The Excursion Train

As a bustling crowd clambers aboard the Great Western Railway excursion train taking them to an illegal prize-fight, the guard fears for the safety of his rolling stock. Little does he expect, however, the murder of one of his passengers, public executioner Jake Bransby. Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck and his assistant Sergeant Victor Leeming are sent to the scene and are intrigued by the murder weapon - a noose. When a second man is strangled by a noose on a train, Colbeck must act quickly to catch the murderer before more lives are lost.

Murder in the midst of merriment can be the most shocking sort, and so it is in the case of Jacob Bransby--brutally strangled with a length of wire while on board a train carriage crowded with lowlife Londoners, all bound for an illegal bare-knuckle prizefight in Berkshire in 1852. That the deceased's wallet was not purloined leaves Scotland Yard Inspector Robert Colbeck wondering at the motive for this heinous act--and, soon, additional crimes--in The Excursion Train, Edward Marston's second witty, railroad-tied Colbeck escapade (after The Railway Detective).

It doesn't take the foppish flatfoot long, though, to realize that "Bransby" was an alias, behind which hid a veteran public executioner, notorious both for his religious mania and his appalling incompetence with a hangman's noose. While the deceased's suffering spouse lives in denial of her husband's invidious deeds and macabre mementos, and their estranged son operates under his wife's maiden name in order to avoid being treated "as if I was a leper," Colbeck--assisted, as usual, by tenacious Sergeant Victor Leeming--does everything he can to expose the dead man's secrets, and thus flush out a killer. Could this homicide have been committed in retribution for the botched hanging in Kent, a month before, of butcher Nathan Hawkshaw, a generally upstanding individual convicted (despite his protestations of innocence) of hacking to death the alleged rapist of his 16-year-old stepdaughter, Emily? The inspector can only determine that, it seems, by first revisiting the Hawkshaw case--an endeavor that will lead to Leeming's inauspicious beating, an attempted suicide, Colbeck's employment of Madeleine Andrews (the comely conductor's daughter he rescued in The Railway Detective) as his investigative confederate, and yet another slaying on the tracks.

Brimming with whimsical dialogue, full-throttle turns, and a droll cast (especially delightful is priggish police superintendent Edward Tallis), The Excursion Train might only be faulted for the artlessness of its romantic subplot. British novelist Marston, best known for his Elizabethan theater mysteries (The Counterfeit Crank), has struck a rich, arcane vein of possibilities by rooting the Colbeck books in the world of railroads--the transformational technology of mid-19th-century England. Colbeck and Leeming have the opportunity in future installments to steam off after malefactors in any queer corner of Victorian Britain. All aboard! --J. Kingston Pierce