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The Kingsford mark
Dust jacket price clipped and worn, owner's inscription, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.
215 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Victor Canning
168 books62 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 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 5, 2018
Superb mystery with psychologically interesting characters, to my mind, Canning's best.
April 21, 2021
An excellent 1975 story from the dependable Mr Canning. It’s opening suggests some form of annoying romance as Carlo, a bright, brattish and rich 17 year old orphan, comes to Exmoor with his guardian (Aunty Grace - his late mother’s sister with whom he has a not altogether healthy relationship) to stay in the self-contained wing of a remote estate run by former MP and recent widower John Kingsford.
Carlo, it transpires, has a psychopathic personality disorder characterised by narcissism, secrecy and insatiable curiosity. Perceiving that John thinks him a soft city type, Carlo determines to impress his host by training for and completing a family initiation test involving a 20 mile cross country run around the borders of the estate with the aim of beating the record time, set by John. That Mr K had done the deed as a young man in a mind-boggling 2 hours 38 minutes sent me to the Landranger map for the area. What I love about Victor Canning is his use of real locations and I spent more time than is reasonable poring over large scale maps of Exmoor following the action on the ground as if by drone. By my rough calculations the run was nearer to 9 than 20 miles and therefore the times were actually rather slow even allowing for the boggy ground. I reckon I could achieve a time easily under 2 hours. Considering I jetted off to Croatia to re-enact another Canning hero’s journey across Miljet Island (see The Whip Hand) this is not totally out of the question.
Carlo starts to enjoy his winter sojourn out on the wild and windy moor, collecting a girlfriend, a motor cycle and the enmity of the Barnstaple chapter of the Hell’s Angels during his wanderings.
He also pokes his nose into John’s (very private) affairs using his expert lock-picking skills, so when John discovers a devastating secret concerning his late wife’s activities Carlo becomes very excited particularly when, through the decoded diary of a 19th century parson, we learn that he may have a close family connection to his role model.
The tension increases inexorably as John Kingsford, secretly observed by Carlo, takes the matter of family honour into his own hands.
Carlo, it transpires, has a psychopathic personality disorder characterised by narcissism, secrecy and insatiable curiosity. Perceiving that John thinks him a soft city type, Carlo determines to impress his host by training for and completing a family initiation test involving a 20 mile cross country run around the borders of the estate with the aim of beating the record time, set by John. That Mr K had done the deed as a young man in a mind-boggling 2 hours 38 minutes sent me to the Landranger map for the area. What I love about Victor Canning is his use of real locations and I spent more time than is reasonable poring over large scale maps of Exmoor following the action on the ground as if by drone. By my rough calculations the run was nearer to 9 than 20 miles and therefore the times were actually rather slow even allowing for the boggy ground. I reckon I could achieve a time easily under 2 hours. Considering I jetted off to Croatia to re-enact another Canning hero’s journey across Miljet Island (see The Whip Hand) this is not totally out of the question.
Carlo starts to enjoy his winter sojourn out on the wild and windy moor, collecting a girlfriend, a motor cycle and the enmity of the Barnstaple chapter of the Hell’s Angels during his wanderings.
He also pokes his nose into John’s (very private) affairs using his expert lock-picking skills, so when John discovers a devastating secret concerning his late wife’s activities Carlo becomes very excited particularly when, through the decoded diary of a 19th century parson, we learn that he may have a close family connection to his role model.
The tension increases inexorably as John Kingsford, secretly observed by Carlo, takes the matter of family honour into his own hands.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews