Victor Bridges

Victor George de Freyne Bridges (1878-1972) was born in Clifton, Bristol, England, and educated at Haileybury. A versatile writer, he was also so prolific that his bibliography is uncertain, details varying from source to source. In addition to novels, he turned out books of verse, short stories, and plays, as well as a book called Camping Out for Boy Scouts and Others, which appeared in 1910.

That interest in scouting and camping out hints at a boyish enthusiasm for adventure, and Bridges liked to describe his thrillers as "adventure stories". According to The Times, he started work on The Man from Nowhere, his first novel, in 1911 to beguile an illness. Another Man's Shoes appeared in 1913, and after that he was published for fifteen years by Mills and Boon, who were not at that time stereotyped as publishers of romantic fiction for women. A Rogue by Compulsion, subtitled An Affair of the Secret Service, typifies an interest in stories about espionage which continued throughout his career.

Bridges enjoyed a lengthy literary career, and lived to the age of 94. When he died, his work was recalled by an obituarist in The Times as "graced by a pleasing sense of style.... Much that Bridges wrote was cast in a conventional mould and intended for unexacting eyes, but he always remained a literary craftsman, who could spring surprises with his humour and sense of suspense." It is not a bad epitaph.

[Source: Introduction to Trouble on the Thames by Martin Edwards (www.martinedwardsbooks.com)]