If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

Cannan, Joanna

Page history last edited by J F Norris 7 years, 11 months ago

Joanna Cannan was the pseudonym of Joanna Maxwell Cannan Pullein-Thompson (1898-1961), an English writer. She was born into a literary family, the daughter of an Oxford don who was a keen mountaineer, and married Harold James Pullein-Thompson in 1918. Their daughter Josephine was born in 1924, followed a year later by the twins Christine and Diana (a son, Denis, the actor and playwright, preceded them in 1919). While the girls were at school Cannan lived at The Grove, near Henley — a period joyously recalled in her daughters' jointly written memoir Fair Girls and Grey Horses (1996). She also wrote 'straight' novels and pony books for girls. Her series characters (separately) were policemen Guy Northeast and Ronald Price.

On the whole the novels are competent rather than brilliant but they do show an admirable grasp of the technical principles of the genre. -- Patricia Craig

Cannan's earlier detective novels fit into the mid-/late-thirties "literate" "Crime Queen" mode of Sayers, Allingham and Marsh. Cannan's later detective novels from 1950-62 are extremely biting satirically. She makes the police detective (Price) a nitwit. Barzun and Taylor picked Body in the Beck for their top 100 mysteries.

No Walls of Jasper and Frightened Angels are "crime novels," (quite good ones, I think), by which I mean a crime and its outcome are the focus. I don't know why they haven't had more attention, but then Joanna Cannan seems to have fallen into all round "undeserved neglect," as we say (though about four of her books have been reprinted lately, including the two early 'tec novels). Personally, I enjoyed them more than the famous Francis Iles pair. Maybe it's the urge to iconoclasm, but I found them more serious and moving. Ithuriel's Hour is a novel in which events lead up to death, haven't read it yet though. There are also two Buchanesque thrillers, as I understand, The Hills Sleep On and A Hand to Burn. All thirties.

Price, like Dover, is an amusing creation, but I would say after reading the whole series that he's being heavily satirized (maybe it's the cumulative effect!). However I think it's fair to say that the satire got heavier and less evenhanded after Murder Included. To the author I think he came to symbolize what she saw as the exasperating "new conformity" of the rising Labor middle class. Cannan's an interesting mix of what we would view as conservative and liberal sentiment, you can see it in all her books, including the detective novels.

How much you like Death at the Dog seems to me to depend on what you think of the female lead character, Crescy. People either seem to like her or hate her!

There have been some large print reprints of Cannan's Price mysteries, which makes them more accessible, if still on the pricey side.

-- Curt Evans

Rue Morgue Press reprinted Death at the Dog and They Rang Up the Police.