Rex Carver is a fictional British private eye created by the prolific writer Victor Canning.[1] He appeared in four fast-paced, irreverently narrated novels in the 1960s.[2]
In the book preceding the novels, The Limbo Line (1963), the Government agency that Carver is unwillingly drawn into is described for the first time.[3] It introduces Richard Manston, a retired agent drawn back into the world of spies, who also appears as a character in some of the later Rex Carver books.
Although strictly a private investigator, Carver knows a number of people who work for a shadowy British undercover agency and he frequently runs into both enemy agents and hostile British agents during his adventures. It is by no means a stretch to call his adventures spy thrillers or to consider Carver himself a secret agent of sorts.[4]