Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

This week’s topic is How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time, but I don’t think they have, I’ve always loved reading and read a wide variety of genres. So, instead I am doing a topic I missed in August when I was on holiday. It’s books Featuring Modes of Transportation on the Cover, Planes, Trains & Automobiles.

The books I’ve chosen show trains, boats and planes on their covers:

Trains

The Christmas Train by David Baldacci – Basically this is a love story. Tom, a world-weary journalist is travelling from Washington DC to spend Christmas with his girlfriend who lives in Los Angeles. It’s also a detective story as there is a thief on the train.

Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards, fifteen railway themed stories in this collection and an introduction on classic railway mysteries. Train travel provides several scenarios for a mystery – the restriction of space on trains, with or without a corridor, means that there are a limited number of suspects and they can also provide an ideal place for a ‘locked room’ crime or an ‘impossible crime’ story. This collection also includes a couple of crimes with a supernatural element.

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie – Ruth Kettering, the daughter of millionaire Rufus Van Aldin is found strangled in her compartment in the Paris-Nice train, known as the train bleu, on its arrival in Nice and the fabulous ruby, the Heart of Fire that Van Aldin had given her, has been stolen. Fortunately Hercule Poirot is also travelling on the train and he of course unravels the mystery.

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie – this begins when Mrs McGillicuddy was going home from Christmas shopping in London when she saw from the window of her train a murder being committed in a train travelling on a parallel line. But nobody believes her because there is no trace of a body and no one is reported missing. Nobody, that is except for her friend Miss Marple. But she is getting older and more feeble and she hasn’t got the physical strength to get about and do things as she would like. So, she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – Poirot is on the Orient Express, on a three-days journey across Europe. But after midnight the train comes to a halt, stuck in a snowdrift. In the morning the millionaire Simon Ratchett is found dead in his compartment his body stabbed a dozen times and his door locked from the inside. It is obvious from the lack of tracks in the snow that no-one has left the train and by a process of elimination Poirot establishes that one of the passengers in the Athens to Paris coach is the murderer.

Boats and Planes

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie – Poirot is on the river-steamer SS Karnak, cruising on the Nile. Linnet Doyle, a wealthy American heiress is murdered, shot through the head. The motive seems straightforward, looking at who gains from Linnet’s death, but this is a complicated plot (when is one of Christie’s books not complicated?) and following on from Linnet’s murder, her maid is also found dead, Linnet’s pearls are missing, several characters are not what them seem and with the arrival of Colonel Race, a member of the British Secret Service, it seems there is also an international murderer and agitator on board.

Death Under Sail by C P Snow – This is a classic mystery, a type of ‘country house’ mystery, but set on a wherry (a sailing boat) on the Norfolk Broads, where Roger Mills, a Harley Street specialist, is taking a group of six friends on a sailing holiday. When they find him at the tiller with a smile on his face and a gunshot through his heart, all six fall under suspicion. It’s ingenious!

Planes

The 12.30 from Croydon by Freeman Wills Crofts – this begins with a murder but the identity of the murderer is known before he even thought of committing the crime. It’s set in the early 1930s when the country is suffering the effects of the ‘slump’ and Charles Swinburne’s business is on the edge of bankruptcy, and he is unable to raise the money to keep it going. So, he decided to murder his uncle, Andrew Crowther, in order to inherit his fortune. Consequently Andrew died on the 12.30 plane from Croydon. What I found most interesting is the description of the thrill of the early passenger flights. 

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie – a kind of locked room mystery, only this time the ‘locked room’ is a plane on a flight from Paris to Croydon, in which Hercule Poirot is one of the passengers. In mid-air, Madame Giselle, is found dead in her seat. It appears at first that she has died as a result of a wasp sting (a wasp was flying around in the cabin) but when Poirot discovers a thorn with a discoloured tip it seems that she was killed by a poisoned dart, aimed by a blowpipe. A most enjoyable book!

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates – I was totally gripped by the first part of the book describing Franklin’s flight, with his crew of four sergeants, over France then the Alps and on to Italy. On his return flight when they were over France, they began to dive, rapidly losing height and he knew that the port engine had gone. The air screw (that’s a propeller) had broken, meaning they wouldn’t make it back to England and they crash landed somewhere in the countryside. They thought they were about west-north-west of the Vosges. From then onwards the story covers the period when Franklin whose arm had been very badly injured was cared for by Francoise and her family, hidden in their farmhouse. He falls in love with Francoise and she agrees to help him escape and marry him when they reach England.