I’ve been in denial about this moment for a long time. M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman have been clear for a while now that their excellent Adventures on Trains series had an endgame in mind and…this is it. With The Arctic Railway Assassin (2022) we reach the (ahem) end of the line.

Harrison ‘Hal’ Beck has taken five previous train journeys with his uncle Nathaniel Bradshaw, each time encountering some combination of theft, murder, kidnap, sabotage, and more skulduggery besides. But, for their journey on the night train into the Arctic Circle to hopefully view the Northern Lights, Uncle Nat is determined that things will be different: “This time I’m going to prove to your mother that we can take a train trip together without encountering crime”. So when they’re followed around Stockholm by a mysterious woman it’s probably nothing. And when they board the train and begin to have suspicions that a professional killer known as The Shadow might be on board, meh, it’s probably a mistake.

As ever, Leonard and Sedgman have done a wonderfully compact job cramming in developments so that once the problems begin to roll out you suddenly realise how deeply the characters have become embroiled in events without any escape. And the threat here feels remarkably fresh, given that we we can be pretty certain no-one is actually going to get filleted by our legendary hired killer. What is known of Uncle Nat from previous instalments means that certain scenes here crackle with a tangible tension, and the authors’ willingness to escalate events into situations from which there seems to be little escape is impressive for how much it overturns expectations the reader might have.

For the first time since he’d started having adventures with his uncle, [Hal] was truly afraid.

Given the wonderful work done by illustrator Elisa Paganelli in support of Leonard and Sedgman’s narratives, it’s pleasing, too, that Hal’s constant sketching of scenes and events comes into play a little more centrally here, with a few visual hints well-deployed, and a clever piece of reframing when the reader and characters both realise that someone assumed harmless is in fact anything but. The, er, additional element added to Hal and Nat’s journey — I’m trying to avoid even minor spoilers — complicates things in a way that might have taken away some of the core charm, but fans need not worry: this is in all the ways that matter very much the style and stripe of adventure that you’ve come to love over the course of the series.

It’s also excellently written, knowing when to take time amidst its propulsive plot to allow a moment to sink in or to set a scene vividly in the reader’s head:

The snow mist, which hung low, reduced visibility and gave an air of claustrophobia to the landscape. The world outside the window was monochrome, a flat picture made of greys, blacks and whites. SO many different whites. Colour is light, Hal thought, but here, there is no direct light, as the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon. Snow has the power to suck all the colour from the world.

Before the finale goes all Lord of the Rings, too, there’s a pleasing simplicity about the scene setting and the starkness of both the landscape and situation we’re in. It’s in boiling the plot down to small moments like this, when the temptation in your final chapter must be to go as big as possible, that things really excel — human stories are small stories, after all.

Apart from the ease with which you can apparently get thrown in jail in Denmark and the fact that you cannot hiss the word “Go”, it’s very difficult indeed to find fault with this final go around with these characters. The central MacGuffin is ingenious, the threat faced by characters we’ve come to love feels new, the plot rockets along, and the conclusion is emotionally satisfying and buckets of fun. The Adventures on Trains series has, in short, been a triumph from beginning to end, and while I can understand the desire of its authors to perhaps quit while they’re ahead it’s to be hoped that maybe, maybe this isn’t the last we’ve seen from them. The Golden Age made great use of trains, planes, boats, and various combinations thereof, so if Uncle Nat and Hal ever want to try a supposedly safer mode of transportation and accidentally stumble over more criminous endeavours, I am certainly here for it.

~

The Adventures on Trains series by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman