Gavin Lyall · 1965 · road

Gavin Lyall's 1965 thriller. Lewis Cane, once of the wartime resistance, is hired to move a businessman across France to a shareholders' meeting in Liechtenstein by breakfast time. The police want the man for a charge he denies, other people want him dead, and the only route left runs by back roads with an alcoholic gunman in the back seat.

1. 1
   Quimper

   Cane collects his passenger on the Brittany coast, where a boat has put him ashore quietly - and finds this is not the simple drive he was sold, because the police have a warrant out and somebody has already shot at them.

2. 2
   Tours

   They work east by minor roads through the Loire country, avoiding the main routes and the roadblocks - Cane navigating from memory of a war he spent in these fields, and arguing with a bodyguard who is faster than him and drinking.

3. 3
   Dijon

   Burgundy and Dijon, and the opposition is now ahead of them as well as behind: cars waiting on the obvious roads, and a growing certainty that whoever wants Maganhard stopped knows the route as well as Cane does.

4. 4
   Geneva

   Across the Swiss frontier near Geneva, where the rules change and the pursuit has to become quieter - and the reason the meeting matters, and who benefits if it is missed, finally becomes clear.

5. 5
   Vaduz

   The deadline is a shareholders' meeting in Liechtenstein at midnight plus one, and the last stretch is a mountain road and a reckoning with the man who arranged all of it.