Whitechurch, Victor L - Thrilling Stories of the Railway

Thrilling Stories of the Railway (collected 1912) contains nine stories about Railway Detective Thorpe Hazell, and 6 other non series tales. Hazell is a wealthy amateur, vegetarian, and health nut, who studies railways as a hobby. Hazell's vegetarian diet was intended by his author to be both humorous and grotesque, and I took it so when I first read these tales years ago; but today many people are moving toward a vegetarian diet for health reasons, and what Hazell eats in the stories seems more and more normal all the time.

Whitechurch's early fiction is hard to classify. It mixes railroad technology with spy, mystery and adventure elements, and seems designed to please railroad enthusiasts as much as mystery fans. It also oscillates between impossible crime and technology based fiction, with stops along the way for just plain mystery writing. The tone is far removed from Meade and Eustace, or Arthur B. Reeve, and one hesitates to include it in the "scientific detection" tradition. Whitechurch's tone is light. There is a sense of "artificiality" about his plot elements, such as the mystery, crime, or espionage stories. They seem to be constructed as a support element for his ingenious railroading ideas. Despite this, they are often very good pieces of storytelling in their own right.

Several of the best Hazell tales deal with thefts from the railways. These include "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture", "The Affair of the German Dispatch Box", and "The Stolen Necklace". These stories are often impossible crime tales, or border on them. There is also a good natured adventure story among the Hazell tales, "How the Bishop Kept His Appointment". A non-mystery, it is linked to the often humorous "clerical" fiction that Whitechurch also wrote.

The 6 non Hazell stories are a mixed bag. Mostly they are best classified as "ingenious tales about railroads", not mystery fiction, strictly speaking (they largely do not contain puzzles or mysterious situations to be solved). Yet their clever plotting, and crime or spy backgrounds, will commend them to mystery fans. Two of them deal with the technology of railway signaling: "How the Express Was Saved" and "Winning the Race"; these are among the most science oriented of Whitechurch's works. "Winning the Race" is the better story, but it is recommended to read the earlier tale first, as it helps set up the technological background of this otherwise abstruse topic; this is a subject about which I knew nothing before reading Whitechurch. "The Strikers" and the Hazell tale "The Adventure of the Pilot Engine" have affinities to these tales, but are much weaker works (and indeed seem to be variations of each other, to boot). "A Case of Signaling", despite its title, is not about the technology of railway signaling. This tale is unusual among British mystery fiction in that its clever heroine and hero are members of the lower classes. It is a very sweet piece of storytelling, and shows Whitechurch's gift of humor.

A spy name Koravitch is a minor character in "The Adventure of the Pilot Engine". Whitechurch would go on to write a whole book of spy adventures about Captain Ivan Koravitch. I have only read one story in a Sayers anthology from this rare book, and don't know if it is the same character. The tale is a nicely told account of tailing a suspect on a train; it has no puzzle element, but it does include some good train atmosphere.

There is some evidence that Whitechurch's short tales appeared in magazines long before book publication. Thorpe Hazell apparently appeared in the Strand magazine in 1898-1899, although it is unclear whether these are the same Hazell stories collected in Railway in 1912. Similarly, Ivan Koravitch was collected in book form in 1925, but some Koravitch stories appeared in The Railway Magazine in 1897. This means Whitechurch's stories appeared very early in the Impossible Crimes movement, and very early in the Technological Detective movement too. Both genres had already been piloted by L.T. Meade in this era, but just barely: the medical stories in "The Diary of a Doctor" appearing in 1894, and the impossible crimes of "The Master of Mystery" in book form in 1898. The spy elements in Whitechurch's tale were also fairly brand new in this era. Whitechurch may not have been the originator of these movements, but he was an early contributor, someone who helped turn them into actual flourishing literary trends. It also helps explain a certain casualness or tentativeness in his approach. Hazell is presented as an expert on railways. But he is not depicted as the Most Advanced Scientific Genius of Our Time, the way Dr. Thorndyke or Craig Kennedy are. (OK, so I'm exaggerating a little!) Similarly, the frequently impossible nature of Whitechurch's crimes is not underlined by fake supernatural atmosphere, or an elaborately surrealistic mise-en-scène.

Whitechurch's contribution to the Detection Club round robin The Floating Admiral (1931) is also vigorously told. It concentrates on travel by boat up and down a river, in the same way his earlier fiction focused on railways. Two boys, appearing at the end of the chapter, speak for their author when they celebrate the chance to have a river mystery adventure.

Mike Grost