Victor Canning

A middle-aged English bachelor finds unexpected excitement in Paris, as well as an unusual little boy.

This is the third of the books about Rex Carver, private investigator. It is the longest and much the best of the series. As in all four books, the plot involves a hectic travel schedule, in this case to Paris, Italy, Libya, Tunisia and Ibiza. There is a large cast of characters, few of whom can be trusted. The plot is fairly unexpected and daring, and there is real tension in the dénouement. The secret services, represented by Manston and Sutcliffe, are involved, and there is a frightening sequence when Carver is tortured by Sutcliffe's staff. This foreshadows all the cruelty displayed by "our" side in the Birdcage books that Canning wrote in the 1970s.

Sequel to The Circle of the Gods

Psychological thriller and romance set in the West Country. Margaret Tucker tells her husband she has fallen in love and wants to leave him. He storms out and falls to his death. Or was he pushed? Meanwhile his secret service employers are worried about a document he was working on which is missing. Vivid descriptions of the scenery and bird life of North Devon, as well as interesting observations of love and loyalty.

A pilot who has just lost his licence comes across another who is dying after a crash. He takes on the identity of the dead pilot, little knowing that he is walking into trouble, since the plane was carrying diamonds intended to finance a revolution.

This is the second of four thrillers involving the private investigator Rex Carver. He is engaged to trace the heir to a small legacy, but discovers that the missing man is involved with a diamond robbery and drug smuggling.

Robert Rolt, a landowner who has had a brief career in the Foreign Office but now runs the Dorset estates he has inherited from an older brother. Two years before the book begins his wife Sarah vanished. A man from a secret branch of the Foreign Office comes to him with surveillance film of a woman called Angela Starr who resembles his wife. Rolt is immediately sure it is her. He meets her. She tells him she is an amnesia victim with no memory going back more than a year.

In a Sunday Times feature "The Hundred Best Crime Stories" selected by Julian Symons, reprinted as a pamphlet in about 1960, Symons comments: "Just occasionally an author writes a book that stands out from the main body of his work. Venetian Bird is structurally similar to Mr Canning's other very competent thrillers, but it is a long way from them in style and feeling. The shabby private inquiry agent, Mercer, who broods on the fact that 'something has happened to money since the war' so that he is down to third-class hotels and second-class travel, is an admirable central figure to set the tone of this story of love and treachery played out against a Venetian background that is handled with uncommon grace."

The book combines a David-and-Goliath thriller with a sensitive description of a marriage under strain.

A comic farrago. Paul Morison stows away on an Atlantic liner, and is saved from arrest by his double, the crooner Peter Gabriel, who wants Paul to take his place for a few days. But Gabriel is wanted by the police, and so Paul is chased across England and Scotland by Gabriel's fiancee, various good citizens and some policemen.