Stephen Done’s most treasured compliments about his crime novels are from former railway staff and passengers, who congratulate him on the accuracy of his evocations of the steam era.

He said: “I’ve received letters from retired train drivers and firemen saying that my stories tell it how it was. And passengers, who used the Great Central Railway have also written or emailed me with similarly appreciative remarks.

“It is really gratifying to hear from them as I didn’t know the steam era and I’m using my research and imagination to write the novels.”

He was born just too young to see locomotives haul coaches through the countryside to and from London Marylebone. On his eighth birthday in August 1968, he told his mother he wanted to be a steam engine driver and could he have a ride on a steam train from Brackley station.

“My mother said I was too late as steam was being withdrawn in a few days’ time.”

Undeterred, Stephen kept up an interest in steam railways and as he grew up he became actively involved with steam preservation centres.

So he set his crime novels on the former Great Central Railway, which ran from Marylebone to Brackley, Banbury, Woodford Halse and points north to Rugby, Leicester, Manchester and Liverpool.

The stories’ central characters, Det Insp Charles Vignoles and his sidekick Sgt John Trinder (who has a hobby of collecting 78 rpm records of popular and dance band music of the 1940s and 1950s), work for the fictious “railway crime detection department”.

Originally Stephen planned to write just five novels beginning in 1946 and covering a year at a time so that a line of volumes on a bookshelf would have consecutive dates on their spines.

However, since the first novel Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, the series has been — forgive the pun — steaming ahead and the latest and fourth outing, The Marylebone Murders, has been his biggest seller so far.

“One reason is because the title has an attractive alliteration and the name Marylebone seeks to appeal like Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes and the Bakerloo underground line,” said Stephen.

While his novels are sold through bookshops and Amazon, he has also successfuly sold at railway preservation centres like Didcot and the Severn Valley Railway line at Kidderminster and Bridgnorth.

“The crime book buyer at Waterstone’s in Glasgow has also helped by promoting my books, so much so that his opposite number in Edinburgh has taken an interest too,” said Stephen.

So now he is going to extend the series until 1968 and is confident he will find topical references for successive tales. In 1951 there was the Festival of Britain, for example. Earlier novels have featured the 1947 big freeze (The Murder of Crows) and the 1948 ‘austerity Olympics’ at Wembley and also the Cold War in The Torn Curtain.

“As well as looking forward, I am also thinking about writing what are called prequels on the career of Det Insp Vignoles when he was a sergeant in the pre-war period,” said Stephen.

If the success of the current series is anything to go by, the prequels should do well.

Stephen admits his novels have been produced through what was called the “vanity publishing” system, but believes perceptions on this route to bookshelves are changing.

“The Internet and sellers like Amazon have made a big difference. If you have a British Library ISBN number then sellers and the main distributors will handle the books. Ten years ago, people self-published volumes of verse and memoirs that were of little interest to other people, but all that has changed now,” he said.

Stephen’s novels are the result of what he calls a ‘two-man, one-woman show’. He writes and takes photographs, a friend designs the covers and the one woman is the proprietor of a publisher in the East Sussex seaside resort of Hastings, who publishes what she regards as worthwhile books.

The Inspector Vignoles series is published by Hastings Press.