Matador Paperback ISBN 1-904744-96-6
The second book in this series of murder mysteries looks at Timbers' life in 1964
Railway Connections in New Murder Mystery
(The author offers some notes on the railway aspects of this novel.)
The Timberdick books are a series of murder stories set in the sleazy back-streets of a south coast seaport in the 1960’s. The amateur detective is a call-girl who solves the mysteries by listening carefully to what people say. “I got there by thinking, not by fingerprints,” she tells her policeman in the first novel. The romance of old smoky railway stations are an important part of the backdrop. When I started Liking Good Jazz, I was determined to put the railway at the centre of things. I made it the murder scene.
Shopkeeping is my day job. My wife and I run a second-hand bookshop in Market Harborough where the shelves provide a ready source of ideas and reference. On a quiet Tuesday afternoon (we have many of them) I came across a photograph of the Shanklin derailment in 1962 where the brake van looked ready to topple over. What chaos that would have caused! Of course, the Shanklin incident occurred in a rural setting and I was writing about a city at night. Another picture, illustrating the Hither Green derailment of 1967, prompted me to think about the dangers of crawling beneath wrecked carriages. When the two ideas merged – crawling beneath wrecked carriages to prevent them toppling over – I was on my way.
I knew that my technical knowledge was weak and I wanted to be sure that the drama I created could actually have happened (or, at least, might have happened if we allow our imagination a little breadth). Two ‘proper’ enthusiasts, regular customers in our shop, listened to the account and said, yes, it made sense. (Pretty unlikely sense, cautioned the older of the two.) But we all agreed that the mystery of the train crash was more intriguing if we allowed the facts to speak for themselves rather than being fully explained. Railway enthusiasts will want to work it out for themselves, I was told. Not only that, they’ll want to argue about it.
Then there is the matter of tadpoles. A train of carriages of unequal width. So, if a tadpole stopped on a curve, people at the rear of the train might find it difficult to see what was happening at the front. But were these ‘tadpoles’ or ‘red herrings’?
Liking Good Jazz is about murders, not railways, but I wanted to capture a sense of what it was like to work on the old lines, especially alone at night. That’s an atmosphere, ripe for deadly doings!
The photographs and references can be found in:
Railway World Annual 1978 edited by Alan William and published by Ian Allen (1977) and
Southern Steam on the Isle of Wight by Fairclough and Wells, published by Bradford Barton 1975
More Railway Memories in the Case of the Dirty Verger