Yugoslavia before Marshal Tito's break with Russia. In a café facing the harbour of Dubrovnik two Englishmen are sitting, watched by Zarko, the Chief of Police. Robert Hudson, an engineer, has known John Raikes for only three weeks-Raikes has been i...
Fifteen-year-old Smiler is still on the run.Smiler is aiming to evade the police until his father, a ship's cook, comes home to clear him of a crime he hasn't committed. Hitching a train to Scotland, he finds work as an animal caretaker within the gr...
Freckled fugitive Smiler is never far from trouble.After hitching a ride south, Smiler finds his way to North Devon and the estate of the 'The Duchess' - a former fairground fortune-teller who now runs a farm. Here, he stays and tends to circus anima...
John Kingsford suits his home of Darlock House on Exmoor. He has retreated there following the tragic death of his wife and the loss of the easiest Parliamentary seat he could ever have wished for. Into his morose existence bursts Miss Grace Lindsay ...
Victor Canning has structured a new interpretation of Arthurian times -- and his sage is a dazzling union of realism and fiction. - King Features Syndicate...
This fast-paced thriller opens with laconic private eye Rex Carver accepting an apparently straightfoward job of tracing a missing young German au pair. Never one to avoid trouble, Carver soon becomes entangled in a dangerous game of international ...
A millionaire was very desirous to know the whereabouts of a certain Mercedes and was paying Rex Carver a lot of money to track it down. Then people started coming from everywhere trying to keep him from finding it. The search takes Carver all over E...
Elderly spinster Julia Rainbird, under sessions by medium Blanche Tyler, or "Madame Blanche", promises her a large sum of money to locate her illegitimate nephew Edward Shoebridge. She and her boyfriend George Lumley begin making inquiries around the...
Discovering that he is of aristocratic English birth, French artist Maurice Crillon, who specializes in fine forgeries of paintings, visits his eccentric father and becomes enmeshed in a web of intrigue, blackmail, and romance...
Daring Heists, Impossible Patterns and Deadly Mysteries Victor Canning (1911-1986) created three unique series chronicling the mysteries of some of the most original characters in detective fiction. This collection begins with the misadventures of th...
The first book by Victor Canning using the pen name Alan Gould, this is the story of a feud between two boys which persists through adolescence, marriage and a failed business partnership, spanning the years 1900 to 1930, set on the south coast of Co...
The setting is Wearemouth, a fictional blend of Plymouth and Dartmouth. We are introduced to five children who, on a walk to the cinema, pass a local landmark, the Wooden Angel, made from a ship's figurehead and stand holding hands, making a wish. Th...
The adventures of a middle-aged solicitor's clerk who takes a holiday for the first time in his life and finds himself in all kinds of unexpected situations, chased by the police, befriended by gypsies, mistaken for a homicidal lunatic, collecting fo...
Light-hearted chase novel. Paul Morison, about to be arrested as a stowaway, is offered a way out if he will deputise for his lookalike, Peter Gabriel, the famous crooner. He agrees, but after a few days wishes he hadn't, as he is chased from London ...
Six different enterprises occupy Staircase One of Fountain Inn on Chancery Lane. Ben and Helen Brown of General Factotums on the third floor find themselves hired to investigate the Society for Progressive Rehabilitation on the second floor. Meanwhil...
John Polycarp Jarvis (named Polycarp after the first bishop of Smyrna because "most Christian names are not Christian enough") keeps losing jobs but manages to land on his feet. A light-hearted romp through the countryside and society of 1930s Englan...
Three novellas and nine short stories from magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. The themes cover climbing on the Turkish/Albanian border to recover secret equipment from a crashed aircraft, revolution in Latin America, hidden kingdoms in the Himalayas, ...
A young London boy has a unique gift for the effortless memorizing of words. As his father, proprietor of a small shop selling secondhand books and antiques, uneasily uses Peter's gift for commercial gain, the apparatus of State Security steps in to ...
'I want you to do a job for me during the Easter vacation. Not such a colourful job, though it may have its excitements. But it's a job that means a hell of a lot to me.'
Drexel wanted me and that was enough. I said, 'I'll do it.'
And ...
Peter Barlow had both the motive and opportunity to kill James Gurney Hansford but he hadn't done it. For two years now he had suffered another man's punishment, two years of a life sentence for murder he had not committed. Only one man believed in h...
Howard Smith had often made the run between Port Sudan and Cairo, but when his plane crashed in the desert near a small Red Sea port he was carrying drugs for the first time. Somehow he had to pay his way out of the wreckage and dispose of his illici...
Although striving to make an honest living running a small yacht for charter, Edward Furse dreams of a better life for himself and his son Jimmy, and when a mysterious Dutch passenger dies on the voyage back to Holland, Furse finds that fate may have...
The Turkish Slave was dirty, undisciplined and only just sea-worthy, but when Peter Landers was offered a job as Third Officer on the ship, he had little choice but to accept. His divorce had driven him to drink and to one fouled-up opportunity after...
In the beginning it seemed a simple enough job. The contract to salvage the cargo of the Doria, wrecked off the Majorca coast, was straightforward and promised a nice profit for Nick Thorne and his Spanish partner, Domingo Peroni. But the only road f...
Isolation and boredom can do strange things to people. After years and years of too much time on her hands, lonely housewife Margaret Tucker's mundane routine becomes smattered with odd behaviour.
Her husband, Bernard, is cold and distant. Spe...
Roger Quain has undertaken a strange task: he is transporting a pair of rare black panthers from Milan to Paris for his uncle, who runs a circus. The night before he leaves his hotel in Italy, Quain answers a knock at his door to find a beautiful you...
Handsome, brilliant young conman Andrew Raikes is set to swap the hustle for a life of quiet luxury and independence in the English countryside. Then, barely two months in to his new life, a letter arrives from a man even more cunning and ruthless th...
On a night of wild storms, two lonely creatures escape from captivity.
One of the creatures is a boy, Smiler, wrongly convicted of stealing, the other a cheetah, Yarra, leaving the Longleat Wild Life Park to have her cubs in privacy.
Bo...
The case of a missing bracelet ensnares a 1960s London PI in the edge-of-your-seat third Rex Carver mystery from the author of Doubled in Diamonds. An antique gold python bracelet, with diamonds for eyes and emeralds for scales, has been stole...
The Crimson Chalice trilogy, first published between 1976 and 1978, is Victor Canning's classic retelling of the story of King Arthur. Beginning with the story of his parents, Tia and Baradoc, Canning weaves elements of the Grail myth into a Fifth ce...
The high-stakes second novel in the classic Rex Carver mysteries.Rex Carver, suave 1960s London PI, has a missing person to find â€" one who doesn’t want to be found.When Rex Carver is taken on by a solicitor’s firm to trace the sole beneficiary,...
David Redfern, widowed and at a crossroads in his academic career, journeys to a tiny African port, where he becomes the centre of the small community's intrigue. There to catalogue and transport an ancient and mystical collection of artefacts from t...
A quarter of a million pounds worth of diamonds have been stolen from an Amsterdam bank - a prize big enough to attract treasure hunters. Furse, the Englishman, has knowledge of the stones' whereabouts and hopes this wealth will make his future and t...
The Crimson Chalice trilogy, first published between 1976 and 1978, is Victor Canning's classic retelling of the story of King Arthur. Beginning with the story of his parents, Tia and Baradoc, Canning weaves elements of the Grail myth into a Fifth ce...
Edward Mercer's mission had seemed so simple. A benevolent, unknown American father wished to repay a debt of gratitude to the man who rescued his son during the war. A man who carried the broken-legged boy for two days through snow to receive the me...