Peter Cheyney

• Born: February 22, 1896
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: June 26, 1951
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; espionage

Principal Series: Alonzo MacTavish, 1943-1946; Lemmy Caution, 1936-1953; Slim Callaghan, 1937-1953; Dark series, 1942-1950

Contribution

At a time when British crime fiction exerted a strong influence on American writers, Peter Cheyney was the first British author to show that he was influenced by crime fiction in the United States. His novels about tough G-man Lemmy Caution and private eye Slim Callaghan combined fast action with surprises. A popular mystery writer with no literary pretensions, Cheyney sold more than 1.5 million books in 1944 alone. An examination of his popularity shows that he was versatile in the ways he could entertain his large audience. As he progressed, his writing became more subtle, and in his Dark series near the end of his career, Cheyney produced books that vividly conveyed a picture of the divided world of wartime espionage and its cynicism, violence, and double-crosses.

Biography

Peter Cheyney was born Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney on February 22, 1896, in the East End of London. His father helped operate a fish stall at Billingsgate, and his mother ran a corset shop in Whitechapel. Cheyney started writing while still in grammar school, publishing poems and articles in boys’ magazines. When his oldest brother found work as a performer in music halls, Cheyney became attracted to vaudeville and the stage. At seventeen, he was reworking comedy skits in knock-about farces and even toured briefly with one company as its stage manager.

World War I interrupted this informal apprenticeship, and Cheyney enlisted in the army, rising to the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he published two volumes of sentimental verse and wrote many songs and hundreds of short stories. In 1919, he married the first of his three wives.

Cheyney’s initial attempt at a crime novel, a manuscript intended for the Sexton Blake series, was rejected in 1923. He was also undistinguished in his work as a shopkeeper, bookmaker, radio performer (adopting the first name Peter), politician (supporting Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists), and editor.

At the age of forty, Cheyney achieved popularity on his own with his first published novel, This Man Is Dangerous (1936), the book that introduced Lemmy Caution. When a reviewer predicted that readers would reject any Cheyney book not about Caution, Cheyney accepted the challenge and wrote The Urgent Hangman (1937), the first of many Slim Callaghan novels. Nevertheless, Cheyney considered the espionage novels that he wrote in the 1940’s his best work.

One of the most prolific and popular crime writers of his day, Cheyney published at least two books a year, though he was more popular in England and France than in the United States. He died in 1951.

Analysis

Peter Cheyney’s most notable literary trait was his ability to surprise his readers with unexpected twists, hidden motives, and double-crosses. This unpredictability marked nearly all Cheyney’s highly popular works and can even be traced to the short stories Cheyney wrote during the 1920’s. His first recurring character, Alonzo MacTavish, appeared in a series of stories in which Cheyney honed his skills as a creator of surprising plots.

“Sold!”

MacTavish is a gentleman jewel thief and rogue patterned after E. W. Hornung’s amateur cracksman, A. J. Raffles. The story “Sold!” furnishes a good example of Cheyney’s use of surprise. In it, one of MacTavish’s gang seemingly sells out his boss by alerting the police to MacTavish’s next heist. When arrested with the goods, MacTavish indignantly claims that the stones in his possession are duplicates he purchased elsewhere and that he had arranged to show the fakes to the owner of the genuine jewels that night. He even challenges the police to summon the owner to verify his story; arriving at headquarters later, the owner does so. While this meeting is taking place, however, one of MacTavish’s men steals the real jewels from the owner’s safe, the creation of the duplicates having been MacTavish’s ploy to lure the owner away from his home and supply a solid alibi during the robbery. Both police and reader spot the ruse too late. Even after the reader learns to expect a surprise in a Cheyney story, the author’s misdirection usually produces enough twists to outfox any wary reader.

