Thorpe Hazell, the railway detective, investigates a baffling mystery concerning a goods truck which vanished from the middle of a moving train, while the carriages on either side remained in place. The valuable artwork on board the truck provides a clear motive for theft, but how on earth was it done?
A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.
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The Rev. Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch (1868-1933) was Church of England clergyman, who during his career served as Chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford and later became Rural Dean of Aylesbury. He is best remembered today for a series of rural crime novels which he published in the 1920s and early 30s, with titles such as 'Murder at the Pageant', 'Shot on the Downs' and 'Murder at the College'. However, much earlier in his career, while he was still a curate, he wrote a series of detective mysteries for magazine publication, which appeared in numerous periodicals in the 1890s and into the first decade of the 20th century. He invented the character of Thorpe Hazell, who is a specialist in railways, and crime committed in and around trains.
Hazell is an eccentric character; in addition to his fascination with trains and the British railway network, he's also an amateur photographer, a keen collector of antiquarian and rare books, and a hypochondriac with firm views on diet and fitness. He is (relatively unusually for the era) a vegetarian, and follows his own strict dietary regime (in one story he is described as a "faddist" who "carries vegetarianism to an extreme") and "physical culture", with special digestive exercises which bemuse and confuse his clients and associates alike.
'Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture' first appeared in the October 1905 edition of The Royal Magazine (issue No.84). It was subsequently published in book form along with several other stories featuring Thorpe Hazell, under the title 'Thrilling Stories of the Railway', in 1912.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.
28 авг 2024
