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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 6, 2021 16:24:51 GMT
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Post by andydecker on Jan 6, 2021 17:08:03 GMT
I guess we can no longer feel how important such things were in these forgotten times. As far as parodies go, I remember distinctly the two episodes of The Avengers in which British trains were featured, A Funny Thing happened on the Way to the Station with its abandoned platform and The Gravediggers with its miniature train and, well, virtual reality set of a trainride. And of course Mrs Peel in her leather bustier tied to the rails. I never understood if this was a humoristic hommage to those times of yesterday or if they just made fun of this.
But those schedules always seemed to be an important thing in fiction, not just Dame Agatha. How often reached Sherlock Holmes for the timetable, ebven if it was a marvel that he had the time between reading the morning paper AND the evening paper, not to mention the postman who came twice a day, the lucky chap.
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Post by pulphack on Jan 6, 2021 17:20:07 GMT
That's it Dr - Freeman Wills Croft is the man! His stories are incredibly introcate puzzles based on railway timetables, road routes and car speeds as well as how swiftly a man can cross country on foot, dig a grave, then be back in time for dinner, bathed and in evening dress.
That makes it sound like I'm mocking - I love them, actually, but they really are carefully worked out puzzles. Julian Symons shunned that sort of crime fiction as 'humdrum' but in fact they are about absorbing yourself in the intricacies of the mystery web, and the characterisation has to be secondary. Form and function, and all that...
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Post by helrunar on Jan 6, 2021 17:28:28 GMT
Thanks, chaps!
I'm just imagining myself coming home from my evening shift of a night and sitting at my table "bathed and in evening dress" 20 minutes later. The thought is amusing to say the least. My cat lifts a doubtful eyebrow and mews derisively.
H.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Jan 6, 2021 19:49:44 GMT
I've actually been peripherally complicit in a couple of these railway whodunnits, so to speak. I spent several years of the last decade working as a volunteer in the library and archive of the National Railway Museum in York (rather appropriately named Search Engine). It's the largest repository of railway-related info on the planet - the photo collection alone runs to a staggering 1.75 million images(!), and it's all open to anyone to consult. But if you can't get to York in person, a team known as Inreach will accept your railway-related historical query, do the research for you and email the results back. For a fee, which goes towards funding the conservation of the artefacts. So essentially the job consisted of receiving endless railway-related puzzles to solve, which made it great fun. Anyway... I can think of two queries that were sent in by novellists who wanted to make their books historically accurate. One was from a guy who was writing a novel about German spies in Britain at the time of the Battle of Britain. The writer wanted to know if someone could get a train from (I think) Birmingham to Oxford and back on a Tuesday afternoon in August 1940 to commit a murder there. But it had to be within a 3-hour time slot so that his alibi would work. Much study of the August 1940 edition of Bradshaw's Guide (for timings) and old railway maps (for routes) was needed. Another writer wanted to know the precise configuration of the berths inside the sleeper carriages that were used between London (Kings Cross) and Edinburgh (Waverley) in the 1950's for a whodunnit, so that the plot would stack up. In fact, we were asked to provide this for both First and Second class carriages to give him flexibility in the story. We ended up dragging the original blueprints of the carriages (that were used by the workshops that had originally built them) out of the archive to solve it. |
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Post by helrunar on Jan 6, 2021 20:02:45 GMT
That sounds fascinating, Malcolm.
I'm not into railroads and engines and Pullman cars and such, but I'm sort of a research junkie. The thought of pulling out old blueprints and timetables makes my heart purr.
H.
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Post by andydecker on Jan 6, 2021 20:53:21 GMT
I've actually been peripherally complicit in a couple of these railway whodunnits, so to speak. I spent several years of the last deacde working as a volunteer in the library and archive of the National Railway Museum in York (rather appropriately named Search Engine). This is the single best account I heard in a long time. This is so cool. I was always interested in museums, and this sounds like a dream. |
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peedeel
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 61
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Post by peedeel on Jan 7, 2021 6:31:36 GMT
How often reached Sherlock Holmes for the timetable, ebven if it was a marvel that he had the time between reading the morning paper AND the evening paper, not to mention the postman who came twice a day, the lucky chap.
In Victorian London, though service wasn't 24/7, it was close to 12/6. Home delivery routes would go by every house twelve times a day — yes, twelve! In 1889, for example, the first delivery began about 7:30 a.m. and the last one at about 7:30 p.m. So the postie came twelve times a day! |
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 7, 2021 11:57:30 GMT
That's it Dr - Freeman Wills Croft is the man! His stories are incredibly introcate puzzles based on railway timetables, road routes and car speeds as well as how swiftly a man can cross country on foot, dig a grave, then be back in time for dinner, bathed and in evening dress. That makes it sound like I'm mocking - I love them, actually, but they really are carefully worked out puzzles. Julian Symons shunned that sort of crime fiction as 'humdrum' but in fact they are about absorbing yourself in the intricacies of the mystery web, and the characterisation has to be secondary. Form and function, and all that... If you Google Crofts you will see that he may be adapted for TV soon. |
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Post by andydecker on Jan 7, 2021 22:10:01 GMT
In Victorian London, though service wasn't 24/7, it was close to 12/6. Home delivery routes would go by every house twelve times a day — yes, twelve! In 1889, for example, the first delivery began about 7:30 a.m. and the last one at about 7:30 p.m. So the postie came twelve times a day! This is interesting. Hard to imagine today. If I understand this right, it means, that the postman walked every hour his route. This would have made a great witness in a crime story. The man would have to know more about his district than the policeman of the district. |
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 8, 2021 20:49:32 GMT
Thanks, chaps! I'm just imagining myself coming home from my evening shift of a night and sitting at my table "bathed and in evening dress" 20 minutes later. The thought is amusing to say the least. My cat lifts a doubtful eyebrow and mews derisively. H. It's very common for characters in Golden Age detective fiction to perform their ablutions very quickly. In fact, I'm convinced that they only ever washed the bits that other people could see and forgot their oxters etc. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jan 8, 2021 20:59:27 GMT
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 8, 2021 21:22:17 GMT
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Post by andydecker on Jan 9, 2021 16:25:12 GMT
Thanks, chaps! I'm just imagining myself coming home from my evening shift of a night and sitting at my table "bathed and in evening dress" 20 minutes later. The thought is amusing to say the least. My cat lifts a doubtful eyebrow and mews derisively. H. You would need either a butler or a maid to make the appointment. |
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Post by Michael Connolly on Mar 22, 2021 15:08:14 GMT
I'm seeing oxters everywhere now. Oor Wullie (Scottish) uses the word. (He also gave one Jimmy Doig a bloody nose!). Edmund Crispin (of Irish origin) mentions oxters in one of his novels. But here's the funny thing, I'm convinced that the British M.R. James mentions oxters somewhere. Or am I being too Freudian? |
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