Andrew Martin Books in Order

Two young journalists drift through life at Britain's biggest newspaper until one absurd public incident turns Martyn Bilton into a media sensation. It is a sharp, funny satire about newsroom vanity, celebrity and the way hype devours common sense.

Four hopeless antiheroes plan a burglary in Yorkshire, with jealousy, drugs and comic violence never far behind. Martin turns a scruffy heist setup into a darkly funny story about bravado, bad decisions and local self-mythology.

Young railwayman Jim Stringer takes a promising London job on a funeral railway serving a huge cemetery outside the city. The dream quickly sours as workers vanish, deaths multiply and Jim realizes he may have stepped into a trap.

In the hot summer of 1905, Jim Stringer is aboard an excursion train to Blackpool when a near-derailment turns deadly. Guilt and curiosity drive him into a case tangled up with mill owners, radicals and railway pride.

Newly promoted railway detective Jim Stringer is sent undercover among thieves instead of being given the murder case he expects. The job pulls him far from home, while trouble builds around pregnant Lydia and Jim's difficult family ties.

Hoping for promotion, Jim Stringer takes what should be a simple case, then a blizzard reveals a body by the tracks. His search for the killer leads from railway carriages to industrial iron country and a very dangerous chase.

Jim Stringer escorts a young aristocrat accused of killing his father to the quiet village of Adenwold. Once Jim and Lydia arrive, the summer hush gives way to fresh threats, hidden loyalties and the fear that another death is coming.

In 1914 Jim Stringer goes undercover in a shabby Scarborough guest house to investigate a missing railwayman. Strange memories and mounting unease suggest the case is far more dangerous, and far stranger, than a routine disappearance.

On the first day of the Somme, Jim Stringer is trapped in a shell hole and thinking back to a murder in his railway battalion. As trains carry munitions toward the Front, suspicion grows that the killer may be serving beside him.

Baghdad, 1917. Invalided from the Western Front, Captain Jim Stringer is sent to investigate possible treason amid brutal heat, imperial intrigue and fragile railway lines. His only contact is dead before the inquiry properly begins.

Part social history, part travel book, this is Martin's lively account of the London Underground, from its nineteenth-century origins to modern commuter life. He explains how the Tube shaped the city above as much as the tunnels below.

This true story follows Gyles Mackrell's 1942 rescue mission through the Burma and Assam borderlands, where elephants became the key to saving soldiers and civilians from jungle, disease and the Japanese advance.

North East India, 1923. Jim Stringer is meant to inspect railway security, but a shooting on the night mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur and a series of deadly snake attacks pull him into a tense case shadowed by politics and family danger.

Martin retraces five famous named train journeys, comparing their old glamour with the reality of modern rail travel. Along the way he turns railway nostalgia into a funny, informed tour of changing Britain.

Detective Superintendent George Quinn runs a specialist unit investigating the super-rich of Mayfair. Murder, jewel theft and moneyed secrecy pull him into a London where style and privilege are part of the camouflage.

York, 1799. When a silhouette artist is found stabbed with his own scissors, debtor Fletcher Rigge is briefly released from prison to solve the crime. Armed only with copies of the victim's final six shades, he enters a city full of shadows.

Peter Cunningham drifts through a Virginia summer, teaching at a women's prison and half-committing to life with his longtime girlfriend. Then he meets Leslie, and the affair that follows forces hard questions about ambition, honesty and the stories people tell about love.

Martin rides the surviving sleeper services to places like Istanbul, Lisbon and Venice, using each journey to explore the glamour, oddness and slow decline of the night train. It is travel writing, history and elegy in one.

A struggling journalist in present-day London begins writing about a vanished Victorian mind-reader known as the Martian Girl. The result is a layered mystery that moves between two Londons, with performance, obsession and danger linking them.

A compact, affectionate guide to London's moquette seat patterns, from horse buses to modern Tube stock. Martin turns overlooked upholstery into a lively piece of design and transport history.

London, 1976. A washed-up rock star begins a long-planned killing spree that starts with a wink, while a wealthy Englishman in Paris tries to uncover who the so-called Winking Killer really is before the hunt closes in.

York, 1925. A man with a revolver confronts Jim Stringer at the station, sending him back to a summer fair and a Wild West sideshow led by the unnerving sharpshooter Kid Durrant. The trail becomes one of Jim's most dangerous.

After the Beeching cuts, volunteers kept parts of Britain's railway past alive. Martin travels preserved lines from Aviemore to Epping, meeting the people who keep steam running and explaining why the obsession still feels so vivid.