Victor Whitechurch

• Born: March 12, 1868
• Birthplace: Norham, England
• Died: May 25, 1933
• Place of death: England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; police procedural

Contribution

Victor Whitechurch’s crime novels were written when England was not at war and when the prospect of war seemed remote. During this welcomed peace, the detective story form no doubt provided amusement and stimulation for Whitechurch as well as for his readers, yet his bucolic settings and the sturdy country folk about whom he wrote with such grace seemed hardly suited to violent crime. Perhaps having no taste for tales of brutal injury, he chose to dispense with the horror in the first chapter, in which he always revealed the crime’s occurrence. From that point he could proceed, in the remaining chapters, with the less emotional work of bringing the guilty to justice.

Whitechurch’s method of plot development, confided to the reader in the foreword of the novel, no doubt made writing each all the more pleasurable and challenging. By revealing his method, Whitechurch gives the reader a special participation in the work and a more intense interest in each turn of events.

Biography

Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch was born in Norham, England, on March 12, 1868. His parents were William Frederick Whitechurch and Matilda Cornwall Whitechurch. As a youth, he attended Chichester Grammar School in Sussex, England, and received his licentiate of theology from Chichester Theological College, an affiliate of Durham University. In October, 1896, he was married to Florence Partridge. They had one daughter.

Whitechurch spent most of his life in rural England, primarily in towns and villages to the west and northwest of London in the counties of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. As an Anglican churchman, he served with varying church titles, first as curate (parson), then as senior curate, vicar, dean, and rector, in various country parishes. Late in his life, he was named Honorary Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. His home was Stone Vicarage, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England. Whitechurch died May 25, 1933.

Analysis

Who is better qualified than a rural Anglican churchman to write novels of crime detection whose settings are quaint English villages? There surely can be no one with more experience in the observation of behavior and with more intimate knowledge of the secret pain of his contemporaries than the sympathetic parson of a country church. During the latter part of his thirty-year avocation as a writer, Victor Whitechurch became fascinated with crime fiction. His service and experience in the church no doubt provided his imagination with abundant material for character development, and once his first crime novel was published, his work of this type soon became well accepted by readers and critics alike.

The Crime at Diana’s Pool

Whitechurch had an unusual approach to plot development, one that he was not in the least hesitant to share with his readers. In the foreword to The Crime at Diana’s Pool (1927), he confides that his method was to write the first chapter without knowing “why the crime had been committed, who had done it, or how it was done.” He set himself this task, he says, because in a true crime those in charge of investigation are in the same position and must work their way through the clues as they are uncovered or as they appear. Whitechurch suggested that after reading the first chapter, the reader might close the book and devise his own plot, then compare the result with that of the author. One can assume, however, that very few of Whitechurch’s readers would be willing to forgo the pleasure of proceeding through the novel, once begun, in favor of working out a separate plot. In the first chapter of The Crime at Diana’s Pool, the host of a summer garden party is found dead in his own pool, a knife having penetrated his green coat, which had originally been worn by a musician hired for the party. After such a beginning, one would find it difficult to put the novel aside.

Whitechurch was obviously familiar with life in English villages and thoroughly knowledgeable regarding the people of whom he wrote. Included in each novel is a police investigator who is intelligent, cautious, and conscientious. There is often a vicar, who may serve as the amateur sleuth. (In The Crime at Diana’s Pool, the vicar, through careful, reasoned study, deduces the identity of the murderer and provides the proof necessary to arrest him.) An attractive couple provides the token wearisome romance. Other characters often present are the village doctor, a lawyer or two, town tradesmen, members of the propertied class, and their gardeners and other servants (in one novel, the butler is the culprit). Men are in the positions of authority, and women stay in their places. Diana Garforth, in The Crime at Diana’s Pool, is described as follows:

Diana was four-and-twenty, essentially a type of the English country girl. She played a good game of golf and tennis, rode to hounds, drove a car, and was game for a tenmile walk over the hills when the mood took her. Added to this she was a first-rate housekeeper, and “ran” “Beechcroft” admirably. Also she was, if not exactly brilliant, a well-informed girl, and had had the advantage of being educated at a school modeled on the lines of a public school, with nothing “finicky” in its atmosphere. She was good company, frank and natural and without affectation.

