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The Limbo Line
1965 Novel
224 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1968
16 people want to read
About the author
Victor Canning
163 books59 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
June 9, 2024
British author Victor Canning published the Limbo Line in 1963, a standalone novel starring Richard Marsten, a senior espionage agent called out of retirement from his golf course and country estate life to thwart the Soviet Empire in a Cold War story. Here, the events involve numerous Soviet defectors who are fairly ordinary and not necessarily well known. They are being kidnapped from their new lives in Great Britain and returned to the Soviet Union never to be heard from again. Here, Marsten is slowly drawn back into the espionage game, first by meeting ballerina Irina who he takes out on a few dates that went rather well, only to break his heart as he has to stand by and watch her be kidnapped, put on ice, and transported across France en route to the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. But, his supervisor warns him that this is the only way that they can trace the route the smugglers take the kidnapped defectors and Irina's fate must be risked to save hundreds of others.
There are points where the novel seems British upper crust stiff, but there are plenty of action scenes to break up any stiffness. In the end, it is quite a satisfying read.
Interestingly, Canning did not create a series around Marsten, but later used him as a character in his four-book Rex Carver espionage series, which included The Whip Hand (1965), Doubled in Diamonds (1966), the Python Project (1967), and the Melting Man (1968).
Limbo Line was made into a movie in 1968 and the book was re-issued with a new cover as a movie tie-in. The book reviewed here is the 1963 Berkley Medallion edition numbered F1085.
There are points where the novel seems British upper crust stiff, but there are plenty of action scenes to break up any stiffness. In the end, it is quite a satisfying read.
Interestingly, Canning did not create a series around Marsten, but later used him as a character in his four-book Rex Carver espionage series, which included The Whip Hand (1965), Doubled in Diamonds (1966), the Python Project (1967), and the Melting Man (1968).
Limbo Line was made into a movie in 1968 and the book was re-issued with a new cover as a movie tie-in. The book reviewed here is the 1963 Berkley Medallion edition numbered F1085.
August 23, 2023
I'm reading a lot of spy fiction outside of the big names such as Fleming, Green and ambler for a writing project of my own. Victor Canning was a solid, professional writer of his era, a favourite of book clubs and filmed a surprising number of times, peaking with Alfred Hitchcock's 1976 adaptation of his The Rainbird Pattern as Family Plot. The Limbo Line, first published in 1962, was itself filmed in 1968, as spy fiction was at that point very popular in the wake of James Bond. The novel itself is very mid-range, with an good plot about a Soviet agency which is kidnapping low-level defectors and returning them to Russia for propaganda reasons. The writing style is a bit wordy and pedestrian by modern standards, and doesn't bear comparison to the top level of thriller writers.
You can tell reading the book that Canning isn't very interested in his nominal hero Richard Manston, a retired agent coerced into taking on one last mission (yes, that old chestnut) and has a lot more fun bringing to life the supporting cast, particularly his spymaster Sutcliffe. The characters would return in a series of four books about private eye Rex Carver - Canning's character names have dated rather badly) published between 1965 and 1968.
You can tell reading the book that Canning isn't very interested in his nominal hero Richard Manston, a retired agent coerced into taking on one last mission (yes, that old chestnut) and has a lot more fun bringing to life the supporting cast, particularly his spymaster Sutcliffe. The characters would return in a series of four books about private eye Rex Carver - Canning's character names have dated rather badly) published between 1965 and 1968.
August 26, 2010
A few years ago I set out to discover the appeal of spy novels. This one seems competent enough, but I did not find it compelling.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews