Book Review by Margaret B: Fountain Inn is one of the old Inns of Chancery in London and now houses a number of small businesses. Grace, a secretary in one of them loses her job but she is immediately re-employed by the Browns who run one of the other businesses in the Inn, providing all sorts of useful services and doing any odd jobs required by their clients.
The Browns are asked to look into one of the other businesses in the Inn – a religious organisation which appears to be a sort of cult and may also be a financial scam. The Browns are not actually detectives but with the help of their new secretary, Grace and her friend, George an architect who also works in Fountains Inn, they eventually find a missing member of the cult and discover the criminals behind the financial scam. They then need to rescue the missing woman and stop the criminals running off with thousands of pounds. This involves kidnapping, car chases, illegally entering houses, shoot outs in remote Welsh islands, a blossoming romance and much more.
So it feels to me like a Tintin book with all the expected tropes of a children’s adventure story – an easy to read ripping yarn that gallops along at quite a pace! The characters are well described and their is a lot of humor in their relationships.
Cover of first edition (19390
Spoiler alert:
One thing that did strike me as slightly different from many stories of this type is that our protagonists triumph in the end, only because some of the criminals have a strong sense of honor and won’t kill their victims. As a result, the criminal gang members turn against each other. Without this plot device all our protagonists would have been killed and the criminals would have escaped with the money. This doesn’t work for me and it seems to be quite a weakness in the plot unless Canning is making a deliberate point about amateurs messing in things they shouldn’t. But I don’t think it is that sort of a book!
Apparently this was Canning’s first attempt at a thriller so maybe he was still honing his thriller writing plot skills! But it was quite well received at the time and The Guardian review said ” Fountain Inn, which is extremely well written, is the attractive kind of detective story in which the main interest is not “Who?” but “How?””.
A fun if slightly flawed read with some lovely characters!
Another review of this book can be found here.
