Victor Canning

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  • Bibliography:
    60 Books
  • First Book:
    January 1957
  • Latest Book:
    August 2021
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Book List in Order: 60 titles

  • A Forest of Eyes

    • / General Fiction
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    Harlequin Romance - 393

    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...

  • Dragon Tree

  • Flight of the Grey Goose

    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...

  • The Painted Tent

    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...

  • Doomsday Carrier

  • The Kingsford Mark

    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 ...

  • The Crimson Chalice

    Victor Canning has structured a new interpretation of Arthurian times -- and his sage is a dazzling union of realism and fiction. - King Features Syndicate...

  • The Whip Hand

    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 ...

  • The Limbo Line



  • The Satan Sampler

  • Birdcage

  • Melting Man

    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...

  • The Rainbird Pattern

    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...

  • Warlords

  • The Scorpio Letters

  • Memory Boy

  • Vanishing Point

    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...

  • Raven's Wind

  • Comedies and Whimsies



  • The Minerva Club

    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...

  • Two Men Fought

    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 Wooden Angel

    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...

  • Mr. Finchley Discovers His England

    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...

  • Mr. Finchley Goes to Paris

  • Beggar's Bush

  • The Chasm

    A novel set in Florence in 1946. The city is in ruins and shell-shocked officer Edward Burgess keeps seeing old comrades as he wanders the streets. But no, the comrades are dead and all he sees are ghosts. Except in one case, and that one man would m...

  • Crime and Detection: Short Stories

  • Fly Away Paul

    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 ...

  • Fountain Inn

    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...



  • Italy and the Balkans: Short Stories and a Novella

  • Matthew Silverman

  • Polycarp's Progress

    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...

  • Stories and Novellas: The Exotics

    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, ...

  • The Boy on Platform One

    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 ...

  • Castle Minerva

    '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 ...

  • The Hidden Face

    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...

  • His Bones Are Coral

    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...

  • The House of Seven Flies

    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 Man from the 'Turkish Slave'

    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...



  • The Manasco Road

    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...

  • The Mask of Memory

    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...

  • Panther's Moon

    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...

  • Queen's Pawn

    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...

  • The Runaways

    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...

  • Italy and the Balkans

  • The Improvised Life of Polycarp Jarvis

  • The Uncertain Future of the Silvermans

  • The Aberdyll Onion

  • The Python Project

    The edge-of-your-seat third novel in the classic Rex Carver Mysteries, from the author of the Birdcage series.A missing bracelet gets Rex Carver, London PI, in a bind...An antique gold python bracelet, with diamonds for eyes and emeralds for scales, ...



  • Birds of a Feather

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • The Circle of the Gods

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    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...

  • A Delivery of Furies

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • Doubled in Diamonds

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    A suave 1960s London PI searches for a missing person who doesn’t wish to be found in this high-stakes mystery by the author of The Whip Hand. When Rex Carver is taken on by a solicitor’s firm to trace the sole beneficiary, one Arthur Finch, of a...

  • Fall from Grace

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • The Golden Salamander

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    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...

  • The House of the Seven Flies

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    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...

  • Immortal Wound

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    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...

  • Mr. Finchley Takes the Road

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • Table Number Seven

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • Venetian Bird

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    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...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Victor Canning has published 60 books.

Victor Canning does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Python Project, was published in August 2021.

The first book by Victor Canning, A Forest of Eyes, was published in January 1957.

No. Victor Canning does not write books in series.
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