The Railway Detective

The Railway Detective is the eponymous opening title in the series of detective mystery novels written by Keith Miles under the pseudonym Edward Marston. Set in 1851, it is about a railway robbery which is investigated and ultimately solved by two Scotland Yard detectives, Inspector Robert Colbeck and Sergeant Victor Leeming. The novel was published in 2004 by Allison & Busby of London. The book's cover depicts part of "The Railway Station" (1862) by William Powell Frith. According to the publishers in a 2018 news release, the series has been optioned for television adaptation by Mammoth Screen.
Plot introduction.
In April 1851, shortly before the opening of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, a mail train on the London and North Western Railway (L&NWR) is halted between Leighton Buzzard Junction and Linslade Tunnel by a group of men disguised as railway police. Using duplicated Chubb safe keys, they steal all the mailbags and a consignment of over £3,000 in sovereigns being transferred from the Royal Mint to a bank in Birmingham. The train driver, who tries to resist the robbers, is badly injured and his fireman is forced to drive the engine forward to where a section of track has been removed, causing a derailment. The robbers escape and the alarm is raised by telegraph to the Metropolitan Police Force in Scotland Yard, London, where it is received by Detective Superintendent Edward Tallis, head of the Detective Department.
Plot summary.
Tallis summons Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck to his office and orders him to lead the investigation. It is quickly established that there is an "unresolved tension" between Tallis and Colbeck which is an underlying theme of the whole series, although the two have great professional respect for each other. Colbeck and Detective Sergeant Victor Leeming travel to Leighton Buzzard where they meet Inspector Rory McTurk of the railway police. McTurk strongly resents their involvement but Colbeck and Leeming soon establish that members of the railway police were guilty of deserting their posts on the train in order to play cards, thus making it much easier for the gang to carry out the robbery. Meanwhile, train driver Caleb Andrews is not expected to survive and his daughter Madeleine arrives in Leighton Buzzard to care for him.
Colbeck is convinced that the gang had inside information and were certainly in possession of duplicated safe keys. He and Leeming begin enquiries at the organisations involved with the shipment: the L&NWR, the Post Office, the Royal Mint, the fictitious Spurling's Bank in Birmingham and the Chubb factory in Wolverhampton. As a result, they become aware of Daniel Slender, who duplicated the safe keys at Chubb; William Ings of the Post Office, who was involved in the mail train's scheduling; and Albert Woodhead of the Royal Mint, who unwittingly advised Ings of the gold consignment. The L&NWR and the Birmingham bank are absolved of involvement in the crime.
Ings is the first of the suspects to be pursued and Colbeck discovers that he is hiding in the notorious Devil's Acre. To find Ings, Colbeck seeks help from Brendan Mulryne, a former colleague who is now a resident there. Mulryne establishes a connection between Ings and the prostitute Polly Roach but, though he finds Roach, he is too late to prevent the murder of Ings. In due course, Slender meets a similar fate. It is clear to Colbeck that the gang are eliminating loose ends and weak links to remain undetected. Colbeck is concerned about the unnecessary destruction of the steam engine after the robbery and believes he is looking for someone with influence who hates the railways.
Although Tallis dismisses Colbeck's theory, it is valid as gang leader Sir Humphrey Gilzean has an obsessive hatred of railways. He blames them for the accidental death of his wife. The gang strikes again at the Kilsby Tunnel, placing gunpowder at one end in a bid to destroy both the tunnel and a train carrying glass sheets for use in the Crystal Palace. The explosion is detonated too soon to destroy the train and causes only superficial damage to the tunnel. Colbeck makes the connection and realises, despite more opposition from Tallis, that an attempt will be made to destroy the locomotives on display at the Great Exhibition.
Colbeck is right about the Crystal Palace and, aided by Leeming and Mulryne, is able to arrest Jukes and the Seymours one night when they try to destroy the "Lord of the Isles". The gangsters refuse to give information about their leaders. Gilzean and Sholto have added to their haul by blackmailing the senders of complicit letters which were in the stolen mailbags. They are fearful of imminent arrest and Gilzean instructs Sholto to find someone whom Colbeck cares about to distract him from the investigation. Caleb Andrews is no longer a critical case and has been taken home where Madeleine is looking after him. She has met Colbeck in the course of the investigation and there is a mutual attraction between them which develops as the novel progresses. Sholto follows Colbeck and observes the affection he has for Madeleine during a visit to the Andrews household. As a result, Gilzean and Sholto kidnap Madeleine and send a demand to the Met for the release of Jukes and the Seymours.
