The Doomsday Carrier by Victor Canning

published 1976

 

What a great and unusual writer Victor Canning was. He was amazingly productive, popular and successful. In an earlier blogpost on him I said this:

Victor Canning wrote thrillers, and they were the kind of paperback that, in my young years, people’s Dads had on their bookshelves – along with books by Gavin Lyall, Alastair MacLean, Wilbur Smith and Hammond Innes.

But you wouldn’t mistake him for anyone else, he has a most distinctive style.

This is a jaunty and unusual thriller, with the by-now-expected somewhat downbeat ending. As ever, the action gets going quickly: a young female research scientist (in what novels like to call 'a top-secret facility') has a shock in her private life, and as a result has a moment of inattention in her work. And a chimpanzee, Charlie, escapes. He is being experimented on, and there are good reasons why he must be found as soon as possible. Excellent setup.

But then, equally, there is a 30-day deadline: he MUST be found before that time, humankind is safe till then, but AFTER 30 days all hell will break loose.(There’s a clue in the title there.) Everything must be deadly secret for now – though people may need to be warned later… This is all extremely unconvincing in real life, but fine in fiction, although it holds its own issues. It’s a book, it’s a thriller, so we know Charlie is not going to be recaptured two days in, we know it must be going to the wire. And the Canning magic is that he makes this work, we still go along with the story. Even better, we follow the deeply-sympathetic Charlie, we always know where he is and what he is doing, and we find out backstories for the people he meets on the way. The chimp keeps slipping away from these chance-met strangers.

Meanwhile the research scientist, Jean, is secreted away with one of Canning’s security hardmen – the writer is big on shadowy departments run by cynical inhuman leaders of men. This one,  Rimster, is apparently at the end of a tough career. The two of them must stay hidden, and must be ready to race off after Charlie when he is found.

There are various plot strands you might predict from this, and all I will say is that Canning is always full of surprises, and it may not quite all go exactly as you are expecting.

The book is fascinating as a picture of mid-70s life – everyone smoking all the time, and although Jean is allowed to be both clever and successful, there are some pretty old-fashioned views of women around and see below for clothes caveats. There are also a lot of ideas discussed, some feeling very contemporary: the secret world colliding with the press, the ethics of animal experiments, worries about the way wars may be conducted in future.  

The setting is very recognizable, moving between Wiltshire and Hampshire, from Salisbury out in circles: you would assume the research facility, here named Fadledean, is based on Porton Down. Helicopters come from the (real) flying base, and search for Charlie around the beautiful hillfort at Danebury Ring.

 I am generally very resistant to animals and any attempts at anthropomorphism (though see the recent Fox 8), but I liked Charlie with his pant-hoots (‘a loud, structurally complex vocalization of chimpanzees’) his healthy appetite, and his chewed-up wads: he was truly a major character in the book.

There’s not much in the way of clothes, disappointingly, but there was one gem of a description of  Rimster – remember this is the tough guy full of unmentionable experience, who must save the world:

 

Rimster came through the open French windows of the lounge and down the brick-paved path between the terrace rose beds. He wore an open-necked green shirt with a paisley foulard at his throat and immaculately-creased light cord trousers. He looked clean, hard-chiselled and impossible to ruffle.

He sounds like he has wandered through those French windows from a quite different book -  middle-class adultery - or perhaps a social comedy/manners play of the era.

Jean doesn’t even have that much to work on in the clothes line, so I had to guess, and have taken what I think is a liberty. I couldn’t resist the top picture of the same woman in both trendy clothes and a white (‘research scientist’) coat – it’s from an ad in a fashion magazine of the era, and the point is the pen round her neck: that was quite the thing for a while there. I’d like to think this is what Jean might have looked like, but it’s probably not what was in Canning’s mind. I think his Jean looks more like this, a picture I chose for another Canning book:

These were both 1970s heroines, but they seem to belong to a much earlier time.

All in all, a most enjoyable thriller to while away an afternoon, and he fits a lot into what is a very short book. Modern-day authors write long, and presumably that is what their publishers and readers want, but Canning shows exactly what can be done in a short book.