UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AUTHOR · DETECTIVE AND MYSTERY
Victor L. Whitechurch
Also known as: Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch, V. L. Whitechurch
> Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch was a British author born in 1868. He became first a curate and then, in 1904, vicar of St Michael’s church in Blewbury, Berkshire. In his later career he was Chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford and, from 1918, Rural Dean of Aylesbury. His first novel, The Course of Justice, was published in 1903, and a prolific writing career followed. Whitechurch’s detective Thorpe Hazell was a vegetarian railway detective, written as an antidote to Sherlock Holmes. Stories featuring Hazell were featured in Strand Magazine, Railway Magazine, and Pearson’s and Harmsworth’s magazines.
Most acclaimed
Stories of the railway
Canon Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch was a celebrated crime writer and an expert railway enthusiast. He wrote a large number of crime short stories set in the golden age of Britain's railways, and a selection of the best of these was published in 1912 as Thrilling Stories of the Railway. A faultless constructor of mystery plots, Whitechurch was also one of the first writers to make a proper study of police procedure; the hero of many of these stories, Thorpe Hazell, was described by Ellery Queen as the first 'speciality' detective, and was greatly admired by Dorothy L. Sayers. All the stories in this collection, many of which are tales of adventure and action as much as of detection, are linked to the railway, and have titles redolent of the Edwardian period, such as 'The Affair of the Corridor Express', 'The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box' and 'How the Bishop Kept his Appointment'.
The floating admiral
"In 1931, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and ten other crime writers from the newly-formed ‘Detection Club’ collaborated in publishing a unique crime novel. In a literary game of consequences, each author would write one chapter, leaving G.K. Chesterton to write a typically paradoxical prologue and Anthony Berkeley to tie up all the loose ends. In addition, each of the authors provided their own solution in a sealed envelope, all of which appeared at the end of the book, with Agatha Christie’s ingenious conclusion acknowledged at the time to be ‘enough to make the book worth buying on its own’. The authors of this novel are: G. K. Chesterton, Canon Victor Whitechurch, G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley."-- Publisher description.
The Canon in residence
1913
The Reverend John Smith, Vicar of Market Shapborough, has an unsettling encounter in Switzerland with a man who replaces the Vicar's clothes with his own and vanishes. Forced to complete his vacation without his clerical garb, Vicar Smith's outlook on his fellow man is greatly affected, such that when he returns and accepts a post as Canon at Frattenbury Cathedral, the conservative community is shocked by his attitudes and behavior.