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The Doomsday Carrier
The plot involves Charlie, a laboratory chimpanze, who while incubating a devestating plague bacillus, effects his escape from the Ministry of Defense's Biological Research station where he resides. Now alight in the idyllic Wessex countryside an all out--though decidedly discreet- search is launched before a deadly time bomb goes off amongst an unsuspecting populace. A wonderfully droll anti-war, anti-government screed, not Orwell but entertaining never the less.
189 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Victor Canning
165 books60 followersVictor Canning was a prolific writer of novels and thrillers who flourished in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, but whose reputation has faded since his death in 1986. He was personally reticent, writing no memoirs and giving relatively few newspaper interviews.
Canning was born in Plymouth, Devon, the eldest child of a coach builder, Fred Canning, and his wife May, née Goold. During World War I his father served as an ambulance driver in France and Flanders, while he with his two sisters went to live in the village of Calstock ten miles north of Plymouth, where his uncle Cecil Goold worked for the railways and later became station master. After the war the family returned to Plymouth. In the mid 1920s they moved to Oxford where his father had found work, and Victor attended the Oxford Central School. Here he was encouraged to stay on at school and go to university by a classical scholar, Dr. Henderson, but the family could not afford it and instead Victor went to work as a clerk in the education office at age 16.
Within three years he had started selling short stories to boys’ magazines and in 1934, his first novel. Mr. Finchley Discovers his England, was accepted by Hodder and Stoughton and became a runaway best seller. He gave up his job and started writing full time, producing thirteen more novels in the next six years under three different names. Lord Rothermere engaged him to write for the Daily Mail, and a number of his travel articles for the Daily Mail were collected as a book with illustrations by Leslie Stead under the title Everyman's England in 1936. He also continued to write short stories.
He married Phyllis McEwen in 1935, a girl from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare. They had three daughters, Lindel born in 1939, Hilary born in 1940, and Virginia who was born in 1942, but died in infancy.
In 1940 he enlisted in the Army, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery in Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales, where he trained alongside his friend Eric Ambler. Both were commissioned as second lieutenants in 1941. Canning worked in anti-aircraft batteries in the south of England until early 1943, when he was sent to North Africa and took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaigns. At the end of the war he was assigned to an Anglo-American unit doing experimental work with radar range-finding. It was top secret work but nothing to do with espionage, though Canning never discouraged the assumption of publishers and reviewers that his espionage stories were partly based on experience. He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of major.
He resumed writing with The Chasm (1947), a novel about identifying a Nazi collaborator who has hidden himself in a remote Italian village. A film of this was planned but never finished. Canning’s next book, Panther’s Moon, was filmed as Spy Hunt, and from now on Canning was established as someone who could write a book a year in the suspense genre, have them reliably appear in book club and paperback editions on both sides of the Atlantic, be translated into the main European languages, and in many cases get filmed. He himself spent a year in Hollywood working on scripts for movies of his own books and on TV shows. The money earned from the film of The Golden Salamander (filmed with Trevor Howard) meant that Canning could buy a substantial country house with some land in Kent, Marle Place, where he lived for nearly twenty years and where his daughter continues to live now. From the mid 1950s onwards his books became more conventional, full of exotic settings, stirring action sequences and stock characters. In 1965 he began a series of four books featuring a private detective called Rex Carver, and these were among his most successful in sales terms.
He died in 1986.
Canning was born in Plymouth, Devon, the eldest child of a coach builder, Fred Canning, and his wife May, née Goold. During World War I his father served as an ambulance driver in France and Flanders, while he with his two sisters went to live in the village of Calstock ten miles north of Plymouth, where his uncle Cecil Goold worked for the railways and later became station master. After the war the family returned to Plymouth. In the mid 1920s they moved to Oxford where his father had found work, and Victor attended the Oxford Central School. Here he was encouraged to stay on at school and go to university by a classical scholar, Dr. Henderson, but the family could not afford it and instead Victor went to work as a clerk in the education office at age 16.
Within three years he had started selling short stories to boys’ magazines and in 1934, his first novel. Mr. Finchley Discovers his England, was accepted by Hodder and Stoughton and became a runaway best seller. He gave up his job and started writing full time, producing thirteen more novels in the next six years under three different names. Lord Rothermere engaged him to write for the Daily Mail, and a number of his travel articles for the Daily Mail were collected as a book with illustrations by Leslie Stead under the title Everyman's England in 1936. He also continued to write short stories.
He married Phyllis McEwen in 1935, a girl from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare. They had three daughters, Lindel born in 1939, Hilary born in 1940, and Virginia who was born in 1942, but died in infancy.
