Dolores Hitchens (1907-1973) was a successful American mystery novelist. Her second husband, Bert, was a railway detective. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out what happened next. Yes, they started writing railway mysteries. They ended up writing five of them, the third of which was End of the Line (published in 1957).
End of the Line involves the reopening of a very old case. Six years earlier the Western Shores Limited was wrecked in the Lobo Tunnel and sixteen people were killed. A case like that is never really closed, not until it’s solved. The railroad cops never give up on a case involving a trainwreck. Now the conductor of the train on that fatal day, a man named Parmenter, has resurfaced after spending five years in a Mexican prison on another charge. There was never any evidence against Parmenter but he vanished six months after the wreck, which just happens to be when the compensation claims were settled. And he arrived in Mexico with plenty of cash. That’s the kind of thing that gets railroad cops thinking.
There are two railroad detectives on this case. Farrel is an old hand, a man who seems kind of grey and defeated. Saunders is young and keen. They’d really like to have another talk with Parmenter, especially given that at the moment he re-entered U.S. territory his daughter, who’d been living with her aunt, disappeared.
There are two lines of investigation for Farrel and Saunders to follow. The first is the Parmenter angle. The second concerns a rail gang employee who may have had a grudge against the railroad. It’s possible that the two angles are unconnected and it’s possible that neither will lead anywhere but those are the only leads they have. It’s also possible that some of those compensation claims may have been fraudulent.
All of these leads are apparent to the two investigators right from the start and there are some obvious theories that might fit the known facts. The problem is that there’s no actual hard evidence whatsoever so it’s going to require a lot of painstaking routine investigation.
This book has been reissued as a Black Gat Book by Stark House, known for their reprints of noir fiction. This might lead you initially to think this will be a noir novel. In fact it’s very much a police procedural. Every lead and every clue, however slight, has to be sifted. It needs a certain amount of skill to make this kind of story gripping and entertaining but the authors are up to the task.
And while it’s not noir fiction as such there are a lot of broken people in this story. Some are broken because they’re bad, some because they are weak and some because they are foolish. So there are some noir touches.
The two detectives, and the relationship between them, make things more interesting. Farrel is a drunk. His personal life crashed and burned a few years earlier and he crawled inside a bottle and that’s where he has stayed. The Lobo Tunnel case is his last chance to hang onto his job. Saunders is a straight arrow. He follows the rules. He never drinks on duty. And he’s a complete innocent when it comes to women. Saunders disapproves of Farrel and suspects that he is finished and that he’s going to make an unholy mess of things. Farrel suspects that Saunders was planted on him by his boss to get rid of him. Things are tense between them, to say the least. Their relationship develops as they learn more about each other but whether that’s going to make them learn to like and trust each other or learn to hate each other is something you’ll have to read the book to find out.
There’s also Betsy, who lives next door to Saunders. She’s young and pretty and she seems keen to teach him all about women. She seems to already know all about men.
There are some exciting moments as well, with a young girl being stalked by a killer and then with Farrel and Saunders going undercover and finding themselves unarmed, in the middle of a dangerous drug-smuggling racket (which may be connected to the trainwreck).
Everything in End of the Line works extremely well. This being a police procedural it’s the investigation rather than the mystery that is the primary focus. Farrel and Saunders have a fair idea as to what actually happened (as will the reader) but it’s the patient gathering of evidence that provides the entertainment. Farrel and Saunders both have some depth to them and the various witnesses and suspects have real and fairly complex motivations.
It’s all thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.
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