Victor Canning Knihy

In this series of pen-portraits of England in the 1930's, Victor Canning vividly captures the pattern and colour of the great fabric of English life from Cumberland to Cornwall from a bygone era.

Mr Edgar Finchley, unmarried solicitor's clerk, aged 45, is told to take a holiday for the first time in his life. He decides to go to Margate. But Fate has other plans in store... This gentle comedy trilogy was a runaway bestseller on first publication in the 1930s and retains a timeless appeal today.

Mr Finchley takes a fancy to a horse-drawn caravan that he sees for sale, and sets out to explore the countryside and go house-hunting. While learning to handle the horse and the caravan, he encounters a variety of eccentrics and country characters, and several unsuitable houses. It gradually emerges that the caravan contains a secret, and Mr Finchley finds himself in real trouble.

An Elementary Level story in a series of ELT readers comprising a wide range of titles and divided into five levels: Starter Level, with about 300 basic words; Beginner (600); Elementary (1100); Intermediate (1600); and Upper (2200). Some of the titles are also available on cassette.

This is a split-level story with two people kidnapping prominent officials, while at the same time, an elderly woman is trying to bring the missing elements of her family together before she dies. There seems no connection, but, as a lovable and charismatic psychic and her jack-of-all-trades partner seek the whereabouts of a man who disappeared years ago, the suspense mounts and culminates in violence, with the author delivering an unexpected aftershock in the final pages.

Classics. Detective and mystery stories. Latest range of classic crime novels from the 20th century, published with stylish retro cover artwork.

Book 2 of the classic trilogy of humorous rural adventures through pre-war England. An ebullient Mr Finchley is about to propose marriage to a lady he had rescued from mishap, when he is sent to Paris by his firm. There he manages to upset a boat, adopt a stray orphan and get himself kidnapped. The fine tangle he gets into takes some unravelling! Only when eventually back in London does he complete the proposal of marriage that was interrupted at the start. Jerome Jerome meets Mr Bean in this gentle comedy series, which was a runaway bestseller on first publication in the 1930s and retains a timeless appeal today. It has been dramatized twice for BBC Radio, with the 1990 series regularly repeated. AUTHOR: Victor Canning was a prolific writer throughout his career, which began young: he had sold several short stories by the age of nineteen and his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers His England (1934) was published when he was twenty-three. Canning also wrote for children: his trilogy The Runaways was adapted for US children's television. Canning's later thrillers were darker and more complex than his earlier work and received further critical acclaim.

Laconic private eye Rex Canning has accepted the apparently straightforward job of tracing a young German au pair. Never one to avoid trouble, Carver becomes entangled in a dangerous game of international espionage and double dealing.

The novel is narrated in the first person (unusual for Canning) by 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, but agrees on seeing photographs and handwriting samples that she must be Sarah Rolt. She returns to live with him. They visit Sarah's mother in Italy. There is a mysterious incident in which a speedboat may have been trying to kill them while they are swimming. Meanwhile the secret services are trying to get Rolt to help them investigate International Industrial Systems Limited, a firm in which Sarah's mother has a large investment. And Sarah still has no recollection of her missing year. The final explanations involves an element of science fiction, the only time that Canning drifted into this genre. It also maintains the thread, started in The Python Project and culminating in Birdcage, of the essential nastiness of the British secret services.