Published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1958 at 15/- in a print run of 14,000, with some of the edition later reduced to 7/6. There was a US edition by W.Sloane Associates in 1958 at $3.95 and a paperback under the title The Captives of Mora Island by Perma Books at $0.35 in 1959. The Popular Book Club edition came out in 1959 at 4/3 and must have been very successful since secondhand copies of this edition are plentiful. The very striking cover design for the first edition is by the magnificent Val Biro, designer of 3,000 book covers.
The background to this book is an anti-colonialist struggle in "Cyrenia", clearly intended to be Cyprus. Major John Richmond is assigned the duty of acting as jailer to Hadid Chebir and Colonel Mawzi, rebel leaders who have been captured and sent into exile on Mora Island in the San Borodon group, an imaginary British dependency somewhere near the Canary Islands. Chebir is the son of a talismanic rebel leader and is accompanied by his British wife Marion. But meanwhile the rebels have hired a team of mercenaries to rescue them and wipe out the garrison.
In this book Canning draws fairly explicitly on his military experience. The privates and NCOs talk and behave very like the characters described in the short pieces Canning wrote for the Evening Standard "Did it happen?" series. This is also the only place in his writing where Canning uses the f--- word in rendering speech, in this case the speech of the soldiers and NCOs, though it is discreetly masked with dashes.
In more than one newspaper interview Canning reported with great relish that he had sold the film rights for this book to Louis B. Mayer for £30,000 just before Mayer's death in 1957 but the film had not been made.
 First edition |
 Popular Book Club |
 US paperback 1959 |
 Russian translation 1998 |
| Index of characters, locations and themes (in preparation) |
|||