Occupation Novelist Education University of Oxford Role Novelist | Name Andrew Martin Genre Crime Fiction | |
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Born 6 July 1962 (age 61)
York, England ( 1962-07-06 ) Notable works Jim Stringer, Steam Detective Nominations Dagger in the Library, CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award Books The Necropolis Railway, Underground - Overground: A Passen, The Essential Guide to, The Last Train to Scarborough, The Somme Stations Similar People Patrice Petro, Nigel Davies, Keith Miles | ||
Andrew Martin (born 6 July 1962) is an English novelist and journalist.
Martin was brought up in Yorkshire, studied at Merton College, Oxford and qualified as a barrister. He has since worked as a freelance journalist for a number of publications while writing novels, starting with Bilton, a comic novel about journalists, and The Bobby Dazzlers, a comic novel set in the North of England, for which he was named Spectator Young Writer of the Year.
The Guardian claimed Bilton and The Bobby Dazzlers "rank high in the lists of the best comic novels published in the past 10 years".
His series of detective novels about Jim Stringer, a railwayman reassigned to the North Eastern Railway police in Edwardian England, includes The Necropolis Railway (set on the real London Necropolis Railway), The Blackpool Highflyer, The Lost Luggage Porter, Murder at Deviation Junction, Death on a Branch Line, The Last Train to Scarborough, The Somme Stations (Winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011) and The Baghdad Railway Club.
In 2015, he released The Yellow Diamond, A Crime of the Super-Rich, a detective novel set in London's Mayfair.
He has also written a number of works of non-fiction: How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man's Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts; Ghoul Britannia, Notes on a Haunted Island; Underground Overground, A Passenger's History of the Tube; Belles and Whistles, Five Journeys Through Time on Britain's Trains, and Flight by Elephant, the Untold Story of World War II's Most Daring Jungle Rescue about Gyles Mackrell and his Burmese, elephant-assisted wartime rescue mission, published in 2013. In addition, he is the editor of a dictionary of humorous quotations: Funny You Should Say That: A Compendium of Jokes, Quips and Quotations from Cicero to the Simpsons.
His works for television and radio include: Between the Lines, Railways in Fiction and Film (2008), Disappearing Dad, Fathers in Literature (2010), The Trains that Time Forgot: Britain's Lost Railway Journeys (2015), all in the Timeshift series, and three essay series for Radio 3, The Sound and The Fury (2013), England Ejects (2014), The Further Realm (2015).
Andrew Martin lives in north London with his wife and sons.