The Iron Horse by Edward Marston
Book 29 of 52 for 2011
Now, this ought to have been right up my street. London, railways and Victoriana, by Jove. Simply must have a touch of the old Steampunk about it, you would have thought. In fact, jolly close to the kind of stuff I find myself writing in my spare time. (And churning out at great length come November and December, but that’s another story. Literally.)
Not a bit of it. Edward Marston is an enviably prolific writer producing historical novels in a number of periods including the high Victorian and the Restoration. This seems to contribute to results that are distinctly mainstream; period London is cleaned up with all the quirks and harsher details smoothed down to make the novels easy reading for wide consumption. Nothing in here is going to give a single horse even a brief moment of disquiet – which, given the story is about nobbling racehorses, is no mean feat at all. And I have to say that I like my historical crime fiction an awful lot darker and rougher around the edges, and my depictions of the golden age of steam to be a bit more than a glorified trainspotters’ club for coppers with too much time on their hands.
By far the best thing about this book was the plot which was a textbook exercise in feeding the reader enough scraps to let them feel smug for solving the thing while introducing a seat-of-the-pants last-minute twist which also pulls the rug from under their feet. This is not necessarily easy to achieve and it is a strength of the book that it comes off so well. The villain(s) are in plain sight throughout the whole thing, as they should be, and the whole book is very easy and undemanding to read – the perfect choice if you want something relaxing, absorbing and escapist rather than challenging, difficult or thought-provoking.
But. There had to be one and, in fact, there are several. However good the plot, the absolute worst thing about this book is the dialogue. Not only could I not tell any of the characters apart from their speech, I couldn’t even make a stab at their sex or class. And, having subsequently peeked into another volume by the same good gentleman, I find that I would, in fact, struggle to identify which book they appeared in or which period in history they occupied. Realistic (as opposed to functional) dialogue simply does not seem to be his thing. By Christ, the hero of this book is a smug so-and-so. And another problem is that some of the characters are straight out of Central Casting with one from this story going so far as to make a convincing appearance as a major protagonist in that other book mentioned above which is set a couple of centuries earlier.
I’m also pretty unsettled by the depiction of women characters, who are few in number and two-dimensional in the extreme. You can’t cover this up by claiming women’s roles in society were limited in the past, as some always pushed the boundaries and tried to live the lives they wished for rather than the ones prescribed for them. Restoration London, for example was full of women traders and business owners and women’s legal status improved dramatically during the Victorian era. However, in this book, I think I counted three women – subservient domestic angel, calculating whore and outright victim. That was it. Not good enough – consult the work of Lindsey Davis, Phil Rickman, CJ Sansom or (queen of them all) Daphne du Maurier for some more convincing examples of what you can do with female characters in historical fiction (if you can be bothered to try, that is).
So I have to count myself disappointed and say that my dealings with the Railway Detective are unlikely to be prolonged – a particularly unhappy circumstance after recently reading the excellent Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale and watching its equally good television adaptation. For Jack Whicher was practically the prototype of the Scotland Yard detective, and he used the railways to travel about the country solving crimes.
However, I will confess that I am having a lot more luck with Mr Marston’s restoration milieu, a world in which his writing somehow seems freer and less by the numbers. I’m finding his depiction of post-conflagration London much more compelling than his Victorian adventures (though I have to say the women characters aren’t much better), so maybe this is a relationship that will endure a while after all.
Tags: crime fiction, historical novels, steampunk, Victorian London