ROBERT BRUCE MONTGOMERY (1921–1978) had a long, successful career as a pianist, organist, conductor, and composer, creating operas, requiem masses, and even the background music for many British motion pictures, including six of the famous Carry On … comic film series, such as Carry on Nurse (1959). Using the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, he enjoyed a career as the author of detective novels and stories featuring Gervase Fen, a literary critic and professor at Oxford University, which he attended as well. Although he published only nine novels (all with Fen) and two short-story collections, Crispin quickly became a favorite of readers who like intelligent, witty, fair-play detective fiction. Two of his novels, The Moving Toyshop (1946) and Love Lies Bleeding (1948), were selected for the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone Library. In the former, a poet stumbles upon a corpse in a room above a toy shop and is immediately knocked unconscious. When he comes to, the corpse is missing—and so is the entire toy shop. The latter focuses on the search for a long-lost, priceless Shakespearean manuscript. Eight of Crispin’s novels and a short-story collection were written during a ten-year stretch (1944–1953), and it appeared that he would take his place with the greatest of the greats when he abruptly stopped writing detective fiction to devote his career to music, reviewing crime fiction, and editing science fiction anthologies. He wrote only one more novel, Glimpses of the Moon (1977), before his death; Fen Country (1979), his second collection, was published posthumously.
“Beware of the Trains” was first published as “Nine Minus Nine Equals One” in the March 1951 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Beware of the Trains (London, Gollancz, 1953).