The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery (1975) by Michael Crichton is a fictionalized account of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855. It details the actions of criminal mastermind Edward Pierce and his co-conspirators as they plan and execute the heist of £12,000 of gold from a train in London. This historical thriller analyzes Victorian beliefs about crime in the context of a rapidly changing society overwhelmed by industrialization. Historically, Pierce’s successful heist shocked a nation that believed technological progress to be the harbinger of accelerated moral progress.

Michael Crichton is highly celebrated for the depth of research invested in each of his many novels. He has also written a number of other historical thrillers, including Eaters of the Dead (1976) and Timeline (1999), in addition to science fiction classics such as Jurassic Park (1990) and Prey (2002). The Great Train Robbery was made into a film directed by Crichton and starring Sean Connery as Pierce.

This guide refers to the 1995 Arrow Books Limited paperback edition.

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain descriptions of pedophilia. The source material also makes use of racial slurs, which this guide obscures.

Plot Summary

The Great Train Robbery begins with a discussion of crime and technological progress in Victorian England, then shifts to a description of the criminal mastermind, Edward Pierce, who watches from afar as a young man is thrown from a luggage car and killed. Later, Pierce meets with the expert “screwsman” (lockpicker), Richard Agar, who agrees to help him with a job. Pierce then talks to his friend Mr. Henry Fowler, an employee of the bank Huddleston & Bradford. Fowler is responsible for the security measures that protect shipments of gold designated to pay for soldiers in the Crimean War. Fowler reveals to Pierce that four separate keys are required to open the safes that hold the gold: one held by Mr. Trent of the bank, one held by Mr. Fowler himself, and two held in the train manager’s office at London Bridge Station. Pierce sets about obtaining the four keys.

Pierce hires Clean Willy as a “snakesman” (a young boy good at climbing through small places), arranging for the boy to break out of prison. He then makes contact with Mr. Trent and begins to court Trent’s daughter, Elizabeth, to learn where Mr. Trent keeps his key. Elizabeth eventually reveals to Pierce that the key is kept in the cellar of the Trent residence. Pierce and Agar break into the house and make a wax copy of the key. In pursuit of the second key, Pierce arranges for Mr. Fowler to have sex with an underage girl. While Fowler is distracted, Agar copies his key. Finally, the team breaks into the train manager’s office, and Agar copies both of the keys held there. Pierce then makes contact with a train guard named Burgess and pays him to look the other way while his team pulls off the heist. He also places an order for a large amount of lead shot.

The team does a practice run to ensure that their plan is sound. Agar poses as the handler of a leopard that is loaded into the luggage car of the train. While Burgess looks the other way, Agar uses the keys to open the gold safes, verifying that the keys are functional. However, their plans to pull off the real heist are put on hold when Clean Willy, the snakesman, informs on them. To make matters worse, the shipments are delayed when the czar of Russia dies, and the security measures on the train are changed after a case of wine is believed to have been stolen.

Finally, on May 22, 1855, the team executes the heist. Agar is disguised as a corpse, placed in a coffin, and loaded into the luggage car. Burgess, the guard, lets Agar out so that he can open the safes. Meanwhile, Pierce uses mountain-climbing equipment to climb out of the window of a passenger car, hang off the side of the train to unlock the luggage car padlock, and then climb into the luggage car. There, Agar and Pierce remove the gold from the safes and replace it with the lead shot from their checked bags. They then throw their gold-filled bags off the train, where Pierce’s getaway driver collects them. Finally, Pierce climbs back to the passenger car, and Agar returns to the coffin.

Soon after the heist, authorities realize that the gold is missing, but the trail goes cold as French and British authorities blame each other for the theft. A few months later, Agar’s lover is arrested for stealing and tells the police that Agar is now in prison for forging notes. Under pressure from the police, Agar admits to his role in the heist, and his confession leads to the arrest of Pierce and Burgess. At the trial, Pierce is unremorseful. He is convicted of the crime, but during his transport to prison, his lover Miriam slips him a handcuff key and his getaway driver knocks out the prison transport guards, allowing Pierce to escape. They are never seen again, and the gold is never recovered.