On May 15, 1855, the crime of the century was perpetrated by turning lead into gold. Enacting a highly sophisticated bait and switch, Edward Agar, William Pierce, Jeremy Forsyth, and James Burgess were able to steal £12,000 in gold which was being transported from London to Paris. This highly publicized crime, the Great Gold Robbery, and ensuing trial became great Victorian fodder for tabloids and social gossip. About one hundred years later, Michael Robbins wrote a feature piece in the May, 1955 issue of The Railway Magazine. Twenty years later, Michael Crichton took this sensational story and turned it into a stunning piece of historical fiction. The Great Train Robbery is highly fictionalized but close enough to the truth to be spellbinding.
I was introduced to Michael Crichton’s books in middle school. Long before Jurassic Park hit the big screens, I first forayed into Crichton’s writing with The Terminal Man and The Andromeda Strain. These two books, read in rapid succession, whetted my appetite for medical-based science fiction. They presented intellectual puzzles for me to solve with the assistance of the narrator, and made me genuinely interested in technology, medicine, and cerebral fiction. As intriguing as Crichton’s writing was, it was often unsatisfying because of his one-dimensional characters and what almost seemed to be a compulsive need to throw in something sexual and scandalous. Compared to C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, which I would not discover for almost two more decades, or Carl Sagan’s Contact, Crichton pales in comparison. That said, his work is not without value.
What Crichton seems to excel at is his ability to recognize and understand complex technical challenges that can be massaged into interesting stories. The question which propels Andromeda Strain forward is riveting. The moral challenges in The Terminal Man are frightening in their possibilities. It is this ability to know a good story when he sees one and harness the technical complexities as rising action that make The Great Train Robbery a truly exciting story to read. The real life facts are awesome indeed. Presuming that his readers might have some familiarity with the true story, he shifts the role of criminal mastermind from the real main character to a lesser character and re-dresses them both with more intrigue. Frankly, it is a very smart move. Instead of having to develop a plot, all he has to do is retell the story in a way that people will want to read. And, he did.