The Great Train Robbery: Michael Crichton’s Victorian Caper of Gold, Gentlemen and Steam
Lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side in Victorian London, and Edward Pierce moves easily between both worlds. Rich, handsome and witty, he charms the city’s most prominent citizens while he plots the crime of the century. Who would suspect that a well-bred gentleman could be the mastermind behind the daring theft of a fortune in gold?
Author: Michael Crichton (1942–2008)
Title: The Great Train Robbery (1975)
Format: English Kindle edition
Scope: Historical crime novel set in Victorian England
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B007UH4DD6 (ASIN B007UH4DD6)
The Pride of the Industrial Age
Not even Pierce could foresee the consequences of an extraordinary robbery whose target is the pride of England’s industrial age: the mighty steam locomotive. The story recounts the beginnings of high-speed rail travel and shows how little people of the time understood about the physics of moving trains.
Ignorance as an Accomplice
They could not explain, for example, the suction effect that appears when two moving trains pass each other; only later was the problem solved by spacing the tracks further apart. It is partly thanks to this ignorance that the robbery can be carried out: its author does not fully understand the danger he is exposing himself to, and so he puts into practice the plan devised by him and his cunning accomplices.
A True Story
Crichton based the novel on a real crime: the so-called Great Gold Robbery of May 1855, when gold bullion sent by the South Eastern Railway from London to Folkestone, on its way to pay British troops in the Crimean War, was found to have been replaced by lead shot during the journey. The thieves had to obtain copies of four different keys to two heavy safes, guarded and kept in separate places. The real mastermind, Edward Agar, eventually testified in court, and Crichton draws heavily on the trial records.
Victorian Underworld
The novel’s charm lies in Crichton’s guided tour of Victorian London. Between scenes he steps aside, like a lecturer, to explain the city’s criminal slang, the codes of respectable society, the ratting contests in pubs, the cruel prisons and the strange medical and moral ideas of the time. Pierce assembles a crew straight out of that underworld: a skilled screwsman (safe-breaker), a snakesman small enough to slip through tiny openings, and his mistress, an actress who can play any role. Their preparations, from taking wax impressions of keys to bribing a guard, are as absorbing as the robbery itself.
From Page to Screen
Crichton directed the film adaptation himself in 1978, with Sean Connery as Pierce, Donald Sutherland as the safe-breaker and Lesley-Anne Down. Connery famously performed much of the climactic sequence on the roof of a moving train himself. The film is lighter in tone than the book, which keeps a sharper edge about the hypocrisy of Victorian respectability.
Who Will Enjoy It
Fans of heist stories and of Victorian London, and readers who know Crichton only for his techno-thrillers: this is a reminder that his real gift was explaining a world, whether a genetics lab or a nineteenth-century railway, while keeping the plot racing.
Tip
Read the author’s asides slowly; they are half the pleasure, and some of them are very funny about Victorian manners.
Note
Crichton’s afterword sets out what is history and what is invention.
Why Read It
This tale of suspense, surprise and adventure is a thrilling, breathless journey that runs along steel tracks at dizzying speed. It is a classic caper novel set a decade before the age of dynamite, but explosive all the same, and a reminder that Crichton could write superb historical fiction as well as techno-thrillers.
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