During World War I his father served as an ambulance driver in France and Flanders, while he with his two sisters went to live in the village of Calstock ten miles north of Plymouth, where his uncle Cecil Goold worked for the railways and later became station master.
Here he was encouraged to stay on at school and go to university by a classical scholar, Dr. Henderson, but the family could not afford it and instead Victor went to work as a clerk in the education office at age 16.
[1] Within three years he had started selling short stories to boys' magazines and in 1934, his first novel, Mr. Finchley Discovers His England, was accepted by Hodder and Stoughton and became a runaway best seller.
[1] In 1935 he married Phyllis McEwen, a woman from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare.
Canning worked in anti-aircraft batteries in the south of England until early 1943, when he was sent to North Africa and took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaigns.
In 1965 he began a series of four books featuring a private detective called Rex Carver, and these were among his most successful in sales terms.
[6] Some time at the end of the 1960s, he began an affair with Diana Bird, the estranged wife of a solicitor living in the area, which led to his separation from Phyllis and leaving the family home in 1969 to settle in Devon.
The settings are mostly in the south of England, and the villains are often sinister government officials who crush the innocent bystanders who might expose them.