The Case of the Hail Mary Celeste: The Case Files of Jack Wenlock, Railway Detective

(Paperback)

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Description

Jack Wenlock is the last of the Railway Goslings: that fabled cadre of railway detectives created at the Weeping Cross Railway Servants Orphanage, who trod the corridors of the GWR trains in the years 1925 to 1947. Sworn to uphold the name of Gods Wonderful Railway, Jack keeps the trains free of fare dodgers and purse-stealers, bounders and confidence tricksters, German spies and ladies of the night. But now, as the clock ticks down towards the nationalisation of the railways Jack finds himself investigating a case that begins with an abducted great aunt, but soon develops into something far darker and more dangerous. It reaches up to the corridors of power and into the labyrinth of the greatest mystery in all the annals of railway lore the disappearance in 1915 of twenty-three nuns from the 7.25 Swindon to Bristol Temple Meads, or the case of the Hail Mary Celeste. Shady government agents, drunken riverboat captains, a missing manuscript and a melancholic gorilla all collide on a journey that will take your breath away.

Reviews

Complex absurdity of a very special sort. Anyone who loves steam trains, detective thrillers and PG Wodehouse will feel distinctly at home * Jasper Fforde *
An utter delight this cocktail of the surreal and the terrifyingly real is a rare entertainment * Michael Williams, author of On the Slow Train *
Gripping * Britain *
Effortless and hilarious Pryce is in a league of his own * Time Out *
Malcolm Pryce is the king of welsh noir Edgar Allen Poe meets Phoenix Nights in a flurry of blood-stained absurdity * Sunday Telegraph *
A master of dry delivery, he has an impressive ability to transpose the ordinary with the extraordinary, sweeping you away into a funfair mirror world of grotesque characters and absurd situations which keep you glued to the page at every turn * Big Issue *

Author Bio

Malcolm Pryce was born in the UK and has spent much of his life working and travelling abroad. He has been, at various times, a BMW assembly-line worker, a hotel washer-up, a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas, an advertising copywriter and the world's worst aluminium salesman. In 1998 he gave up his day job and booked a passage on a banana boat bound for South America in order to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. He spent the next seven years living in Bangkok, where he wrote three more novels in the series, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth and Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth. In 2007 he moved back to the UK and now lives in Oxford, where he wrote From Aberystwyth with Love, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still, and, most recently, The Case of the Hail Mary Celeste. malcolmpryce.com / @exogamist