Victor Canning's Castle Minerva

Victor Canning (1911-1986) was an English writer whose first novel was published in 1934, his last in 1985. He wrote historical fiction, children’s books, private eye thrillers and spy fiction. He was very successful but sadly is now largely forgotten. His spy thriller Castle Minerva appeared in 1955.

David Fraser had done espionage work during the war but has settled down into a contented life as a schoolmaster. On a climbing holiday in Wales he runs into his old commanding officer, Colonel Drexel. Drexel saved David’s life during the war so when Drexel asks him to take on a cloak-and-dagger job he cannot refuse.

It seems simple. He has to babysit a young Arab prince named Jamal, in a villa in the south of France near the Spanish border.

David has a bit of a thing for aquariums and in the local aquarium he spots a pretty young woman. Being an ex-spy David knows when he’s under surveillance and this girl definitely seems to be watching him. Then she drops her handbag, and it’s obvious that she has done this deliberately. She is trying to attract his attention. She certainly has no trouble doing that. They meet again later. Her name is Sophie. David is hopelessly in love with her.

By this time alarm bells should be ringing in David’s head. It’s not just the meeting with the girl. It’s also her two male friends, very unsavoury types to be friends of such a nice girl. And there’s the missing key. And the ’phone call about the motor launch. And the dogs that don’t bark when they should. Those alarms bells don’t ring because David is too busy daydreaming about his future life with Sophie. They will of course get married. He’s not sure how many children they will have. Sophie certainly reciprocates his romantic feelings.

David has also made the acquaintance of Dunwoody, a genial eccentric middle-aged Englishman who always just happens to be on hand when something interesting happens.

Then David’s world collapses about his ears. The job he’s doing for Drexel goes very wrong. Jamal is gone. David is under police suspicion. He realises that Drexel thinks his protégé has turned traitor. David is held prisoner, but not by the police. He knows that Sophie cannot be involved in anything underhand. She is after all the girl he’s going to marry. But David is in a lot of trouble and things just keep getting worse.

There has been betrayal but there are quite a few suspects.

An interesting aspect to this novel is Canning’s brutally realistic, even cynical, view of the worlds of espionage and government. The background to David’s adventure is a power struggle in the tiny Arab principality of Ramaut. There are several players in this power struggle, one of them being the British Government. The British Government isn’t interested in freedom and democracy, or high moral principles, or the welfare of the people of Ramaut or even for that matter the welfare of the British people. Ramaut has zero strategic importance. But there is oil in Ramaut. The British Government is serving the commercial interests of a British oil company. The only consideration is money.

There is plenty of moral murkiness in this story. The bad guys don’t do bad things because they’re evil. They’re not actually evil. They do bad things for comprehensible motives. The good guys aren’t exactly paragons of virtue. Even David is no knight in shining armour. He doesn’t give a damn about freedom and democracy or Queen and Country or the people of Ramaut. His motivations are entirely personal. He doesn’t like being betrayed, he wants revenge for wrongs he has suffered and he wants the girl. He is a decent man and a likeable hero but he’s no saint.

Sophie is complicated as well. There are things about her that David needs to know but doesn’t. She could of course be the femme fatale here but she could just as easily be a victim or an innocent bystander.

This is very much a psychological spy novel. It’s more in the gritty realist tradition of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and (later) Len Deighton than in the action-adventure Bond tradition. There is plenty of moral complexity. But it’s also very entertaining. The plotting is tight and clever, Canning pulls off some superb suspense sequences and some fine action scenes. There’s nothing dull about this novel.

Castle Minerva is superb spy fiction. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Canning’s excellent 1948 spy thriller Panther’s Moon (which really does involve panthers and oddly enough there are real tigers involved in Castle Minerva).