1. Mr Finchley Discovers His England
Edgar Finchley is a forty-five-year-old solicitor’s clerk who has never taken a proper holiday. His carefully planned trip to Margate is overturned when he falls asleep in a motorcar, wakes to find it being stolen and becomes an unwilling passenger in a police chase. Once released,…
2. Mr Finchley Goes to Paris
Just as Edgar Finchley is preparing to propose to Mrs Crantell, his employers send him to Paris to discuss an inheritance with a client. There he befriends Robert, an English orphan living informally beside the Seine, and is drawn into the boy’s improvised exploration of the…
3. Mr Finchley Takes the Road
Now married, Edgar Finchley buys a brightly painted horse-drawn caravan and sets out alone through Kent while looking for a house. Learning to manage the horse, the vehicle and life on the road exposes him to village tradespeople, landowners, itinerant workers and a sequence of unsuitable…
4. The Improvised Life of Polycarp Jarvis
On his twenty-first birthday, Bristol clerk John Polycarp Jarvis celebrates too freely with his employer’s daughter and loses his secure position. Rather than seek another conventional office job, he begins an erratic progress through 1930s Britain. He drives a bus, helps establish a flying circus, becomes…
5. Fly Away Paul
Paul Morison, an American engineer travelling to England to see his mother’s birthplace, closely resembles the celebrated singer Peter Angel. When Angel asks him to take his place during a private absence, Paul agrees to a brief impersonation. Public appearances, newspaper attention and an encounter with…
6. The Uncertain Future of the Silvermans
Matthew Silverman edits the Swanbridge Messenger, the provincial newspaper established by his great-grandfather. He expects his eldest son George to inherit the editor’s chair, but George chooses the Church instead. The second son, Alexander, reluctantly enters journalism while harbouring artistic and political ambitions, and the younger…
7. Fountain Inn
When her employer disappears and leaves a bankrupt business behind, typist Grace Kirkstall finds work with Ben and Helen Brown in the same rambling London building. Their new firm undertakes awkward jobs for clients who need discreet practical help. Its first substantial commission requires them to…
8. The Minerva Club
The Minerva Club is a discreet London institution whose membership is restricted to men with substantial criminal records. Within its respectable rooms, experienced thieves and confidence tricksters exchange ideas, plan ventures and apply professional pride to problems that ordinary clubs would never discuss. Their schemes involve…
9. The Aberdyll Onion
This collection brings together Victor Canning’s post-war short fiction of crime, deception and comic misadventure. The settings range from a Welsh valley and the French countryside to Mediterranean islands and urban interiors. Amateur schemers, cautious professionals and ordinary people facing unusual temptations repeatedly discover that a…
10. Young Man on a Bicycle
The title novella follows Paul Ashcroft, an opportunistic young Englishman on the French Riviera who survives through theft, impersonation and carefully directed charm. Posing as a respectable visitor, he gains access to villas and wealthy holidaymakers while attributing his crimes to another crook. His calculations become…