The Evening Standard praised his first Jim Stringer novel, saying "The age of steam has rarely been better evoked." Murder at Deviation Junction was shortlisted for the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award and, in 2008, he was shortlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award.
He has also written a book on housework for men entitled How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man's Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts (2008) and a look at British ghosts, Ghoul Britannia: Notes on a Haunted Isle (2009).
The cover gallery covers only Martin's Jim Stringer novels.
Faber & Faber 0571-20991-2, 2003, 231pp, £6.99. Cover by Brian Lancaster/design Tim Byrne
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.
Faber & Faber 0571-21902-0, 2005, 336pp, £7.99. Cover design Two Associates
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...
Faber & Faber 0571-21904-9, 2007, 320pp, £7.99. Cover design by Two Associates
In York, Winter, 1906 - two brothers have been shot to death. Meanwhile, 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...
Faber & Faber 0571-22966-6, 2008, 249pp, £7.99. Cover design by Faber
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.
Faber & Faber 0571-22968-0, 2009, 262pp, £7.99. Cover design by Two Associates
It's the sweltering summer of 1911, and one Friday evening a young aristocrat arrives into the custody of detective Jim Stringer, a man recently found guilty of murdering his father in the sleepy village of Adenwold. He warns Jim of another murder likely to happen in the same village - that of his brother, a reclusive intellectual. When Jim and his wife Lydia arrive at Adenwold they encounter a host of likely suspects and the intended victim, and suddenly Jim has one weekend in which to stop a murder and unravel a conspiracy of international dimensions...
Faber & Faber 0571-22970-3, 2010, 314pp, £7.99. Cover design by Two Associates
One night, in a private boarding house in Scarborough, a railwayman vanishes, leaving his belongings behind...It is the eve of the Great War, and Jim Stringer, railway detective, is uneasy about his next assignment. It's not so much the prospect Scarborough in the gloomy off-season that bothers him, or even the fact that the last railwayman to stay in the house has disappeared without trace. It's more that his governer, Chief Inspector Saul Weatherhill, seems to be deliberately holding back details of the case - and that he's been sent to Scarborough with a trigger-happy assistant. And when Jim encounters the seductive and beautiful Amanda Rickerby a whole new personal danger enters Jim's life...
Faber & Faber 0571-24964-0, 2012, 287pp, £7.99. Cover design by Faber
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 - even before they departed for France, a member of Jim's unit had been found dead. During the stand-off that follows, Jim and his comrades must operate by night the vitally important trains carrying munitions to the Front, through a ghostly landscape of shattered trees where high explosive and shrapnel shells rain down. 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...
Faber & Faber 978-0571-24965-7, 2013, 304pp, £7.99.
Baghdad 1917. Captain Jim Stringer, invalided from the Western Front, has been dispatched to investigate what looks like a nasty case of treason. He arrives to find a city on the point of insurrection, his cover apparently blown - and his only contact lying dead with flies in his eyes. As Baghdad swelters in a particularly torrid summer, the heat alone threatens the lives of the British soldiers who occupy the city. The recently ejected Turks are still a danger - and many of the local Arabs are none too friendly either. For Jim, who is not particularly good in warm weather, the situation grows pricklier by the day. Aside from his investigation, he is working on the railways around the city. His boss is the charming, enigmatic Lieutenant-Colonel Shepherd, who presides over the gracious dining society called "The Baghdad Railway Club" - and who may or may not be a Turkish agent. Jim's search for the truth brings him up against murderous violence in a heat-dazed, labyrinthine city where an enemy awaits around every corner.
Faber & Faber 978-0571-28410-8, 2014, 330pp, £7.99. Cover design by Faber
India 1923. Captain Jim Stringer is on secondment to the East Indian Railway. Travelling on the Night Mail from Calcutta to Janalpur, a rich Anglo-Indian is shot dead in the sleeping compartment next to Jim's. Was it a robbery gone wrong, or was Jim the actual target?
Apart from the Jamalpur shooting, someone is placing venomous snakes in the First Class compartments of the railway, drawing Jim into the thriving snake trade of Calcutta in hopes of finding a lead. Meanwhile, his daughter has formed a connection with a Maharajah's son, and Jim detects danger to his family from all sides in the manic social whirl of a dying empire...
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