Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing

By Kate Colquhoun

In July 1864, Thomas Briggs was traveling home after visiting his niece and her husband for dinner. He boarded a first-class carriage on the 9:45 pm Hackney service of the North London railway. At Hackney, two bank clerks discovered blood in the seat cushions as well as on the floor, windows, and sides of the carriage. A bloodstained hat was found on the seat along with a broken link from a watch chain. The race to identify the killer and catch him as he fled on a boat to America was eagerly followed by the public on both sides of the Atlantic. Kate Colquhoun tells a gripping tale of a crime that shocked the era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Nov 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781590208861

Kate Colquhoun

Kate Colquhoun lives in west London and is a keen gardener. ‘A Thing in Disguise’ is her first book.

Reviews for Murder in the First-Class Carriage

[aadyer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An entertaining and informative, relatively well paced narrative, describing not the crime, trial and execution of a criminal involved in the first ever rail way murder in the British Isles. Interesting and intriguing at times, it revealed a lot of the inconsistencies in Victorian England and society. Good, but not going to tell the ardent Victorian scholar anything new about the period.

[davidgnp · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I must admit to a certain initial prejudice against purchasing this book because, having read the blurb, it seemed to me an attempt to cash in on the success of Kate Summerscale's excellent 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher'. Indeed Jack Whicher is mentioned in these pages as a contemporary of the detective Inspector Richard Tanner who is the chief investigator of the murder of Thomas Briggs in a Victorian railway carriage, the subject of Kate Colquhon's book. It's certainly true that the Colquhon story covers the same period of history, tracks the investigation of a real-life high-profile murder and treats its subject in a very similar style to Kate Summerscale, but I came to the conclusion that I couldn't blame the author for the publisher's opportunism and that her own credentials were anyway impeccable. So I bought the book.I'm glad I did. As with 'Mr Whicher' I was transported to mid-Victorian England and was as thoroughly engaged with the murder, the investigation, the chase, trial and aftermath as newspaper readers of the time obviously were, though Colquhon writes with far more restraint than many of those journalists covering the story. Ms Colquhoun's admirable research allows us not only to become steeped in the details of the case but also to have a tangible sense of the lived context, with plenty of rich descriptive background to place the reader in the territory. We do hear the occasional riffle of research notes but in general the learning is presented subtly and in tune with the narrative.Tanner is not brought to life as effectively as Summerscale's Whicher, but the difficult-to-pin-down Francis Muller - the supposed villain of the piece - is very carefully drawn in all his ambiguities. This being real life, there is no fully realised close-the-book resolution, but Colquhon makes that a strength of her book, particularly in the final chapters. I won't say more than that, not wishing to give too much of the game away, but I do warn readers not to take too close a look at the picture captions before you've finished the narrative, otherwise you will discover more than you may wish to know at that point.

[casabooks · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I truly enjoy these out of the ordinary slightly unusual historical tales.
This first murder in a railcar had many very extraordinary circumstances and the author has done excellent research and laid out the investigations, discoveries, court proceedings in a chronological basis and gives you as much info as possible.
But it got to be too much for me - felt like I was slogging through the same info, recountings again and again and again . . .
I know this is what happens in crime solving - facts that seem the same, info that has been heard previously takes on a different slant, witnesses change slightly, and there were no clear cut absolutes.
I only wonder if this could have been told somehow in a shorter version - I was hoping for a 'story' that I could read, not a crime that I had to solve, and so it became a struggle for me.

[arielfl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have been fascinated by the idea of a murder occurring on a train ever since Murder on the Orient Express. Being a true crime buff, because truth is often stranger than fiction, and also a fan of Victorian London, I thought this would be right up my alley. In truth it was very dry, like week old toast dry. Not even butter and jelly could have saved it.The novel relates the true tale of poor Mr. Briggs. One night while heading home on a train he never reaches his destination. All that is left behind is a hat, not his, and his bloody railway car. He is soon located but is mortally wounded and unable to describe his assailant. Through some dogged detective work and circumstantial evidence a likely suspect is found but he is able to flee before the net is closed. The chase is on and the book goes on to lay out the facts of the case. While some interesting facts were presented, the author repeated herself a lot. It was clear from the copious notes in the back that the author did her research but the detectives conclusions were repeated in the trial portion of the book too closely. In addition the book suffered from the case itself not being very interesting. As far as I could make out it seemed that Mr. Briggs was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The motive for the crime was rather murky and I don't think fully established. If the killer had been tried today any lawyer worth his salt would have gotten the defendant off based on the case as it was presented here. Since there wasn't any forensic evidence tested like it would be today, the true guilt of the person who murdered Mr. Briggs can never fully be determined which is a draw back to the book.This kind of true crime historical novel is the type that author Erik Larson does so well. I just don't think there was enough of a story here for a whole novel and the additional information added in for padding was not interesting enough for anything but a brief skimming over or putting you to sleep.