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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.
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