Trains and Lovers - Alexander McCall Smith

[John Ashworth]

Lovers on a train

11:16am Saturday 20th October 2012 in The Press By Stephen Lewis

He’s gone from writing about African lady detectives to penning romances set on a train. STEPHEN LEWIS talks to Alexander McCall Smith ahead of a railway-themed date in York.

THERE is something special about being on a train, says Alexander McCall Smith. It is something to do with the way complete strangers are brought together in a place that’s somehow outside of or apart from the everyday world.

“There is a sense almost of isolation within an artificial world, where people who have never met before can end up meeting and talking.”

That makes a train a great place to set a story. Agatha Christie recognised that (hence Murder on the Orient Express), as did Patricia Highsmith in her novel Strangers On A Train, adapted into a cult film by Alfred Hitchcock.

McCall Smith enjoys travelling by train himself – and last September he did one of the great train journeys, riding the Ghan in Australia for almost 2,000 miles from Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south.

The name is an abbreviated version of the route’s former nickname, The Afghan Express – a name bestowed in honour of the Afghan camel drivers who arrived in Australia in the late 19th century to help explore the country’s remote interior. “They used to have a camel route through the middle of Australia,” McCall Smith says.

Given his fascination with rail travel, it’s no real surprise that he should have chosen to write a novel set on a train. It is to be called Trains And Lovers (no, the title isn’t inspired by DH Lawrence, though Sons And Lovers is a great title, McCall Smith concedes), and it is set on a train journey from Edinburgh (McCall Smith’s home) to London – via York, of course.