Victor L Whitechurch is not now a name that resonates. Perhaps he should have admitted that his middle initial stood for Lorenzo. That, at least, might have made him more memorable. As a clergyman, the limits of his ambition were reached in 1918 when he became rural dean of Aylesbury. As an author, he seems almost deliberately bland, especially when writing autobiographically. Published in 1909, Concerning Himself: The Story of an Ordinary Man is a sort of Anglican Bildungsroman that spends page after page in descriptions of his youth ‘floundering about in my dull little world’.

Even when writing crime fiction, Whitechurch was keen to stress how unremarkable his narratives were. ‘It is, perhaps, unfortunate that the “Detective Story” is so often confused with the “Thriller”,’ he wrote, ‘for it does not at all follow that they are one and the same thing. A “Thriller” by its very name, is a story full of exciting incidents.’ His books, by contrast, were never intended to excite.

Yet there are some advantages to the unexciting. A steady focus on the quotidian can mark out an author whose peers are fixated on the spectacular. Whitechurch was said to be the first author in the field so punctilious that he confirmed his descriptions of police procedure with Scotland Yard.