Panthers' Moon

by Victor Canning

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 young woman, Catherine Talbot, who has an even more extraordinary request. She is a British secret service agent in possession of some microfilm containing precious, deadly information. She needs to get the film out of Italy and back to Britain fast – and the panthers might be the perfect disguise. But when their train is derailed as it crosses the Swiss Alps, the panthers – and the microfilm – go missing.

The search in the wild mountain range attracts hunters from far and wide – but whether they’re hunting the panthers, or the microfilm, Quain and Catherine cannot tell . . . and their enemies may be closer than they think.

“A thriller of the first order” Daily Telegraph

“A most brilliant and beautifully written thriller—I believed, and enjoyed every word of it.” Christopher Pym, Sunday Times

Genres: Glaciers, Thriller

209 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Victor 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.

Reviews

[David Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early Canning from 1948 and a good one. If you've read Christopher Bookers excellent "The Seven Basic Plots" this follows the blueprint of Overcoming the Monster (II). Quain, an engineer, is in post war Milan tasked with transporting a pair of panthers to his uncle's zoo in Paris. While waiting for the cages on their truck to be attached to the Paris goods train he spends the last evening at his hotel where he is accosted by a young English agent, former IOS officer Catherine Talbot, damaged from her experiences and loss of her only love to Nazi reprisals against the Maquis. She hands him a McGuffin in the form of microfilms outlining some nuclear process which could be used for good or evil - remember this is 1948 and nobody had used nuclear processes for the good of mankind. These films need to be transported to Paris but she is being followed and the man she obtained the films from murdered.
Quain is intrigued and agrees to help using an excellent hiding place for the films that make it unlikely they will be found en route. Although why she just didn't stick them in the post...?
Things don't go smoothly thereafter and there is the delicious quandary for Quain of being caught in a situation wherein he doesn't know whom of his fellow guests at a Swiss mountain hotel are after the films and who are potential allies. There is superb descriptive writing of panthers hunting and being hunted and Quain himself is eventually cornered with no seeming means of escape. Will he make the leap to freedom and get the girl?

[John A. Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work from the 1940s tells the story of Roger Quain, a slightly vague adventurer, given the task of transporting a pair of rare black panthers from Milan to Paris for his uncle's circus.
He is contacted by Talbot, a British secret service agent and asked to transport some microfilm that needs to get back to the UK. When Quain's train crashes in the Alps, the panthers escape, along with the mircofilm. He is soon joined by an eclectic group hunging for the panthers, but who is after the microfilm rather than the cats?

I found this book doing some research on the 40s, and it sounded like an interesting story. Set's the scene of post-War Italy, and the simmering tensions of the world well, and is an intriguing tale of it's own.
Mr Canning provides lots of detail, and the sections with the panthers and the dogs are excellent, and each of the protagonists is drawn out enough to engage the reader. And without giving anything away, it just goes to show nothing is entirely new. Rather good fun.

[Abby Sharkis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read this book for my spy novels class. It was a solid 3 stars. Not bad but not that great. The female protagonist is actually pretty good but the whole second half of the book is them on a panther hunt which I thought was kind of boring.

[Freeda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise was intriguing. The events were a bit dark, but one or two of the characters were interesting.

[Liisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books received from my Great Grandmother, that is no long in print.