Austin Lee was a maverick clergyman, a thorn in the side of the Church of England, of which he outspokenly despaired.  He was a staunch socialist, pacifist and a colourful and stirring preacher, and wrote widely and controversially in the press on politics and social issues.
    Born in Keighley in 1904 and educated at Cambridge, Wells and Oxford, he moved frequently from parish to parish, mainly in Lincolnshire and London, and was also briefly a naval chaplain in the 1930s. 
    In 1955 he turned his talents to fiction, creating Miss Flora Hogg, a former school mistress turned Private Investigator, and wrote other detective novels under the pseudonyms John Austwick and Julian Callender.
    He never married, and died in 1965.