Rex Carver #3

The Python Project - Victor Canning

Only a rich person that goes for an elephant foot umbrella stand could love the python bracelet. Antique. Gold. Diamonds for eyes. Emeralds for scales. Creepily decadent, it has been stolen from its rich widow owner. The insurance company hires private investigator Rex Carver for its recovery.

Carver soon discovers that the thief – the ne’er do well brother of the rich widow - has disappeared. Carver persuades his partner, Hilda Wilkins, and her BF Olaf the Swede Sailor, to interrupt their vacation and pursue investigations in Mediterranean spots such as Italy and Libya (an accessible place when this story was released in 1967, not so much after 1969).

After Carver locates the bad hat brother and his sleazy partner, however, the game changes completely. He enters the murky world of spies where all the heavy-hitters, no matter what side they are playing on, are cold-hearted bully boys and bad girls, jailers, torturers, and executioners. Canning held a view of espionage as dim as John le Carré’s:

She looked hard at me then, and something was touched off within which wasn’t often allowed to show in her face, but for a moment it was there, and it was something I’d seen before in Sutcliffe and Manston, something that gave one the feeling of standing naked, half-dead with fatigue, looking down into some greeny- blue ice gorge which just offered coldness while you fought off vertigo, and death when it overcame you… They all came from the same mold.

But Canning is not as solemn about it as le Carré. There are plenty of odd settings, quirky characters and one-liners that are pretty funny.

Rex Carver starred in four fast-paced adventure stories, all released between 1965 and 1968. This was Book #3. Carver occasionally works with Richard Marston, who was hero of TheLimbo Line (1963). Carver is not hard-boiled, but impudent or irreverent in that endearing and amusing way the English and Irish do so well.

Canning was a Silver Dagger winner and named a Grand Master by the British Crime Writers Association. He's becoming a neglected writer so we should read him.