Unlike Arthur Conan Doyle, whose mysteries resulted at least in part from a dearth of patients to support his intended medical career, Canon Victor L. Whitechurch wrote fiction while filling increasingly responsible positions in the Church of England. He was ordained in 1891, just as Conan Doyle was enjoying the first successes of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Whitechurch's mysteries, "merely detective yarns," as he called them, are few but include the very rare collection Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912). Published just one year after the appearance of G. K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), these stories show a decided kinship with the Holmes adventures while simultaneously defining a world of their own. Whitechurch wrote a relatively small body of work in which the contemporary conventions of the mystery story are expanded with skill and sympathy. He was one of the first writers to submit manuscripts to Scotland Yard...