The Baghdad Railway Club

[John Ashworth]

I've enjoyed most of Andrew Martin's "Railway Detective" series of books. Often low key and understated, not pulp thriller page-turners, but he is a thoughtful writer. I haven't read this new one yet.

THE BAGHDAD RAILWAY CLUB

Daily Express Friday June 8,2012
By Barry Forshaw

YOU may know Andrew Martin as an expert on household husbandry: one of his books is a men’s guide to domestic arts.

Or you may know him as an enthusiast for steam railways – few things get his pulse racing like a vintage locomotive. But the real Andrew Martin – the one most cherished by admirers of historical crime fiction – is the award-winning author of the Railway Detective series featuring Captain Jim Stringer.

In The Baghdad Railway Club the year is 1917 and Stringer, invalided from the Western Front, has been sent to Mesopotamia to look into an apparent case of treason.

The city is a dangerous place, humming with insurrection, the local Arabs make little secret of their distaste for the British soldiers in their midst.

He finds that any attempt at concealing the reason for his mission is pointless and his only contact in the city is dead.

As Jim struggles with the oppressive heat and his impossible task there is at least some pleasure to be had from his other preoccupation. He is to work on the railways around the city, reporting to the mysterious Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd. The latter has inaugurated an elegant dining society, the Baghdad Railway Club. But is Shepherd clandestinely working for the Turks who were recently thrown out of the city? And will Jim survive the mounting threat to his own life?

While many a crime writer alternates between excellent and more workaday books, Andrew Martin’s consistency is admirable. This latest outing might not have the intensity of its predecessor The Somme Stations, with its lacerating vision of the effects of warfare, but Martin is clearly aiming for something different here.

While all the historical detail is impeccable as ever – Jim’s disagreements with his wife on the subject of women’s suffrage and private education are well observed and Martin draws some astringent parallels with our own time – the real pleasure lies in the vision of an Englishman out of his depth in foreign climes.

Martin handles this theme with the skill of such illustrious predecessors as Graham Greene – and there is no higher praise than that.