Andrew Martin

London, 1976.

In Belgravia in the heat of summer, Lee Jones, a faded and embittered rock star, is checking out a group of women through the heavy cigarette smoke in a crowded pub. He makes eye contact with one, and winks. After allowing glances to linger for a while longer, he finally moves towards her.

In that moment, his programme of terror - years in the making - has begun.

Months later, the first of the many chilling headlines to come appears: 'Police hunting winking killer.'

Meanwhile in France.

Charles Underhill, a wealthy Englishman living in Paris, has good reason to be interested in the activities of the so-called Winking Killer. With a past to hide and his future precarious, Charles is determined to discover the Winker's identity.

In the overheating cities of London, Oxford, Paris and Nice, a game of cat and mouse develops, and catching someone's eye becomes increasingly perilous. But if no one dares look, a killer can hide in plain sight . . .

York, 1799.

In August, an artist is found murdered in his home - stabbed with a pair of scissors. Matthew Harvey's death is much discussed in the city. The scissors are among the tools of his trade - for Harvey is a renowned cutter and painter of shades, or silhouettes, the latest fashion in portraiture. It soon becomes clear that the murderer must be one of the artist's last sitters, and the people depicted in the final six shades made by him become the key suspects. But who are they? And where are they to be found?

Later, in November, a clever but impoverished young gentleman called Fletcher Rigge languishes in the debtor's prison, until a letter arrives containing a bizarre proposition from the son of the murdered man. Rigge is to be released for one month, but in that time, he must find the killer. If he fails, he will be incarcerated again, possibly for life.

And so, with everything at stake, and equipped only with copies of the distinctive silhouettes, Fletcher Rigge begins his search across the snow-covered city, and enters a world of shadows...

Detective Superintendent George Quinn - Mayfair resident and dandy with a razor-sharp brain - has set up a new police unit, dedicated to investigating the super-rich. When he is shot in mysterious circumstances, DI Blake Reynolds is charged with taking over. But Reynolds hadn't bargained for Quinn's personal assistant - the flinty Victoria Clifford - who knows more than she's prepared to reveal...

The trail left by Quinn leads to a jewellery theft, a murderous conspiracy among some of the most glamorous (and richest) Russians in London - and the beautiful Anna, who challenges Reynolds' professional integrity. Reynolds and Clifford must learn to work together fast - or risk Quinn's fate.

Set in the heart of twenty-first-century Mayfair, a world of champagne, Lamborghinis and Savile Row suits, The Yellow Diamond is a brilliant new venture from one of our best loved crime authors - meticulously plotted, wonderfully humane and hugely enjoyable.

North East India, 1923. On the broiling Night Mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur, a man is shot dead in a first class compartment. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer was sleeping in the next compartment along. Was he the intended target? Jim should have known that his secondment to the East Indian Railway, with a roving brief to inspect security arrangements, would not be the working holiday he had hoped for. The country seethes with political and racial tension. Aside from the Jamalpur shooting, someone is placing venomous snakes - including giant king cobras - in the first class compartments of the railway.

Jim also has worries on the home front: his daughter has formed a connection with a Maharajah's son, who may in turn have a connection to Jim's incredibly rude colleague, the bristling Major Fisher. Jim must do everything he can to keep his family safe from harm, as he unravels the intrigues that surround him...

On the first day of the Somme, enlisted railwayman Jim Stringer lies trapped in a shell hole, smoking cigarette after cigarette under the bullets and the blazing sun. He calculates his chances of survival. Jim and his comrades must operate by night the vitally important trains carrying munitions to the Front, through a ghostly landscape of shattered trees. Close co-operation and trust are vital. Yet proof piles up of an enemy within, and as a ferocious military policeman pursues his investigation into the original killing, the finger of accusation begins to point towards Jim himself...

In Andrew Martin’s excursion into the Edwardian past, his resourceful ex-railway-worker-turned-detective Jim Stringer is tackling an assignment he is not comfortable with: he is to take lodgings in a dismal off-season Scarborough. Jim is to stay at a house called (ironically) 'Paradise’, from which the last railwayman to stay there has mysteriously vanished. What is it that Jim Stringer’s chief inspector isn’t telling him about the case? And two other questions soon become very pressing: will the beguiling Amanda Rickerby put a spoke in Jim Stringer’s marriage? And will Stringer himself ever be riding the railway back to his York haunts again.

It's the sweltering summer of 1911, and one Friday evening a special train rolls into York station. It carries a young aristocrat recently found guilty of murdering his father in the sleepy village of Adenwold. He is briefly entrusted into the custody of railway detective Jim Stringer, and he warns of another murder likely to happen in the same village - that of his brother, a reclusive intellectual. Jim and his wife Lydia take the train along the near deserted branch line to Adenwold. Here they encounter a host of likely suspects and the intended victim, as Jim has one weekend in which to stop a murder and unravel a conspiracy of international dimensions.

A train hits a snow drift in the frozen Cleveland Hills. In the process of clearing the line, a body is discovered, and so begins a dangerous case for struggling Edwardian railway detective, Jim Stringer. Jim's new investigation takes him to the mighty blast furnaces of Ironopolis, to Fleet Street in the company of a cynical reporter from "The Railway Rover", and to a nightmarish spot in the Highlands. Jim's faltering career in the railway police hangs on whether he can solve the murder - but before long the pursuer becomes the pursued, and Jim finds himself fighting not just for his job, but for his very life as well.

