Canning's narrative style
and choice of narrator

Canning's narrative style is straightforward. He never (except in one short story) uses the historic present as an aid to suspense, and events are told in their proper order, without flashbacks or other distortions of time.

Many novelists, particularly writers of suspense fiction, take up an early preference either for a first-person narrative, often featuring a recurrent hero, or for third-person narrative with multiple points of view, allowing the writer to narrate parallel events and adopt a god-like view. An intermediate position would be a third-person narrative with a close focus on one central character who is present in every scene, the technique largely used by Ian Fleming for his James Bond stories for instance.

Canning used all three styles. He started with the single-viewpoint third-person narrative, the pattern of his first three books, but he soon experimented with mutiple viewpoints in the books written under the pen-name Alan Gould. His middle period (1940-1970) contained almost all his first-person narratives. His favoured style in later life was the multiple viewpoint narrative, but he also wrote a great many books with the close focus on one character. In one or two cases there was an compromise position. In The crimson chalice, for instance, the action takes up one of two viewpoints, that of the woman Tia or the man Baradoc, but not straying further. His three early Mr. Finchley books, the four books about the private eye Rex Carver, the three about 'Smiler' (Samuel Miles) and the three about King Arthur were his only use of recurrent central characters; the remaining 45 books all had different heroes. One reason for this is that the conventional morality of the fifties suspense story was that the hero and heroine had to fall in love and marry, which meant they were 'used up' for plot purposes. This argument did not apply to the later Birdcage series, but in many of those books the central characters die; it is the villains who are recurrent, not the heroes.

In about one fifth of his work (12 novels out of 58) he uses a first-person narrator, always male. Usually this is the central character. In one case only, Atlantic Company, it is an observer who is a participant but not the protagonist. The name of the narrator is shown for each such book below. I have also shown the name of the main character who is tracked in the single-focus third-person narratives.

John Higgins, Shaftesbury, May 2016
updated Chiang Mai, June 2024