One of the finest thrillers ever written, it was published by Heinemann in 1972 at £1.90 and by Morrow in the USA in 1973 at $6.95. There was a Companion Book Club edition in 1973. It was awarded the Silver Dagger of the Crime Writer's Association (UK) in 1973 and was nominated for the Edgar award in the USA in 1974. It was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Family Plot [1976], Hitchcock's last film.
It is set mainly in the village of Chilbolton in Hampshire, in and around Salisbury in Wiltshire, and in north Somerset.
A criminal signing himself "Trader" has kidnapped two public figures, both Labour Members of Parliament, for relatively small ransoms, but has made sure there has been press coverage. The handovers of money and victims are arranged with meticulous care, and the authorities are unable to identify the kidnappers.
Miss Rainbird, an elderly spinster living in Chilbolton, has engaged a spirit medium, Blanche Tyler, to track down her illegitimate nephew whom the family sent for adoption forty years before. The medium uses her boyfriend, George Lumley, to make enquiries in the village, the results of which she can later present as spirit communications, so George sets out to find the nephew and eventually identifies him as Edward Shoebridge. A lucky accident gives Blanche Shoebridge's address, but she does not tell George that she now has it.
Meanwhile "Trader" prepares his biggest coup, the kidnapping of the Archbishop of Canterbury without publicity and for a vast ransom. Blanche visits Shoebridge and sees enough to expose him as "Trader". She is murdered, and George is suspected. But meanwhile Shoebridge makes a small mistake which allows the security policeman Grandison to start tracking him down. The ending is quite unexpected and sinister.
This was Canning's masterpiece, a beautifully characterised and plotted story, drawing out two of the main Canning themes: love for the rural landscape, and the equal ruthlessness of criminals and law enforcers, with harmless if not entirely innocent bystanders crushed between them. The description of the working practices of a spirit medium is quite brilliant, exposing the mixture of deception and self-deception which is necessary to her trade. The book relies on the central mechanism of narrating two almost parallel sets of events which are bound to intersect; we can see that a collision is coming and would love to warn the characters, but are as powerless as a pantomime audience calling "Behind you!".
The Hitchcock film version, Family Plot, started fairly close to the book, but then turned into a completely different story with a conventional happy ending as Blanche and George catch the kidnappers and find the ransoms. The treatment suffered, too, by being set in the USA where there is no figure to kidnap who is quite comparable to the Archbishop of Canterbury; one can't get quite so worked up about "Bishop Wood". The film contains reprises of some classic Hitchcock set pieces, such as the sabotaged car careering down a mountain road, followed by the the would-be murderer trying to run down George and Blanche on the deserted road. Significantly, the scriptwriter, Ernest Lehmann, was the scriptwriter for North By Northwest.
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 US paperback |
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 Portuguese translation |
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| "Chilbolton ... was a longish, straggly village with pink and white thatched cottages, and some more substantial houses. Everything spick and span and one look told you that there was money around." (Page 17) | "The church didn’t impress him as much as Reed Court. It was a rather gloomy flint-built affair with an insignificant-looking wooden spire perched on one corner. The weather vane on top bore the date 1897. Not the finest flowering period of English architecture." (Page 18) |
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| "From Reed Court he went back into the village and parked outside the Abbot’s Mitre. Four drinks later his dossier on Miss Grace Rainbird was building up nicely." (Page 17) | "This was the story Mrs Gradidge told—and which George had dutifully passed on to Blanche. Mrs Gradidge took a great glee in pointing out that, while quite a few in the village knew perfectly well what had happened up at Reed Court and in Northumberland, neither Sholto nor Miss Grace Rainbird had any inkling that the skeleton in their family cupboard had long been walking abroad. And, Mrs Gradidge hinted, there were other things that could be told if one had a mind to. Not that she would because she didn’t hold with gossip and scandalizing. Sometimes, for instance, the two lovers had used the old fishing hut where Gradidge kept reeds for thatching—and they hadn’t been the first by a long street. George, who had had enough, escaped to the Abbot’s Mitre where he had three quick whiskies to take the bad taste from his mouth." (Page 67) |
Note: I sometimes think the weakest thing about this book is the title. In the sixties Canning had written a series of short stories about a fictional "Department of Patterns" in the French Sūreté, with titles like "The Doomsday Pattern" and "The Carnation Pattern". I suspect that when he started writing the book he used "The Rainbird Pattern" as a working title until he could think of something better. Somehow it got through to the published version. In this respect, at least, Hitchcock improved on the original, with a punning reference to the graveyard in which George starts his hunt for the Rainbird family secrets.
