At the close of the twentieth century, it was possible to buy a short thriller or detective story from vending machines in Paris railway and underground stations. A spokeswoman for the publisher, Éditions de la Voûte, said in early 1997: ‘The idea is just a rethink of the success of station and airport novels. Since commuter journeys tend to be short, we decided that none of our books should take more than one hour to read.’ The novel on offer was changed every week, alternating between a new book and a reprint. The first offering in the Metro-Police series, as it was called, was Gérard Delteil’s Le Nouveau Crime de L’Orient Express, a new version of Agatha Christie’s famous train-crime novel.

Walter Benjamin noted the elective affinity between the railway journey and detective fiction in an article, published in 1930, entitled ‘Kriminalromane, auf Reisen’ [‘Detective Novels, on Journeys’]. In this short piece Benjamin (who, like a number of the theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, was fascinated by detective fiction and indeed wrote a synopsis of a detective novel) observed that railway travellers prefer to buy their reading material from station bookstalls, opting for the contingency of what they find there rather than for the certainties of what they might bring from home: