Beware of the Trains

Much of what I enjoy about Crispin's Gervase Fen stories is missing here (the humour, the literary allusions, etc.) and instead what we get is a series of quick-fire mysteries wrapped up in 5-10 pages. Unfortunately, it reminded me of those Slylock Fox newspaper comic strips where you have to figure out a puzzle given some minimal clues. Sure, the solutions make sense but it's not really all that interesting in the end.

Surprisingly, it's the final story (“Deadlock”) that works best. Surprising because it doesn't feature Fen at all (neither does the preceding story) and also because as Crispin points out in the introduction, it aims more at creating an atmosphere rather than telling an anecdote. At 20 pages long (the longest story in this collection) it allows the mystery to unfold as an actual short story rather than a quick brain teaser.