‘Murder at Whitechapel Road Station’ by Jim Eldridge

Published by Allison & Busby,
21 November 2024.
ISBN: 978-0-74903146-6 (HB)

This is the fourth book in Eldridge’s London Underground Station Mysteries Series and, as with its predecessors, is set during the Blitz in WW2. The former Whitechapel Road Underground station is being used as an air raid shelter and a body is found in one of its nooks and crannies. Not only has this woman been stabbed, she has also been eviscerated. A battered Victorian doctor’s case containing surgical tools has been left nearby. Was that meant to be found? Once the dead woman is identified as a prostitute, it is inevitable that the ghost of Jack the Ripper starts to hover over proceedings.

DCI Edgar Coburg, or Edgar Saxe-Coburg to give him his full name, of Scotland Yard is brought in. Coburg comes from a privileged family (he is the younger brother of Magnus Saxe-Coburg, otherwise known as the Earl of Dawlish). Assisting him, as before, is DS Ted Lampson. Before long, as they say, the plot thickens. Coburg is summoned to a meeting at Buckingham Palace with King George VI and Winston Churchill, the prime minister. One of the monarch’s valets, Bernard Bothwell, has gone missing, and they want him found. They also claim that a watch has disappeared, and this appears to be a major concern. Coburg is told that everything must be kept quiet, and he cannot tell even DS Lampson. In an entertaining aside, the king wonders whether he (his family name being Saxe-Coburg-Gotha before George V changed it to Windsor) and Edgar Saxe-Coburg are distantly related.

At this point there is nothing to link the cases, but it soon transpires that Bothwell has family connections with Whitechapel – and Coburg does not like coincidences. Early in the novel we become aware that there is ‘The Watcher’, someone who is keeping an eye on the police activities around Whitechapel. Magnus Saxe-Coburg and his valet Malcolm have been asked by Churchill to scout potential sites in Whitechapel for more air raid shelters. Whoever ‘The Watcher’ is manages to persuade some local toughs that the pair are Nazi spies, and consequently they get beaten up. Meanwhile, another two women are murdered: one is also eviscerated, but the murderer is interrupted whilst attempting to do the same to the second yet manages to escape.

Such is the importance attached to Coburg’s investigation into the disappearance of Bothwell (which gives the reader the impression that there is more to it than meets the eye) that he is taken off the underground station murders. Lampson and others continue looking into them, but it is not long before the cases merge to one extent or another. A discovery is made that drags Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson into the story.

There are interesting developments from the previous novel in the series. Ted Lampson and Eve are now married (Lampson lost his first wife), and Ted hopes that his son Terry will start to call Eve ‘mum’ rather than Eve. Added period detail comes through Coburg’s wife, Rosa, who is a jazz musician. During the novel she hosts the first of what is hoped to be a series of concerts broadcast live from the Maida Vale Studios, and artists such as Vera Lynn, Flanagan and Allen and the Crazy Gang make appearances.

This is an enjoyable and easy read. Eldridge likes dialogue, and there are relatively few descriptive passages to get in the way of the fast-moving and engaging plot. Characters such as ‘Cheerful Charlie Brown’, a reporter on the Whitechapel Chronicle, add to the fun. If the previous novels have caught your attention, I’m sure you will not be disappointed by this one.
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Reviewer: David Whittle

Jim Eldridge was born in the Kings Cross/Euston area of north London in November 1944. He left school at 16 and did a variety of jobs, before training as a teacher. He taught during the 1970s in disadvantaged areas of Luton, while at the same time writing. He became a full-time writer in 1978. He is a radio, TV and movie scriptwriter with hundreds of radio and TV scripts broadcast in the UK and across the world in a career spanning over 30 years. He lives in Kent with his wife, 

http://www.jimeldridge.com/   

David Whittle is firstly a musician (he is an organist and was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School for over 30 years) but has always enjoyed crime fiction. This led him to write a biography of the composer Bruce Montgomery who is better known to lovers of crime fiction as Edmund Crispin, about whom he gives talks now and then. He is currently convenor of the East Midlands Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association.