A Handful of Silver / Castle Minerva (1954/1955)

The British edition but not the American one has the dedication "To my wife".

This is only the second of Canning's books to use first-person narration, the first since since Atlantic Company in 1940.

David Fraser, a schoolmaster on a climbing holiday in north Wales, meets Colonel Francis Drexel, his old war-time commander. Drexel recruits him for a vacation assignment, to go to south-west France to take charge of an Arab princeling being held in safe custody for a few weeks until he comes of age to sign an oil treaty which his wicked uncle opposes.

Once installed in Banyuls-sur-mer, Fraser encounters a sinister group of circus artistes including the beguiling Sophie, whom he falls for. Within a few days the princeling vanishes, and Fraser is blamed. What follows is a helter-skelter race through the Pyrenees, with some literal cliff-hanging episodes, until the details of the plot are disclosed.

This was Canning's eighth post-war book for Hodder and Stoughton, published in 1955 at 10/6 with a print run of 11,500 copies. The US edition by William Sloane Associates actually came out in 1954 under the title A Handful of Silver, making it the true first edition. The Companion Book Club combined edition of 1957, pairing it with The Hidden Face and selling for 5/-, must have sold well; second-hand copies of this edition are plentiful. There was a Hodder paperback in 1962 with a print run of 25,000, and a Heinemann uniform edition in 1971 at 18/-, reissued in 1973 after decimalisation at £2.30 (there's inflation for you!). There was another paperback edition in 1980 by Sundial Publications, for sale in Marks and Spencer stores. This was marred by some very poor proofreading.