Working on what little is known about the three prisoners, Colbeck and Leeming discover their common military background and make the link between them and two of their former officers who both left the Army on the same day. These are Gilzean and Sholto. Colbeck establishes that Gilzean has a pathological hatred of railways and even Tallis agrees that the case has been solved, so the investigation is now a manhunt but with Madeleine's life at stake. Fortunately for Madeleine, Gilzean is protective of her and will not allow Sholto to molest her. Tallis leads a raid on Gilzean's Berkshire residence but he bungles it and the criminals escape, still holding Madeleine as a hostage.
Colbeck finds documents in Gilzean's house which convince him they are taking Madeleine to Bristol to board ship and flee the country. The criminals are travelling by road and so Colbeck and Leeming go to Bristol via the Great Western Railway (GWR). They arrive first and intercept the two criminals on board their ship in harbour. Madeleine, unharmed, is freed and reunited with her father. The bond between Colbeck and Madeleine is permanent and, when Colbeck receives two complimentary tickets from the grateful Prince Albert for the opening of the Great Exhibition, he invites Madeleine to join him.
Historical references.
The Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police Force (the Met) was founded in 1842 and so was only nine years old in 1851, when the story is set. Richard Mayne, who was the joint first commissioner of the Met, is depicted in meetings with Tallis, Colbeck and Leeming. His co-commissioner, Charles Rowan, had retired the year before. Mayne was in charge of policing at The Great Exhibition which opened on 1 May and was an outstanding success, thanks in no small part to effective policing. Mayne is the only real person who plays an active part in the novel.
The novel mentions Prince Albert as the exhibition organiser and Joseph Paxton as its main designer. Gilzean's hatred of Paxton was because of Paxton being a director of the Midland Railway, whose chairman John Ellis is an enemy of Gilzean. The "Lord of the Isles" was a noted locomotive which was displayed at the Great Exhibition before it entered service on the Great Western Railway (GWR). Colbeck mentions the 6-2-0 "Liverpool", the "Puffing Billy" and the 4-2-2 "Iron Duke" in the context of the exhibition. In the second book, when Madeleine begins to seriously pursue her hobby of locomotive artworks, the "Lord of the Isles" is her first subject. 
Caleb Andrews drives for the L&NWR but his train was travelling on the route built by the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) and opened in 1838. The L&BR was amalgamated into the L&NWR in 1846, having been operational since 1833. Robert Stephenson was the L&BR chief engineer. The line from Euston to Birmingham included the Linslade and Kilsby tunnels which both feature prominently in the book. Marston describes the problems Stephenson faced at Kilsby, where quicksand was unexpectedly encountered. The Crystal Palace's construction materials, its cast iron framework and sheets of glass, were manufactured in Birmingham and Smethwick, so they were transported by rail through the Kilsby tunnel to London.
Train robbery was a new phenomenon in the 1850s. There were two in reality before 1851, both on the Bristol and Exeter Railway in 1849. Security was non-existent and the robbers in each case climbed out of their own carriage into the mail van and back. The first major incident was the Great Gold Robbery on the South Eastern Railway in May 1855. The first train robbery in America was by the Reno Gang in Indiana in 1866; there were more infamous robberies in later years by the James–Younger Gang and Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch.
The Birmingham bank manager, Ernest Kitson, explains to Colbeck the purpose of the Bank Charter Act 1844 which was introduced by the late Robert Peel as prime minister. The Act is often called the "Peel Banking Act". It placed strict limits on the issue of banknotes by individual banks who were required to balance all banknotes in their possession with a requisite supply of gold coin or bullion. In the novel, it is because Spurling's fully complied with these rules that a gold consignment was being sent to them.
On his trip to Birmingham and Wolverhampton, Colbeck is disturbed by seeing the Black Country and afterwards tells Leeming that he now understands exactly what William Blake meant when he wrote about the "dark, satanic mills". Colbeck is nevertheless intrigued by industry, especially the railways, and in conversations he refers to Edward Bury, Thomas Russell Crampton and Daniel Gooch as engineers and locomotive designers he especially admires. Caleb Andrews speaks well of Alexander Allan, who claimed to be the designer of the Crewe type locomotive involved in the robbery. The engine was a 2-4-0 introduced by the L&NWR for freight in 1845. Allan was L&NWR works manager at Crewe Works from 1843 to 1853.