole book is like that. I suppose you either like that or you don't. And I mostly did.

Andrew Martin is clever and talented, and I can't really fault his approach. But with all the books to read in the world, maybe one dose of 1905 was enough for me.