Author Description

‘A straight detective story… the reader has a fair chance to beat the detective to the solution’ NEW YORK TIMES This 2022 Spitfire Publishers ebook and paperback edition represent the first republication of this classic of the ‘Golden Age of Crime’ in almost a century Victor L. Whitechurch was one of the founding members of the Detection Club The crime scene is Marsh Quay, a small fishing village in the South Downs. Wealthy amateur explorer, Reginald Templeton, recently returned from South Africa, is found murdered on his yacht, stabbed in the heart. Who was Templeton visiting the night before his death? Why did Harold Grayson, an artist lodging at the Mariners Rest in Marsh Quay, leave so soon after the body was discovered? Will county Detective-Sergeant Colson be able to sift through the maze of conflicting clues without calling in Scotland Yard? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch was a Church of England clergyman and noted English crime novelist. He was born in Norham, Northumberland in 1868 and trained to be a vicar at Chichester Theological College and Durham University. Relatively late in life Victor became rather infatuated with the detective novel and between 1912 and 1932 wrote eight, many centred around the fictional South Downs cathedral and university city of Frattenbury, and often featuring members of the clergy. He was one of the founding members of the Detection Club and contributed to the Club’s collaborative novel The Floating Admiral, published in 1931, which also featured Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton. His most famous literary creation however, is amateur railway detective Thorpe Hazelle, a wealthy, vegetarian fitness fanatic who starred in Thrilling Stories of the Railway (recently dramatized for BBC Radio 4 and featuring Benedict Cumberbatch). Ellery Queen described Hazelle as ‘the first of the speciality detectives’. Another was the young detective clergyman, Reverend Harry Westerham,