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Rex Carver #4
The Melting Man
The pulse-pounding final novel in the Rex Carver Mysteries. Rex Carver, London private investigator, is sent to France in pursuit of some hot wheels. Rex Carver wants a holiday – is determined to have one, in fact. So when millionaire Cavan O’Dowda attempts to hire him to track down some stolen property, the answer is a flat ‘No’. Until, that is, Cavan’s beautiful daughter, Julia, arrives to collect him. The property in question is a top-of-the-range Mercedes, missing in France somewhere between Evian and Cannes; the driver turned up in Cannes without the car, and with no memory of the prior 48 hours. O’Dowda wants the vehicle, and the papers concealed within it, recovered at any cost… The Bond of private investigators sets out on his final mission, perfect for fans of Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
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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 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 8, 2012
A good thriller, if not breath-taking.
I've been criticising books published by small independants lately, for too many errors. I've also seen too many errors by the big publishers in recent years, and have heard a rumour that at least one of them is trying to edit books with a computer programme. Such a strange idea, and doomed to fail.
So I was surprised to find this old book, published 1968, had errors in as well - things like there/their confused, and waive/wave. Not too many, but all the same, it does show that even older books can fail in this area.
Otherwise, a nice plot, fast-moving, and quite traditional in the old style thriller/detective genre.
I've been criticising books published by small independants lately, for too many errors. I've also seen too many errors by the big publishers in recent years, and have heard a rumour that at least one of them is trying to edit books with a computer programme. Such a strange idea, and doomed to fail.
So I was surprised to find this old book, published 1968, had errors in as well - things like there/their confused, and waive/wave. Not too many, but all the same, it does show that even older books can fail in this area.
Otherwise, a nice plot, fast-moving, and quite traditional in the old style thriller/detective genre.
January 1, 2023
This book was the best fun I’ve had reading for quite a while. Not taxing so easy to read. Bought it in Richard Booth’s Bookshop whilst on holiday in Hay-on-Wye, so was an ideal holiday read. Pseudo ‘James Bond’ - in fact it could easily form the basis for a Bond plot - wonderfully imaginative and atmospheric. Slightly non-pc in places so be warned, but if taken in the context of when it was written this shouldn’t offend except the most touchy of people. All-in-all a great read and I’ve already bought a stack more by Canning as I’d never read him before. Highly recommended.
December 2, 2023
In the mid-1960s I read a few books by Victor Canning and thoroughly enjoyed them. For some reason I didn’t read any more (maybe suborned by Helen MacInnes, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, Gavin Lyall, and Desmond Cory, among others!); that is, until now, taking up his 1968 thriller The Melting Man, a collector’s item.
This is the fourth (and final) thriller featuring the investigator Rex Carver. Narrated in first-person, it begins with Carver contemplating a holiday, despite the fact that the firm’s bank balance could benefit from an injection of new cash. ‘... eleven months of the year I worked, if it was there to work at, but come September, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, I took a holiday’ (p9). He told his business partner Hilda Wilkins, ‘I need feeding up.’ She pointedly looked at his lowest waistcoat button and said, ‘That’s not the impression I get’ (p2).
From the outset, the style grabs, with plenty of one-liners, amusing asides, and colourful descriptions. From time to time Carver undergoes a session in the gym run by Miggs, an ex-Commando sergeant who takes one look at Carver and says, ‘My God – a young man in an old man’s body. You’d better let me book you in for a dozen sessions...’ Carver responded: ‘I like to put it on around September. Live off my fat during the winter. Bears do it’ (p6).
His holidaying intentions are waylaid by the arrival in the office of beautiful Julia Yung-Brown. He’d been recommended to her by Miggs: ‘But you don’t quite come up to the description Miggs gave of you. Sort of blurred around the edges somewhere.’ He riposted: ‘Come autumn I begin to disintegrate a little. My best month is May’ (p11).
Despite inferring that Carver was unfit, he manages to hold his own, surviving more than one knock on the head, a near-drowning and a bomb in his car!
Julia and her sister Zelia are the step-daughters of millionaire Cavan O’Dowda, a man with a ruthless reputation. Apparently, Zelia went missing while driving her stepfather’s Mercedes 250 SL in France. Zelia subsequently turned up in Cannes with memory loss and no car. O’Dowda wants Rex to find the car. Simple.
He sets out on the trail of the car – Geneva, Cannes, Turin. And is tracked by his old Interpol pal Aristide Marchissy la Dole as well as the eccentric Alakwe brothers, Jimbo and Najib, together with their sex-mad 6ft 4” lethal assistant Miss Panda Bubakar. It’s obvious that there’s something hidden inside the car that is highly valuable to all the interested actors.
