Uploaded August 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Amateur detective and railway enthusiast Thorpe Hazell is drawn into the world of international diplomacy, when the British Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs calls upon him to help recover a stolen document from a train en route for the continent...
Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:
* Occasional/one-off support via Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/bitesizedaudio
* Monthly support on Patreon: patreon.com/bitesizedaudio
* Visit my Bandcamp page to hear more of my performances of classic stories, and you can purchase and download high quality audio files to listen offline: bitesizedaudio.bandcamp.com
* Become a Bitesized Audio Classics member on YouTube, from $1 per month with various benefits:
youtube.com/c/BitesizedAudioClassics/join
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:59 The Story begins
00:29:03 Credits, thanks and further listening
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 solves mysteries and crimes committed in and around trains.
Hazell is an eccentric character; in addition to his fascination with trains and the British railway network, he's a keen collector of antiquarian and rare books and 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.
'The Affair of the German Dispatch Box' first appeared in the December 1905 edition of The Royal Magazine. 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 2022.
Amateur detective and railway enthusiast Thorpe Hazell is drawn into the world of international diplomacy, when the British Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs calls upon him to help recover a stolen document from a train en route for the continent...
Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:
* Occasional/one-off support via Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/bitesizedaudio
* Monthly support on Patreon: patreon.com/bitesizedaudio
* Visit my Bandcamp page to hear more of my performances of classic stories, and you can purchase and download high quality audio files to listen offline: bitesizedaudio.bandcamp.com
* Become a Bitesized Audio Classics member on YouTube, from $1 per month with various benefits:
youtube.com/c/BitesizedAudioClassics/join
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:59 The Story begins
00:29:03 Credits, thanks and further listening
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 solves mysteries and crimes committed in and around trains.
Hazell is an eccentric character; in addition to his fascination with trains and the British railway network, he's a keen collector of antiquarian and rare books and 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.
'The Affair of the German Dispatch Box' first appeared in the December 1905 edition of The Royal Magazine. 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 2022.
