Preamble
If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
See also
These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
- The Passenger from Scotland Yard (H.F. Wood)
- The Adventures of Lois Cayley (Grant Allan)
Review
This is the second story in The Penguin Book of Victorian Villainies, edited by the authors Graham Greene and Hugh Greene. It is more straightforwardly a crime/detective story, compared to Henry Hawley Smart’s The Great Tontine, but Griffiths has a fair bit in common with that author, including serving in the Crimean War and a prolific output. While Hawley Smart had a particular interest in horse-racing, Griffiths’ area of specialist knowledge is prisons, and much of his output relates to the history of prisons in various European countries, including France, where this novel is set.
Murder on an international train journey is a now well-known premise, thanks in part to Christie’s Orient Express, but crime stories involving railway travel were relatively common in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth (including on film, with several under the same name as this novel). This isn’t even Griffiths’ first crime story on a railway; Rome Express is preceded by The Passenger from Calais the year before. Rapid mass transit poses interesting problems for detection, particularly as information flows could not always keep up.
Rome Express is therefore worth a read as an entry in the broader edifice of crime fiction. It is short and moves quickly, with slightly ridiculous French police officers and a brief appearance by the public Parisian morgue. As a characteristic piece, then, it’s a pleasure. The crime itself, and the unwinding of it, is on the formulaic side: a banker, about to make a smash, absconds with his clients’ funds, then is found dead in the wagon-lit of the train on which he is fleeing. How did the murderer escape, and how many of his fellow passengers were in on the crime? Border crossings in particular tend to make for interesting opportunities for crime and criminals alike to slip by unnoticed, and that is true here. Everyone in the carriage seems to know each other but wants to disclaim the others, and there are lots of potential slippages between characters. The French police are shown up repeatedly by a rather righteous British military man, but they do eventually get their man, and so all comes right with the world.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 