Aristide has appeared in earlier books. He likes his food, particularly if they’re Carver’s croissants ‘which were first made in Budapest in 1686. That is the year the Turks besieged the city. They dug underground passages beneath the city walls at night, but the bakers – naturally working at that hour – heard them, gave the alarm and Johnny Turk was thrown out. In return the bakers were given the privilege of making a special pastry in the form of the crescent moon which still decorates the Ottoman flag’ (p188).
The pace is fast, the characters are larger-than-life, the threats quite real, and the denouement in the millionaire’s mountain chateau is both intense and grim, with a dark and unexpected twist.
Even after fifty-five years, this is a satisfying and entertaining, page-turning thriller.
You can get a used copy for the price of a beer; all four Rex Carver books are available as e-books.
This is the fourth (and final) thriller featuring the investigator Rex Carver. Narrated in first-person, it begins with Carver contemplating a holiday, despite the fact that the firm’s bank balance could benefit from an injection of new cash. ‘... eleven months of the year I worked, if it was there to work at, but come September, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, I took a holiday’ (p9). He told his business partner Hilda Wilkins, ‘I need feeding up.’ She pointedly looked at his lowest waistcoat button and said, ‘That’s not the impression I get’ (p2).
From the outset, the style grabs, with plenty of one-liners, amusing asides, and colourful descriptions. From time to time Carver undergoes a session in the gym run by Miggs, an ex-Commando sergeant who takes one look at Carver and says, ‘My God – a young man in an old man’s body. You’d better let me book you in for a dozen sessions...’ Carver responded: ‘I like to put it on around September. Live off my fat during the winter. Bears do it’ (p6).
His holidaying intentions are waylaid by the arrival in the office of beautiful Julia Yung-Brown. He’d been recommended to her by Miggs: ‘But you don’t quite come up to the description Miggs gave of you. Sort of blurred around the edges somewhere.’ He riposted: ‘Come autumn I begin to disintegrate a little. My best month is May’ (p11).
Despite inferring that Carver was unfit, he manages to hold his own, surviving more than one knock on the head, a near-drowning and a bomb in his car!
Julia and her sister Zelia are the step-daughters of millionaire Cavan O’Dowda, a man with a ruthless reputation. Apparently, Zelia went missing while driving her stepfather’s Mercedes 250 SL in France. Zelia subsequently turned up in Cannes with memory loss and no car. O’Dowda wants Rex to find the car. Simple.
He sets out on the trail of the car – Geneva, Cannes, Turin. And is tracked by his old Interpol pal Aristide Marchissy la Dole as well as the eccentric Alakwe brothers, Jimbo and Najib, together with their sex-mad 6ft 4” lethal assistant Miss Panda Bubakar. It’s obvious that there’s something hidden inside the car that is highly valuable to all the interested actors.
Aristide has appeared in earlier books. He likes his food, particularly if they’re Carver’s croissants ‘which were first made in Budapest in 1686. That is the year the Turks besieged the city. They dug underground passages beneath the city walls at night, but the bakers – naturally working at that hour – heard them, gave the alarm and Johnny Turk was thrown out. In return the bakers were given the privilege of making a special pastry in the form of the crescent moon which still decorates the Ottoman flag’ (p188).
The pace is fast, the characters are larger-than-life, the threats quite real, and the denouement in the millionaire’s mountain chateau is both intense and grim, with a dark and unexpected twist.
Even after fifty-five years, this is a satisfying and entertaining, page-turning thriller.
You can get a used copy for the price of a beer; all four Rex Carver books are available as e-books.
September 26, 2025
Pure James Bond stuff. All action, sadism, quips and one-liners, and over-the-top characters trying to double-cross one another - it's easy to see this as a film. A classic period piece with an exotic 'European' setting aimed at a public who had rarely been abroad, and full of set-piece action; the scene where a character is tortured for information by attaching him to a fishing-line with a collar and throwing him into a lake to be played like a fish could be straight out of Ian Fleming.
The prose is good and the dialogue wise-cracking, and it's not entirely clear who is 'good' and who is 'bad', from the authorities down to the petty gangsters.
The prose is good and the dialogue wise-cracking, and it's not entirely clear who is 'good' and who is 'bad', from the authorities down to the petty gangsters.
it would have been nice to sock him on the nose before leaving. But it wouldn't have done any good. He had nothing to do with it. He was just a cipher. He took his pay and went through the prescribed motions and when he went home at night everything dropped from him, leaving him stainless. Just wipe the knife down with a wet rag and you couldn't tell that it had been used. As long as the correct official form had been made out, endorsed by the right department, and neatly filed in the correct cabinets, then there was nothing to worry about.
