“I was seventeen. I wanted a motor-bike... and to drink beer with the other fellows in the rugby club. I'd no money - I was earning 17s 6d a week in an office. I picked up some kids' magazine and I read a story. I thought: ‘My God! If I couldn't write a better story than this, I'd well...!’ I sat down and wrote one... I got four guineas for it. That was it - I'd started.”
Canning was soon selling short stories regularly to boys’ magazines and newspapers. In 1934 his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers his England, was published and became a best seller. (To give a flavour of 1934, other books published in that year included JB Priestley’s English Journey, Orwell’s Burmese Days, Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.) Canning gave up his clerical job and became a full time writer, 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 were published as a book with illustrations by Leslie Stead under the title Everyman's England in 1936.
In 1935 he married Phyllis McEwen, a girl from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare.
He enlisted in the Army in 1940, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery in Llandrindod Wells in Wales, where he trained alongside his friend Eric Ambler. Both were commissioned as second lieutenants in 1941. In Ambler's autobiography, Here Lies Eric Ambler, he writes about his army training:
"There was a pleasant side. Victor Canning was in the same troop as I was. On Saturday nights, duty permitting, we would go to the local repertory theatre and on Sunday nights to the cinema. In both places, of course, we could sit down. I cannot recall our ever going into a pub for a drink where one had to stand at the bar. On weekday nights, if not on duty or cramming or cleaning equipment, one went to bed early."
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 invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaigns. Canning's obituary in The Times notes that: “...even in the Royal Artillery he had a stimulus to write in the promptings of a loyal batman who was in the habit of rebuking Major Canning in the morning if he felt that the boss had not been long enough at his typewriter the previous night.” At the end of the war he was assigned to an Anglo-American unit doing experimental work with radar range-finding. He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of major.
Although before the war he had been
predominantly a writer of gentle comedies, he resumed
writing, on Ambler’s advice, thrillers set in exotic locations. His thrillers
are mainly set overseas since, Canning is reported to have said, “in this
country you can always call a policeman.” Canning’s second post-war book, Panthers’
Moon, published in 1938, had a
plot in which two panthers being transported from Italy to a had
a plot involving two panthers who are carrying microfilm in their collars being
sent from Milan to a circus in Paris. It was filmed as Spy Hunt,
and from then 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.” In 1952 Canning briefly
worked in Hollywood on scripts for films of his own books and on television shows.
The money earned from the film of The Golden Salamander (starring Trevor
Howard) meant that Canning could buy a substantial country house in Kent.
During the 1950s and 1960s Canning also wrote short stories for the many pulp
fiction magazines that then existed, such as Argosy, Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine, and John Bull. In 1965 he began a series of four
books featuring a down-at-heel private detective called Rex Carver, whose
character owed something to Len Deighton’s unnamed narrator of The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water. Although Rex Carver
was based in Pimlico, his work usually took him abroad and involved a colourful
array of villains and their henchmen. My own favourite of these is The Whip Hand, a cracking adventure
involving neo-Nazis.
At the end of the 1960s Canning fell in love with the wife of London solicitor,
which led to his separation from his wife Phyllis. His second wife died of
cancer in 1976. The seven and a half years that they lived together were, as
John Higgins says, “an extraordinarily productive period for him, containing
almost all of his best work, including the first five of his ‘Birdcage’ novels,
a trilogy of books for children starting with The Runaways, and the
beginning of a trilogy retelling the legends of King Arthur, The Crimson
Chalice.” With his ‘Birdcage’ series of novels, beginning with Firecrest
(1971), he moved away from exotic locales and concentrated much of the action
in the south of England. These novels featured a branch of the secret service
known only as “The Department”, which Canning described thus:“The Department was an offshoot of the Ministry of Defence. Its existence had never been officially acknowledged. Its functions – proliferating under the pressure of national security – were as old as organised society. Its work was discreet and indecent. Security and economy demanded that certain people and certain situations had to be handled, organised, dispatched or suppressed without the public being disturbed or distressed by any awareness of the mostly unmentionable stratagems that, in the interests of the national welfare, the Department was given an ambiguous mandate to employ. Murder, blackmail, fraud, theft and betrayal were the commonplaces of the Department. The Department existed, but its existence would have been denied. Its members and operators lived in the common society but acted outside it. Most had entered the Department aware of some of its extreme aspects and prepared to adjust themselves. None had had originally a complete understanding of it; and when this had come it was too late – for knowledge had by then brought acquiescence and even a measure of pride and self-satisfaction at being part of a body of work and action which first changed, then isolated them, and finally smoothly endowed them with an inhumanity that inwardly set them aside from all other people.”
Canning continued writing a book a year, and died of a heart attack in February 1986, in Cirencester. His final book, Table Number Seven, was completed by his third wife Adria and his sister Jean.
Several of his novels were turned into films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, based on The Rainbird Pattern.
Although in the 1970s Heinemann brought out a Uniform Edition set of reprints that included most of the early work, by then Canning was sadly out of fashion, and remains so. This is a pity since many of his novels are excellent reads, and his later novels can hold their own against anything by Len Deighton or Ted Allbeury.
(I am indebted to John Higgins’ excellent webpage concerning Victor Canning for the biographical information.) http://www.victorcanning.com/
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