Victor L Whitechurch
Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch was born on 12 March 1868, the son of an East Anglian clergyman. He was educated at Chichester Grammar School and then at the Theological College in the same city, whence he was ordained deacon at the age of twenty-three. Various curacies mainly in the Thames Valley took him around the districts until 1904, when he attained his own parish at Blewbury near Didcot
For a man in his thirties, just-promoted, not long married and newly a father, his output was prodigious. Already Whitechurch had published one full-length detective novel, and in the nineteenth century he had begun to produce short stories for markets ranging from The Strand to the newly founded Railway Magazine and a humorous series for the Boy's Own Paper; but in the decade after 1904, his production ran to a book a year as well as many more short stories. The books, furthermore, covered a spectrum including crime, clerical lore, travelogue, locale histories, and autobiography.
