I love trains. I don’t spot them on the weekends or have a replica miniature steam engine trundling around in my attic.
I’m rather silly and have never bothered learning to drive so am rather reliant on them, although I do not love how frequently cancelled they are nor the exorbitantly expensive cost of a ticket. I love trains in crime stories. They offer so much opportunity for a twisty tale. The transience of their purpose lends them so well to intrigue. To my mind trains function in one of three ways: firstly as a place for unlikely people to meet; secondly offering a fleeting glance of a crime; and thirdly as a locked room on wheels.
Trains force people together who would not necessarily meet in everyday life. Sat opposite you could be absolutely anyone up to who knows what. Usually, one would hope, they would ignore you, but sometimes that chance meeting starts a cascade of terrifying events. Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers On A Train is a brilliant example of this. The chance meeting between studied, yet susceptible, architect Guy Haines and louche psycho Charles Anthony Bruno sparking off a tormenting folie à deux.
A glance out of the window, usually at the back of a terrace or a field of prosaic sheep grazing, sometimes throws up a handful of secrets and a body or two. The train’s speed throwing into question just how reliable the observer is. 4:50 from Paddington is one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels. Mrs Elspeth McGillicuddy, on her way to visit the indomitable Miss Marple, sees a woman on a train running parallel being strangled to death leaving her friend who thinks she’s to solid to make up such a thing to investigate the lack of a body. Another recent favourite of mine is Paula Hawkin’s The Girl on The Train whose heroine is an alcoholic who entangles herself in her the disappearance of her ex-husband’s neighbour and former nanny as she watches his idealised new life from the commuter train that she still takes despite losing her job.
Murder on the Orient Express is in many ways perfect. It’s my favourite Poirot, the one with the most emotional nuance for Christie’s Belgian detective.
To me trains feel like the future. Sometimes, increasingly often if I’m being honest, that future feels like Snowpiercer but then sometimes it’s hopeful, we’re are all supposed to be transitioning to a greener way of life after all. Trains also form part of the evocative and nostalgic past in my imagination. I watched a lot of old films with my grandmother growing up – The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery is still a firm favourite of mine. Steam billowing out of smoky engines ducking through blackened tunnels dug out by navvies. Closed off carriages – filled by knitting spinsters click-clacking on their way to visit relations and buttoned up and stiff businessmen commuting in bowler hats with a large copy of The Timesbeing used to ignore their fellow passengers – each carriage a social microcosm unto itself. Dining carriages serving soup and boiled beef and stewed puddings. Sherlock Holmes, a teenaged obsession of mine, is forever telling Watson to look up the trains before they speed off to solve a case in the countryside.
I decided to open A Deadly Inheritance on a luxury steam train ride to Bath, my favourite city. My Tik Tok had been feeding me videos of such deluxe trips to beautiful spots of the England for a couple of weeks. Read into that my aspirations. Painstakingly restored carriages, clinking bellinis, perfectly poached eggs for brunch, three course dinners served by waiters in starched white coats as the train trundles back to London. Nostalgia hits me hard at the moment. The world as it is, the eviscerated ghosts of a world that once was passing on, the infant spectre of a new age dawning on us. When I think of Bath I think of Austen but I also think of the Baedecker raids. Of the horrors of a world war. Of attempts to destroy beauty in order to break spirits. Of staring down annihilation.
Many thanks to Charlotte in writing this feature and to Hannah Turner at Faber in organising this feature.
A Deadly Inheritance, Faber & Faber, pbk original £9.99. July 17, 2025
