A teacher at an exclusive private school seeks the assistance of Thorpe Hazell, the "railway detective", after one of his pupils disappears on board a moving express train, apparently the victim of a gang of kidnappers...
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 a 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 at the turn of the 20th century. He invented the character of Thorpe Hazell, who is a specialist in the British railway network, and crime committed in and around trains. Hazell is also notable for his unusual diet and health regimes - he is (relatively unusually for the era) a vegetarian, and several of the stories reference this, as well as his "digestive exercises" and other oddities which amuse and perplex his clients and associates. He is also a book collector and expert on book editions and bindings. The character was apparently conceived by Whitechurch as a deliberate contrast and antidote to Sherlock Holmes.
'The Affair of the Corridor Express' first appeared in Pearson's Weekly, a London periodical, on 22nd April 1899, where it is listed as a "Humphrey Judd" story. It was subsequently revised to feature Thorpe Hazell and appeared in The Royal Magazine in September 1905 (this is the version of the story which is read here). It was later 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.
13 сен 2024
