Rex Carver is a fictional British private eye created by the prolific writer Victor Canning

Victor Canning

Victor Canning was a prolific writer of novels and thrillers who flourished in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, but whose reputation has faded since his death in 1986...

. He appeared in 5 fast-paced, irreverently narrated novels in the 1960s. Although strictly a private eye, 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.