February 1, 2024
For what it is, it's a pretty good read - the plot's well written, the mystery's interesting, and the characters are fun and genuinely interesting to read about. I really liked the casual tone it took on and it doesn't hold up terribly considering when it was written. It's a fun, easy read with a good story and a couple actually surprising twists. There are a few points where it very much shows its age - it's not exactly what you'd call completely politically correct and has its fair share of scenes that are just vaguely uncomfortable. It does take you out of the narrative somewhat, but those moments are relatively few and far between, especially for a book from this era. I would recommend it if you need something short and simple, though proceed with caution if you're more sensitive to such themes.
"Master and man, its a bond that lasts right up to death, when said master is a millionaire. I am glad to be my own master and man- there's no quarrels." - Chapter 9, Line 247
"Master and man, its a bond that lasts right up to death, when said master is a millionaire. I am glad to be my own master and man- there's no quarrels." - Chapter 9, Line 247
May 14, 2020
I enjoyed how the plot coils around a small number of characters and locations, drilling down instead of expanding out. The place descriptions are too drawn out for my taste, the weighting more towards minutia than atmosphere, but the sense of time and place is still strong.
July 22, 2020
read back in 1983 and loved it .
March 12, 2024
Good ol’ fashion potboiler…..
May 4, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in July 1999.
In this early novel, Victor Canning presents a narrator who at the outset seems intended to be Len Deighton's Harry Palmer. He is not such a master of the sort of truculent attitude embodied in Palmer as Deighton is, and the characterisation soon slips. With flashes of Chandler's Marlowe on the way, we end up with a narrator similar to those of Eric Ambler, if rather nastier than any of them and without the ineffective air Ambler usually gives his central characters. That Canning is not of the same rank as any of these other authors is undeniable (and the slippage of Rex Carver's characterisation demonstrates this), but you can certainly see what would have influenced a publisher to accept this novel.
The narrator runs a fairly shady business in London, which basically bears the same sort of relationship to a normal private detective agency as Special Branch does to the CID. The rich businessman Cavan O'Dowda commissions him to recover a Mercedes, lost somewhere in the south of France by his stepdaughter, who claims to have amnesia about what happened when she disappeared for some days. Carver soon realises that it isn't the car itself that O'Dowda wants back; he was using his stepdaughter to unknowingly courier some sensitive documents to France. Other groups are soon chasing the documents, including representatives of an African dictator and Interpol.
We are soon in standard thriller territory, with the nasty touches that tend to mark out Canning's novels, even among other early seventies' writers. The title of the novel is derived from one of these. O'Dowda is on the edge of insanity, and keeps a room in a chateau filled with waxworks of those who attempted to prevent his success in some way. There, he likes to gloat about his eventual victories; the fire that destroys him along with the dummies is one of the more unpleasant passages in this book.
In this early novel, Victor Canning presents a narrator who at the outset seems intended to be Len Deighton's Harry Palmer. He is not such a master of the sort of truculent attitude embodied in Palmer as Deighton is, and the characterisation soon slips. With flashes of Chandler's Marlowe on the way, we end up with a narrator similar to those of Eric Ambler, if rather nastier than any of them and without the ineffective air Ambler usually gives his central characters. That Canning is not of the same rank as any of these other authors is undeniable (and the slippage of Rex Carver's characterisation demonstrates this), but you can certainly see what would have influenced a publisher to accept this novel.
The narrator runs a fairly shady business in London, which basically bears the same sort of relationship to a normal private detective agency as Special Branch does to the CID. The rich businessman Cavan O'Dowda commissions him to recover a Mercedes, lost somewhere in the south of France by his stepdaughter, who claims to have amnesia about what happened when she disappeared for some days. Carver soon realises that it isn't the car itself that O'Dowda wants back; he was using his stepdaughter to unknowingly courier some sensitive documents to France. Other groups are soon chasing the documents, including representatives of an African dictator and Interpol.
We are soon in standard thriller territory, with the nasty touches that tend to mark out Canning's novels, even among other early seventies' writers. The title of the novel is derived from one of these. O'Dowda is on the edge of insanity, and keeps a room in a chateau filled with waxworks of those who attempted to prevent his success in some way. There, he likes to gloat about his eventual victories; the fire that destroys him along with the dummies is one of the more unpleasant passages in this book.
May 28, 2010
adventure and crime from a great storyteller.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews