The Lost Luggage Porter
Gripping Edwardian Thriller Featuring Jim Stringer, Steam Detective
Oct 12, 2007
The Lost Luggage Porter by Andrew Martin is a superb historical thriller. It features Martin’s detective “Jim Stringer, Steam Detective” a member of the Railway Police in York during the first years of the twentieth century. The novel is obviously superbly researched, but Martin’s skill shows itself further in his ear for dialogue and the dense texture which he weaves around the reader.
The Edwardian Underworld
The plot of The Lost Luggage Porter involves Stringer going undercover to become a member of a gang of thieves, who are also suspected of being involved in the murders of two railway workers. Martin produces a range of characters including the goateed heavy-drinking criminal plotter Valentine Sampson, the tubercular Born-Again left luggage porter Edwin Lund and the outspoken suffragette Lillian Backhouse.
What the Dickens...
Such vivid and memorable characters, along with the novel’s action amidst the Edwardian underworld, draw the inevitable epithet of “Dickensian” (in a review in The Daily Express), but the comparison misses the point. Dickens’ style is grotesque and fantastic, and he creates peculiar little worlds in which to stage his novels. Martin, on the other hand (whilst obviously not as great or significant a writer) is more realistic: his skill lies in persuading the reader that Edwardian England was exactly as he describes. His continual use of detail – the workings of a bicycle lamp, a steam-brake which hasn’t been warmed, umbrellas rotting in the damp – gives an immediacy to his writing which is rarely found in historical novels.
Perfect Pitch
He also has a brilliant ear for dialogue, coming up with lines like “Didn’t think much of Barraclough’s, didn’t Dad” and “We have business in hand, Allan, a very great doing – see you right for life if it comes off.” He quotes snippets of the language around his hero continually, from signs, advertisements, newspapers, and mixes up thieves slang with police reports and Northern dialect, to give an impressively convincing effect. Jim Stringer’s York feels both real and very different from modern England. It’s also quite scary at times – Martin plays on the immediacy and strangeness of his chosen fictional world to make the reader feel as suspicious and ill at ease as Stringer is whilst undercover.
One reviewer called The Lost Luggage Porter “a superior pot-boiler," a curiously double-edged epithet, and Andrew Martin deserves the benefit of the upside. He’s no Umberto Eco or Lawrence Norfolk, but he may well be sneaking up on Bernard Cornwell and George MacDonald Fraser. The next books in the “Jim Stringer, Steam Detective” series will be well worth a look...
