Great Train Robbery (1963) Head of the Buckinghamshire Crime Investigation Department (CID) was born on 29 September 1909 and died on 28 November 2005, aged 96 years. He retired on the last day of the trial after the verdicts were handed down (at the then compulsory retirement age of 55). This allowed him (with Ronald Payne of "The Sunday Telegraph", who was involved in the paper's coverage of the case) to be the first of the investigators to write a book "The Train Robbers" on the robbery investigation in 1964. In the book he expressed some frustration with the Flying Squad although he mostly
The Great Train Robbery (novel) by a horse he had been flogging. The final line of the novel reads, "The money from the Great Train Robbery was never recovered." Crichton became aware of the story when lecturing at Cambridge University. He later read the transcripts of the court trial and started researching the historical period. The story is a fictionalised representation of the historical events that happened, although the setting can be considered quite accurate. The characters' names are changed in the novel; for example, the main protagonist William Pierce is changed to Edward Pierce and Edward Agar to Robert Agar. Crichton stated that he