One of the most frequent customers during my first job working in a bookshop was a middle-aged man with an unhealthy obsession with train timetables.

He would routinely stand in front of the counter and explain in a monotone voice his day’s journey, which had involved the 9.46 connecting with the 10.23 and his proposed return, which would see the 16.11 connecting with the 16.45.  Unless, of course, it was running late and he would then have to catch the 17.19.  Quiz him – should you ever want to – on any combination of routes across the entire rail network and he would have an instant recall of the relevant facts and figures.

It was perhaps this particular customer’s monotonous dialogues that put me off reading Freeman Wills Crofts.

Freeman Wills Crofts was well known as a crime writer whose plots frequently centred around an intimate knowledge of the train timetable, as in The 12.30 from Croydon; Sir John Magill’s Last Journey; Inspector French’s Greatest Case; and in numerous short stories, like The 8.12 from Waterloo.

Thankfully, I righted my prejudice and now regard Freeman Wills Crofts amongst my favourite writers of detective fiction.  Unlike my bookshop regular, Freeman Wills Crofts made train timetables thrilling.

A fellow admirer of Freeman Wills Crofts was the Japanese crime writer Seichō Matsumoto and, similar to Freeman Wills Crofts’s books, a train timetable plays a key part in his classic novel Tokyo Express.

Matsumoto even takes his admiration of the train timetable a step further: one of his characters – Ryōko Yasuda – writes an entire essay – reproduced in the novel – on the way that a reading of the train timetable transports her from her bedridden state into a glorious world of distant places and far-flung imaginations.

One thing that strikes me is that for both Freeman Wills Crofts and Seichō Matsumoto’s plots to be convincing the trains must run exactly true to the timetable.  The Freeman Wills Crofts novels I mention were written in the 1920s and 1930s; Tokyo Express in 1957.

Now, seventy-plus years on, the greatest thrill I get is if my daily commuter train arrives sometime vaguely within the correct hour it is scheduled.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow is the thinking-man’s Michael Portillo.