The Dragon Tree

by Victor Canning

The Dragon Tree - by Victor Canning

Paperback

Published January 1, 1958

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]

The usual high-standard fare from one of my favourite authors. This is from 1958 and is a realistic portrayal of the muddle that we got ourselves into as a country when the Empire was over and colonies (quite rightly) seeking independence experience a power vacuum. The fictional country of Cyrenia (down Egypt’s way as B.A. Robertson would have it) is a “hotch-potch” of racial tension and two nationalist leaders have been captured by the British who aren’t sure what to do with them. The temporary solution is to exile them to one of two small islands near Madeira and imprison them in a Napoleonic fort under the guard of a (too) small group of British soldiers with backup from a naval destroyer deployed to the islands. The prisoners comprise potential leader, Hadid Chebir, his wife (note the comma), Colonel Mawzi and a servant, Abou. Major John Richmond has responsibility for the prisoners and, co-incidentally, was an acquaintance of Chebir at Oxford. He travels to drying cod scented San Borodon with them, then on to the smaller banana-infested island of Mora where the fort is. It becomes clear that Chebir’s wife (from Swindon and maybe understandably) is unhappy and her husband seems overly subdued. Colonel Mawzi is the de facto leader and it soon becomes clear that an escape attempt is to be made which will humiliate Britain and restore Chebir to glory at home.
There are any number of well drawn characters including the captain of the destroyer, his unhappy wife who is the daughter of the Island’s governor, the governor himself and his ambitious ADC who fancies himself as a future Prime Minister. The soldiers at the fort and the sailors on the ship typify their species and we learn about their private aspirations and restless boredom. The cook at the fort prefers gardening and is in awe of the forty foot Dragon Tree that grows in the quadrangle. He notes that when the trunk is cut it bleeds sap resembling blood. You just know this will be significant as tensions rise and the prisoners’ plans take shape.
One quibble I have is that characters seem to drink (Irish?) ‘whiskey’ rather than Scotch whisky. Why?

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well told tale written from the point of view of a quite omniscient third person narrator that starts at the beginning and proceeds at a slowly accelerating pace to its climatic end. This straight-ahead mode of story telling has fallen out of favor, I guess, with multiple points of view, flashbacks, and non-chronological narration having become hallmarks of more recent fiction. I enjoyed it.