Under the shadow of the Minster

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This heavy, clanking, finely wrought adventure story is set mainly on or around York station in the winter of 1906 and washed down with handfuls of soot, clinker, ‘bacon and eggs and related matters’ and, I would estimate,  some 90 pints of Smith’s ale.

The Lost Luggage Porter is Andrew Martin’s third novel about a train-spotterish railwayman called Jim Stringer, whom we first met in The Necropolis Railway and then saw struggling on the footplate in The Blackpool Flyer. Stringer, complete with false spectacles, has now become a railway detective and been sent out to penetrate York’s underworld and throw in his lot with the pickpockets, bad lads and double-crossers who flourish under the shadow of the Minster —– or is it the shadow of death?

Martin’s range of beer-swilling, blood-spattered, rain-soaked characters — ‘It wasn’t raining,’ notes Stringer at one point, ‘but I had every confidence it would do soon’ — has never been bettered. First off is the complacent, half-barmy Chief Inspector Weatherill, whose scraps of orangey hair swirl about his head ‘like a dog chasing its tail’ and who eventually turns up looking like a music-hall turn: ‘two men under a single giant coat’.

Twinned with this preposterous pillar of the police establishment is the spruce,  gentleman poacher-like master crook Valentine Sampson, who is ‘able to kill folk and clean forget about the fact’, and who in the process of blowing a safe looks like ‘a magical figure in a cloud of bright sparks’.

And then, of course, there is the lost luggage porter himself. Edwin Lund is a strange kid, like ‘a ghostly worm’, undertaker, corpse, bible-basher and murderer thrown into one. He is also ‘a human directory to everything in York’ and the instigator of the whole bloody mess in which our hero finds himself.