By and large, all the characters are unpretentious and are described sympathetically and with humor. Their habits of life and mind would not have been atypical, surely, of those living out their lives in a small English village of the period.

After the crime is described in chapter 1, the story moves quietly and without haste. The reader is kept well abreast of the investigation as it proceeds toward the solution, which is achieved through the accumulation of evidence. Questions arise and are answered one by one, as a chain of connections is exposed. Predictably, the first and perhaps the second party arrested will not prove to be guilty, for at the time of arrest there is still too far to go in the novel. Plenty of time remains for the suspect(s) to be cleared, and the reader knows from the start the fruitlessness of pursuing a solution based on evidence incriminating those so early arrested.

Shot on the Downs

The end is not too predictable, except that the solution will be highly moral, but it is not always satisfactory to the reader. The reader of Shot on the Downs (1927) would prefer that almost any character other than the one chosen by the author would have committed the crime. The murderer is perhaps the most sympathetic and most vulnerable character in the novel, and the reader is left with a sense of loss, even though, technically, justice has been served. Whitechurch’s more typical final chapters are more satisfying: In most cases, the crime has been committed by a recent comer to the town, one whose background and character are not known and whose values prove to be not at all similar to those of the villagers.

Whitechurch takes the opportunity, when he considers it appropriate, to insert a bit of instruction into his stories. Although this practice dates his novels, it adds a certain charm, if one does not view these passages as pedantry. In The Crime at Diana’s Pool, Vicar Westerham is used as a means to give the reader insight into the professional life of a parish parson. This passage may have served also to appease Whitechurch’s own congregation, who may have found fault with the time and attention he devoted to his writing, believing that it was done at their expense:

The next morning the Vicar was busy in his study over the forthcoming fête and sale of work. He had settled down to a full morning’s work. Many people, because they only come across the parson on Sundays, imagine that his profession only entails one day per week of real work, but in this they are greatly mistaken. Often the work on a week day is much more exacting than the taking of services or preaching on Sundays. And the parson is rarely given credit for the many hours he spends in his study over a variety of matters that would puzzle many a business man.

The Floating Admiral

For The Floating Admiral (1931), Whitechurch wrote only the first of the twelve chapters. The remaining eleven, along with the introduction, prologue, and appendixes, were written by fellow members of the Detection Club. The method of construction of the novel was described by Dorothy L. Sayers in the introduction: “Each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind.” Each of the participants, who included Agatha Christie, Henry Wade, and John Rhode, was required to have a definite solution in mind and to present it, along with the manuscript for his or her assigned chapter, for publication. All the solutions (except that of Whitechurch and the author of the second chapter) are provided in an appendix to the novel. The project provided amusement for the participants and afforded them exposure among readers who might not previously have known the work of them all.

Whitechurch’s crime novels are gracefully written and are among the better mysteries of their time. His respect for the reader’s intelligence makes his novels satisfying to read, interest being heightened by his admittedly unorthodox method of plot development.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. List, with commentary, of the authors’ choices for the best or most influential examples of crime fiction. Whitechurch’s work is included and evaluated.

Cox, Michael. Introduction to Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection: An Oxford Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Relates Whitechurch’s fiction to the preceding Victorian culture from which it emerged.

Keating, H. R. F., ed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982. General overview of the conventions and practitioners of British and American crime fiction; sheds light on Whitechurch’s works.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Reads Whitechurch as emerging from and continuing the Edwardian tradition in detective fiction.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Analyzes Whitechurch’s distinctive contributions to British detective fiction between the wars.

Whitechurch, Victor. Foreword to The Crime at Diana’s Pool. New York: Duffield, 1927. The author reveals his method to his readers in this foreword, allowing them a glimpse behind the curtain before the novel has even begun.