The Cozy Mystery List Blog

One of my favorite things to do is sit down with a book by one of my favorite authors. Well, in this case I’m sitting down with a favorite author going by a different name. I’ve written before about Conrad Allen’s Dillman Series, starring ship-based detective George Porter Dillman in the early 1900s. Well, Conrad Allen and Edward Marston happen to be the same person (both being pseudonyms for Keith Miles), so I decided to read the first in Marston’s Railway Detective Series, named, fittingly enough, The Railway Detective.

Though I’ve read most of Marston’s books under the name Conrad Allen, The Railway Detective is the first book I’ve read under the Marston name. However, with my experience of Allen’s Dillman series, I felt confident that I was in for an interesting mystery set in an unusual physical setting during an interesting time period – in this case, a railway-themed mystery in Victorian-era England.

Well, suffice to say I wasn’t disappointed! As always, Marston manages to portray an interesting period of time, in this case the Victorian era, as well as the transportation technology that most well-defined it >>> here, steam-driven locomotives. I’ve got the series tagged as reportedly not Cozy on the appropriate pages of the list – for now I’m going to leave it since Detective Colbeck is an actual police detective, while most Cozy protagonists are amateurs, but I would definitely say that from what I have read so far, the Railway Detective Mystery Series seems well-suited for most Cozy Mystery fans, especially those interested in the Victorian era or train travel.