Jim Stringer Mysteries
2 primary works • 3 total works
Book 2
When railwayman Jim Stringer is assigned to drive holidaymakers to the seaside resort of Blackpool in the hot summer of 1905, he thinks he's struck lucky. But his dreams of beer and pretty women soon fall away - when his high-speed train meets a huge millstone on the line. In the months that follow as he hunts for the saboteur, Jim is drawn into a beguiling but dangerous world of eccentrics, conmen and cowards. From ventriloquists to funfair salesmen, ticket clerks to dandies, everyone is a suspect in this captivating adventure.
Book 3
The story is set in winter in 1906. After his adventures as an amateur sleuth, Jim Stringer is now an official railway detective, working from York Station for the mighty North Eastern Railway Company. But he's not a happy man. As the rain falls incessantly on the city's ancient, neglected streets, the local paper carries a story highly unusual by York standards: two brothers have been shot to death. Meanwhile, on the station platforms, Jim Stringer meets the Lost Luggage Porter, humblest among the employees of the North Eastern Railway company. He tells Jim a tale which leads him to the roughest part of town, a place where the police constables always walk in twos. Jim is off on the trail of pickpockets, 'station loungers' and other small fry of the York underworld. But then in a tiny, one-room pub with a badly smoking fire he enters the orbit of a dangerous, disturbed villain who is playing for much higher stakes.
A chance encounter leads young Jim Stringer, a railway porter, to move from Yorkshire to London, enticed by the prospect of becoming a railway man 'of the right sort'. But when he arrives in the Waterloo of 1903, it is to discover a world of garish pubs and tawdry brothels boxed in by towering, blank-faced factories - a world that judders perpetually to the din of the trains on the giant viaducts overhead. Jim finds that his duties are mysteriously confined to the strangest corner of the South Western's business: a railway line that runs to an enormous cemetery. Still more perplexingly, the men he works alongside have formed an instant loathing for him. And his predecessor has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Can Jim work out what is going on before he too is travelling on a one-way coffin ticket aboard the Necropolis Railway?