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The Scorpio Letters
Slight smudge on front cover. Signature on first page. Text is perfect. Same day shipping first class from AZ.
- GenresMystery Thriller
Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
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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 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 14, 2015
According to the cover blurb of my 1971 Pan paperback edition Victor Canning is one of the top six thriller writers in the world. This one is predicated on the slightly flimsy premise of a Mr Evil blackmailing various politicians, actresses and academics, extorting an annual fee for not disclosing sordid details of their pasts. It transpires that these misdemeanours are rather trivial by today's standards and would hardly merit a social media storm, let alone halt their successful careers, but, nevertheless, it enrages a gung-ho botanist with the decidedly unheroic name of George Constantine to try and put a stop to the little game.
George's main tactic is to go blundering into danger at every possible opportunity with no back-up apart from the daughter of one the blackmail victims whom he disarms early on ("a woman with a gun, backed into a corner, is an unreliable quantity").
Having been caught and beaten up several times by the former French Resistance baddies, who make the basic error of explaining to George exactly what they are going to do with him before allowing him to escape, George decides that valour is the better part of discretion and ends up as a prisoner in a health spa for hotel waiters in the Alps (where the baddies make the the basic error... etc etc).
All told, it's no Ian Fleming, Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley or Hammond Innes (although probably is in the top six) but the writing is concise and the action moves along at breathtaking speed with a satisfying amount of sexual tension. It would have made a great ITV serial in its day.
George's main tactic is to go blundering into danger at every possible opportunity with no back-up apart from the daughter of one the blackmail victims whom he disarms early on ("a woman with a gun, backed into a corner, is an unreliable quantity").
Having been caught and beaten up several times by the former French Resistance baddies, who make the basic error of explaining to George exactly what they are going to do with him before allowing him to escape, George decides that valour is the better part of discretion and ends up as a prisoner in a health spa for hotel waiters in the Alps (where the baddies make the the basic error... etc etc).
All told, it's no Ian Fleming, Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley or Hammond Innes (although probably is in the top six) but the writing is concise and the action moves along at breathtaking speed with a satisfying amount of sexual tension. It would have made a great ITV serial in its day.
December 26, 2011
A suave master-criminal blackmailer, a manly adventurer on his trail, a sexy blonde sidekick, picturesque European locales, and hair-raising escapes from certain death: a good time will be had by all.
December 12, 2014
Read in Italian "le lettere di Scorpio"
August 28, 2016
Some lively passages but an incoherent and implausible plot.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews