On the right track for literary success

Feb 4 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

A new detective is steaming into British fiction – meet Inspector Vignoles of the station yard. Peter Elson talks to his creator

STEPHEN DONE knew he had to get his life in order and find a purpose and meaningful direction, without frittering any more of his time away.

So, with no further ado, he announced to his mother that he was going to be a steam engine driver.

After all, on your eighth birthday it’s important to get these matters resolved. But fate was about to unleash a devastating blow.

His mother, like all good mums, was surprisingly well-versed in the interests of her young son and had to break the awful news: “Stephen, I’m afraid the very last steam train is running today.”

Now aged 47, Stephen recalls this moment: “It was August 3, 1968, and a defining moment when British Railways banished the steam train. I suppose I’ve been looking for something else to do ever since.”

Not that he’s been idle. Currently curator of Liverpool Football Club’s Museum and Stadium Tour, at Anfield, he graduated in fine art at Leeds Poly and then museum studies.

“I think I’m the only person employed in Premiership football who’s got a degree in fine art,” chuckles Stephen, who lives in New Brighton.

His latest achievement is publishing a detective novel called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. A warm human drama, it combines his love of railways, detective fiction and the immediate post-war period, a time of massive social change.

Inspiration for the book emerged in autumn, 2005, as he was sauntering down a railway line in Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, where his partner, Irena, lives.

Luckily, for his own well-being and detective fiction, he wasn’t mown down by the 8.21 Trans-Balkan express, but returned home with the germ of a story.

“This storyline wouldn’t go away, even though I never had any ambition to write a novel. It was about a lad, Edward Earnshaw, who’s going to become an engine cleaner.

“I imagined him working in his father’s bakery, taking his bike out to make deliveries to a station refreshment room. I realised I had the beginning of a book.”

His main character is Insp Charles Vignoles, a name borrowed from a leading Victorian railway engineer who worked on the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester Railway and also assisted Stephen’s hero, IK Brunel.

Rather cleverly, this fictional Vignoles occupies an entirely invented role of a staff railway detective on the old London & North Eastern Railway, allowing him to roam among an endless parade of personalities and locations.

“This was an age when work was very compartmentalised. The great thing is that I get him to do whatever I want and say that no door is ever closed to him – the opposite of reality,” says Stephen.

Unlike his bewhiskered 19th- century namesake, Stephen’s Vignoles is in his early 40s and more a dashing Cary Grant or James Stewart figure. He’s very well dressed, as his wife is half-Italian and very stylish.

“Vignoles is very English and educated, giving chance for great play on the class differences. Unusually, I’ve given him two assistant WPCs, which gives the stories a lot of scope. Around 100,000 women worked on the railways in 1946,” says Stephen.

“This is not a book aimed at train buffs, that’s just the setting. It soon became clear that it would be a series, and I’m already onto the next. Dreaming up characters is enormously enjoyable, they just appear.