Beau Blackstone

Blackstone #3

by Derek Lambert

Edmund Blackstone, Bow Street Runner, poured ale over his clothes, and rubbed his fingernails against the stone wall until they were cracked and jagged. Then he dishevelled his hair, rubbing a little grease into it. The whole process offended him but he persevered, massaging soil into his hands until they had a dirty polish about them, yet still they didn’t have the saddle-hard palms which you got wielding a shovel for twelve hours or more every day. For that was what he would have to do — Edmund Blackstone, navigator or navvy.‘If you’re on the run,’ Molly said, ‘take my advice, go back to the canals. There’s only a couple of months’ work left on this bloody railway. And you’ll have to put up with Petro.’‘Who’s Petro?’ Blackstone asked. Although he knew.‘Calls himself king of the navvies. Everyone’s scared of him, even the contractors. Don’t cross him.’But how else, Blackstone wondered, was he to discover who was behind the theft of the navvies’ wages? Who stood to gain if the world’s pioneer public steam locomotive railway, the Stockton and Darlington, failed to open? In chasing the answers Blackstone unearths a plot to pull the world’s first Great Train Robbery.

Genres: Historical Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 1973

About the author

Derek Lambert was educated at Epsom College and was both an author of thrillers in his own name, writing also as Richard Falkirk, and a journalist. As a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, he spent time in many exotic locales that he later used as settings in his novels.

In addition to his steady stream of thrillers, Lambert also published (under the pseudonym Richard Falkirk) a series about a Bow Street Runner called Edmund Blackstone. These, the fruit of research in the London Library, were interspersed with detailed descriptions of early 19th century low life, as the hero undertook such tasks as saving Princess Victoria from being kidnapped, or penetrating skullduggery at the Bank of England.

Lambert made no claims for his books, which he often wrote in five weeks, simply dismissing them as pot-boilers; but in 1988 the veteran American journalist Martha Gellhorn paid tribute in The Daily Telegraph to his intricate plotting and skillful use of factual material. It appealed, she declared, to a universal hunger for "pure unadulterated storytelling", of the sort supplied by storytellers in a bazaar

Lambert was residing in Spain with his family at the time of his death at the age of seventy-one.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bow Street Runner, Edmund Blackstone, himself a former criminal, is dispatched to the English Midlands in disguise as a railway worker, to uncover sabotage by those wanting to prevent the success of the railways, in this interesting 1973 novel set in the early-nineteenth century. Various landowners and a gang of railway workers stand in his way as he has to prevent a robbery taking place on one of the first trains. Much of interest about life and working conditions, and Blackstone is a credible, quite dark character. 4.5 stars.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Invested interests in the canal industry threatened the new railway engines. George Stephenson brings in the Bow Street Runners and therefore Blackstone to find the conspirators and stop the plots against him, and the railway between Stockton and Darlington.
An enjoyable thriller/mystery with the interesting character of Blackstone.
A NetGalley Book

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Navvies and other members of the "dangerous classes," and the word's first train robbery. Great fun. So glad this fine series is now on Kindle, so I can complete it. Ripping yarns, with lots of Regency color. Extra half-star for period brand names (guns, snuff boxes, fashion).

[Steven Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, fun, read; the same series I read a couple of when I was a teenager and really liked then; love now. Detail, character, an era of highwayman derring-do and Peelers who are more criminal than Police. Plenty of twists and turns.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best of Falkirk's Blackstone series. Blackstone goes undercover as a navigator building a railway line. As with many of the other Blackstone novels it is well researched and gives us a look at the Victorian age.