The story is set in winter in 1906. After his adventures as an amateur sleuth, Jim Stringer is now an official railway detective, working from York Station for the mighty North Eastern Railway Company. But he's not a happy man. As the rain falls incessantly on the city's ancient, neglected streets, the local paper carries a story highly unusual by York standards: two brothers have been shot to death. Meanwhile, on the station platforms, Jim Stringer meets the Lost Luggage Porter, humblest among the employees of the North Eastern Railway company. He tells Jim a tale which leads him to the roughest part of town, a place where the police constables always walk in twos. Jim is off on the trail of pickpockets, 'station loungers' and other small fry of the York underworld. But then in a tiny, one-room pub with a badly smoking fire he enters the orbit of a dangerous, disturbed villain who is playing for much higher stakes.

A superbly atmospheric thriller of sabotage, suspicion and steam, "The Blackpool Highflyer" brings a new twist to tales of Edwardian England, steam railways and amateur sleuthing. When railwayman Jim Stringer is assigned to drive holiday makers to the seaside resort of Blackpool in the hot summer of 1905, he thinks he's struck lucky. But his dreams of beer and pretty women are soon destroyed - when his high-speed train meets a huge millstone on the line. Who wanted to derail the packed train? And did they want to kill everyone on board, or just one passenger? Desperately seeking the saboteur, Jim is drawn into the fringes of Blackpool Central, Europe's busiest station. He discovers a murky world of dandies, fraudsters and ventriloquists, shifty revolutionaries and textile magnates. In the summer heat, dazed by the sun and by the roaring fire he stokes, Jim begins to understand that the more he investigates, the longer his list of suspects will become...

When railwayman Jim Stringer moves to the garish and tawdry London of 1903, he finds his duties are confined to a mysterious graveyard line. Perplexingly, the men he works alongside have formed an instant loathing for him. And his predecessor has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Can Jim work out what is going on before he too is travelling on a one-way coffin ticket aboard the Necropolis Railway? A gripping detective story, fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail, The Necropolis Railway steams toward an unexpected conclusion.

The Bobby Dazzlers follows the stumbling progress of four anti-heroes in a funny, macabre thriller about jealousy, drugs, media-friendly Yorkshiremen, salmon fishing, Modernist chair design and gruesome death, all set against a backdrop of beautiful Georgian architecture and some of England's finest countryside. The Bobby Dazzlers is a macabre comic thriller - the story of what happens when the self-satisfied North bumps up against its larger-guzzling, delinquent underbelly.

Adrian Day and Martyn Bilton are two young journalists adrift in the "New Globe", Britain's biggest newspaper. After The Incident (involving a cup of coffee, the Prime Minister, and the exploitation of the working class) an explosion of hype threatens to blow Bilton onto a much larger stage.

In the heroic days of rail travel, you could dine on kippers and champagne aboard the Brighton Belle; smoke a post-prandial cigar as the Golden Arrow closed in on Paris, or be shaved by the Flying Scotsman's on-board barber.

In Belles and Whistles, Andrew Martin recreates five of these famous train journeys by travelling aboard their nearest modern day equivalents. Sometimes their names have survived, but what has usually - if not always - disappeared is the extravagance and luxury. As Martin explains how we got from there to here, evocations of the golden age contrast with the starker modern reality: from monogrammed cutlery to stirring sticks, from silence on trains to tannoy announcements, from compartments to airline seating. For those who wonder whatever happened to porters, dining cars, mellow lighting, timetables, luggage in advance, trunk murders, the answers are all here.

Martin's five journeys add up to an idiosyncratic history of Britain's railways, combining humour, historical anecdote, reportage from the present and romantic evocations of the past.

An entertaining and enlightening social history of the world's most famous underground railway

In the summer of 1942, Gyles Mackrell – a decorated First World War pilot and tea plantation overseer, performed a series of heroic rescues in the hellish jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma – with the aid of twenty elephants.

At the age of 53, Mackrell went into the ‘green hell’ of the Chaukan Pass on the border of North Burma and Assam. Here, Mackrell and a team of elephant riders rescued Indian army soldiers, British civilians and their Indian servants, from the pursuing Japanese, directing the elephants through jungle passes and raging rivers, and territory infested with sand flies, mosquitoes and innumerable leeches. Those he saved were all on the point of death from starvation or fever: that summer was spent in a fight against time.

Now in Andrew Martin’s hands this never-before-told tale of heroics is given the shape of a suspenseful adventure, a wartime rescue whose facts are the stuff of fiction.

A wry look at our haunted isle, goes to cursed houses, talks to psychics and believers, and studies exorcisms. He asks why some ghosts appear in libraries and others at the end of the bed, what ghosts like to wear, and whether you should feel nervous on a foggy, moonlit night...

I Think, Therefore I Drop My Clothes in a Heap...
Andrew Martin is surprisingly well qualified to write a guide to housework for men. Not only is he a man himself, but he does a lot about the house. On purely humanitarian grounds he recently took over some of the ironing from his wife; he then branched out into bath-cleaning, "specialist" dusting, and washing up after dinner (when he wasn't going out).
For the purposes of this book, Martin has interviewed many experts. The result is an elegantly informative read, which interweaves witty, practical housework advice and musings on the nature of domestic politics with recollections from the author's Yorkshire childhood and highly illuminating scenes from the daily sit-com of family life.
How to get things really flat will amuse and instruct any man, forced at gunpoint by his significant other to read it.

'A fool and his words are soon parted' wrote William Shenstone in 1764; one might add that 'A wit and his words are rarely collected'. Here is the antidote: a dazzling survey of the funniest remarks, quips and observations from Ancient Rome, the Bible and Chaucer right up to The Simpsons and Little Britain. Over 5,000 of the very funniest remarks to have appeared on paper since, well, paper was invented.
The quotations are arranged thematically and cover all aspects of life: from the world we inhabit to the things we eat, smoke and drink; from the way we move around to what and how we learn - oh, and the pointlessness of football.