In 1940 he enlisted in the Army, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery in Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales, where he trained alongside his friend Eric Ambler. Both were commissioned as second lieutenants in 1941. Canning worked in anti-aircraft batteries in the south of England until early 1943, when he was sent to North Africa and took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaigns. At the end of the war he was assigned to an Anglo-American unit doing experimental work with radar range-finding. It was top secret work but nothing to do with espionage, though Canning never discouraged the assumption of publishers and reviewers that his espionage stories were partly based on experience. He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of major.
He resumed writing with The Chasm (1947), a novel about identifying a Nazi collaborator who has hidden himself in a remote Italian village. A film of this was planned but never finished. Canning’s next book, Panther’s Moon, was filmed as Spy Hunt, and from now on Canning was established as someone who could write a book a year in the suspense genre, have them reliably appear in book club and paperback editions on both sides of the Atlantic, be translated into the main European languages, and in many cases get filmed. He himself spent a year in Hollywood working on scripts for movies of his own books and on TV shows. The money earned from the film of The Golden Salamander (filmed with Trevor Howard) meant that Canning could buy a substantial country house with some land in Kent, Marle Place, where he lived for nearly twenty years and where his daughter continues to live now. From the mid 1950s onwards his books became more conventional, full of exotic settings, stirring action sequences and stock characters. In 1965 he began a series of four books featuring a private detective called Rex Carver, and these were among his most successful in sales terms.
He died in 1986.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 19, 2026
sort of peters out into nothing- with some eye-rollingly Christian overtones- but it's a fun time, *most* of the time. I appreciate that the author obviously seemed to have his own interest in zoology with careful descriptions of the chimp's behaviour and frequent name-drops of bird and plant species.
April 17, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in February 1999.
The Doomsday Carrier is a late seventies thriller about an unpleasant subject, one which has perhaps even more resonance now than it did twenty years ago. It is about animal experimentation and biological warfare. Charlie is a chimpanzee at a British research station who has just been injected with a modified plague bacillus, one which makes him a highly infections carrier after a three week incubation period. But then he escapes into the English countryside; he must be caught before he becomes infectious and millions die.
Canning is clearly anti both animal experimentation and biological weapons , and cynical about the purposes which governments publicly ascribe to such establishments as the fictional Fadledean. For someone writing before the eighties' rumours that AIDS was the result of a similar biological warfare experiment gone wrong, his writing is pretty prophetic. In particular, his description of the government attitude behind their successive announcements about Charlie, as he remains at large with the deadline rapidly approaching, is very convincing.
The Doomsday Carrier keeps itself well within the limits of the single-issue thriller, not going in for much in the way of characterisation (except for the gentle personality of Charlie) or plot development. By limiting his ambitions, Canning has created the novel of a craftsman rather than an artist - very competently achieved, but not particularly stunning or original.
The Doomsday Carrier is a late seventies thriller about an unpleasant subject, one which has perhaps even more resonance now than it did twenty years ago. It is about animal experimentation and biological warfare. Charlie is a chimpanzee at a British research station who has just been injected with a modified plague bacillus, one which makes him a highly infections carrier after a three week incubation period. But then he escapes into the English countryside; he must be caught before he becomes infectious and millions die.
Canning is clearly anti both animal experimentation and biological weapons , and cynical about the purposes which governments publicly ascribe to such establishments as the fictional Fadledean. For someone writing before the eighties' rumours that AIDS was the result of a similar biological warfare experiment gone wrong, his writing is pretty prophetic. In particular, his description of the government attitude behind their successive announcements about Charlie, as he remains at large with the deadline rapidly approaching, is very convincing.
The Doomsday Carrier keeps itself well within the limits of the single-issue thriller, not going in for much in the way of characterisation (except for the gentle personality of Charlie) or plot development. By limiting his ambitions, Canning has created the novel of a craftsman rather than an artist - very competently achieved, but not particularly stunning or original.
July 27, 2019
Highly readable thriller from an author who changed styles dramatically in the late 1960s and started writing books about the hard men who do the secret, dirty deeds that allow us to sleep safety on our beds at night. Usually they have tough names like Maserfield or Grimster: this one is Rimster who realises he is losing his edge and being gently given less onerous work prior to retirement. He is asked to look after a research assistant from a Porton Down-like biological and chemical warfare research establishment who has allowed a chimpanzee to escape hours after it has been given the plague meaning it will become infectious to people in 21 days - hence the title. Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration as Yersinia pestis is sensitive to streptomycin but this McGuffin allows an exploration of how governments handle potential threats without alarming the pubic unnecessarily. There's plenty of time to discuss the similarities of those who murder our enemies manually or from a distance using biological terror and it shows how difficult it could be in the 1970s to track and catch even a tame chimp who isn't even trying to avoid capture. These days I suspect he'd have an implant and GPS would locate him quickly.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews