A is for All Aboard

 

A familiar enough phrase to all who have ever travelled by train or boat or even by bus, it could be the last thing that Joe calls out when the Sanford 3rd Age Club set off on another of their famous outings.

It would be entirely in context, too. Joe and his chums don’t exactly hark back to the age of steam, but they’re not too far ahead of it. They’re all baby boomers (like me) although they may have the odd member who born pre-World War Two, and they will all surely remember the great steam engines but they time they began to travel independently, steam will have been replaced by diesel on the railways, air travel would have become more accessible and affordable, and they would be equally at home in the cabin of a Boeing 737 as the carriage of an Inter-City 125.

These days, of course, they travel everywhere aboard a luxury coach, complete with toilets and, in one instance, on board satellite TV. A marked improvement on the old Bristol charabancs with wooden seats.

Most of the STAC Mysteries begin with the coach either leaving Sanford or arriving at the destination, and there is one thing these born again teenagers can be sure of when they set off: the outings are never boring. There’s a party atmosphere of drinking, dancing, and wooing, and inevitably there’s…

MURDER!

Stay with us for the next 26 days as we work out way through the alphabet with our friends from the Sanford 3rd Age Club.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats