Victor Bridges (real name Victor George de Freyne, 14 March 1878 – 29 November 1972) was a prolific English author of detective and fantasy fiction, and also a playwright and occasional poet.

Life

Born on 14 March 1878 at

Clifton, Bristol Clifton is both a suburb of Bristol, England, and the name of one of the city's thirty-five council wards. The Clifton ward also includes the areas of Cliftonwood and Hotwells. The eastern part of the suburb lies within the ward of Clifton Do ...

, Victor George de Freyne may have been connected with a propertied family in

County Sligo County Sligo ( , gle, Contae Shligigh) is a county in Ireland. It is located in the Border Region and is part of the province of Connacht. Sligo is the administrative capital and largest town in the county. Sligo County Council is the local ...

, Ireland. He was educated at

Haileybury and Imperial Service College Haileybury is a public school (English independent day and boarding school) near Hertford in England. It is a member of the Rugby Group and, though originally a major boys' public school in the Victorian era, it is now co-educational, enro ...

. He worked as a bank employee and as an actor in

repertory theatre A repertory theatre is a theatre in which a resident company presents works from a specified repertoire, usually in alternation or rotation. United Kingdom Annie Horniman founded the first modern repertory theatre in Manchester after withdrawing ...

before becoming a full-time writer. Bridges began to publish crime and mystery stories and novels regularly in 1909. He was an early signing by the new London publishing firm of

Mills & Boon Mills & Boon is a romance imprint of British publisher Harlequin UK Ltd. It was founded in 1908 by Gerald Rusgrove Mills and Charles Boon as a general publisher. The company moved towards escapist fiction for women in the 1930s. In 1971, the ...

, which was initially a light fiction publisher in a wide range of genres. Many of his stories were set in

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...

and

East Anglia East Anglia is an area in the East of England, often defined as including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles, a people whose name originated in Anglia, in ...

. He also had two volumes of poetry published. He married in 1920 Margaret Lindsay Mackay, who died in 1957. He himself died on 29 November 1972.Detectionary (in Dutch)
Retrieved 13 November 2012.
This includes a list of Bridges's books that were translated into Dutch. His work appeared in most major European languages.

Selected works

References

External links

Victor Bridges - Fantastic Fiction

Serial part of ''I Did Not Kill Osborne'' from the ''Sarasota Herald-Tribune'', 10 December 1934.
* * * 1878 births 1972 deaths 20th-century British writers Occasional poets {{UK-writer-stub