Full Steam Ahead!

“While sensible men set out to be bankers, lawyers, business tycoons, or president of the United States, my brother had what was, in his mind, a far loftier goal. He wanted to be a detective.” So explains Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer in On the Wrong Track, Steve Hockensmith’s second contribution to the subgenre of western mysteries. As in Hockensmith’s debut novel, the well-reviewed Holmes on the Range (2006), Otto and his elder brother, Gustav--aka Old Red--once again find themselves solving murders and other crimes in the mode of Gustav’s “deducifying” idol, Sherlock Holmes. Only now, as David Thayer explains today in a January Magazine review, they’re working as undercover “law enforcers” on the Southern Pacific Railroad, trying to stop a gang of thieves known as the Give-’em-Hell Boys.

There’s nothing easy about that assignment. “[O]ur heroes aren’t on the job for long, bound from Utah to San Francisco, before they discover a human head beneath the Pacific Express train’s undercarriage,” Thayer writes. “That this particular noggin was once the mortal property of an S.P. employee assigned to the baggage car is an early indicator of what a long strange trip the Brothers Amlingmeyer face on their way west.” However, Big Red and Old Red ultimately prove they’re up to the task. Thayer says that Hockensmith, employing a combination of humor, red herrings, and oddball characters, delivers in On the Wrong Track a second novel that actually rivals his first.

Read his whole review here.