Lemmy Caution Series

The surprises in the Lemmy Caution books, which Cheyney began in 1936, center primarily on their action and pace, qualities that made the books very popular in England. Cheyney was the first British writer to attempt to copy the idiom of the hard-boiled crime fiction that appeared in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective. Mixing imitation Yankee slang with the argot of cops and crooks, narrator-hero Lemmy Caution (“let me caution you”) pursues both foes and women with unshackled energy: “The big curtain that is swung across the dance floor goes away to one side an’ one of the niftiest legged choruses I have ever lamped starts in to work a number that would have woke up a corpse.”

G-man Caution was shaped by the popularity of characters such as Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner. Daly and Bellem both published regularly in the pulps; every issue of Spicy Detective featured a Dan Turner story. The American gangster film, which also rose to great popularity at this time, supplied another likely influence on the Caution books. Films such as Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and the many others ground out by Warner Bros. acquainted the public with Hollywood’s version of mobsters. A subplot involving rival Chicago bootleggers in Cheyney’s novel Dark Hero (1946), for example, broadly parallels Howard Hawks’s 1932 film Scarface, and references to film stars and filmgoing dot many of Cheyney’s books. Also new and popular in the early 1930’s were newspaper comic-strip cops such as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy (syndicated in 1931), Dan Dunn, Secret Operative 48 (1933), and Dashiell Hammett’s and Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9 (1934). The exaggerated, full-throttle style of the Caution books even reads like a novelized comic strip for adults, as in this example from Don’t Get Me Wrong (1939):

Some little curtains at the back part an’ out comes Zellara. Here is a dame who has got somethin’. She is a real Mexican. Little, slim an’ made like a piece of indiarubber. She has got a swell shape an’ a lovely face with a pair of the naughtiest lookin’ brown eyes I have ever seen in my life. She sings a song an’ goes into a rumba dance. This baby has got what it takes all right.

Me, I have seen dames swing it before but I reckon that if this Zellara hadda been let loose in the Garden of Eden Adam woulda taken a quick run-out powder an’ the serpent woulda been found hidin’ behind the rose-bushes with his fingers crossed. At the risk of repeatin’ myself I will tell you guys that this dame is a one hundred per cent exclusive custom-built 1939 model fitted with all the speed gadgets an’ guarantees not to skid goin’ round the corners.

When the pulps gave way to paperback originals, detectives such as Race Williams, Dan Turner, Hammett’s Continental Op, the Shadow, Doc Savage, and others made room for the likes of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, who in many ways is a more sexual, violent version of Lemmy Caution. The tongue-in-cheek humor of the Caution books turned up later in paperbacks by writers such as Richard S. Prather. A clear echo of the voice of Lemmy Caution can be heard in Prather’s private eye Shell Scott: “Man, she had a shape to make corpses kick open caskets—and she was dead set on giving me rigor mortis.” Another of Cheyney’s literary descendants was Ian Fleming. Before writing Casino Royale (1953), the first James Bond novel, Fleming studied Cheyney’s work carefully. When a reviewer later referred to Bond as a Lemmy Caution for the higher classes, Fleming was delighted.

Slim Callaghan Series

In his series about hard-boiled British private eye Slim Callaghan, Cheyney maintained his popularity and combined his gift for surprise with writing that was much more understated. This restrained quality largely resulted from the change of setting from the United States (which Cheyney never visited until 1948) in the Caution books to England in the Callaghan novels. The switch from the headlong, first-person narration of Lemmy Caution to third-person narration also gave the Callaghan novels a grittier, more objective tone.

In the third book of the series, You Can’t Keep the Change (1940) , Cheyney introduced Windemere “Windy” Nikolls as Callaghan’s assistant (replacing operative Monty Kells, who had been killed in the second novel). In subsequent adventures, Nikolls assumed the role of the wisecracking sidekick who flirts with secretary Effie Thompson, reminisces about his many dames, follows up leads, and generally provides comic relief. Windy is, if anything, aptly named, but the breezy street slang that was the staple of the Caution books is in the Callaghan series mostly confined to Windy. This change of emphasis struck a new balance for Cheyney. Windy, the background operative, is the man of instinct and action—not unlike Lemmy Caution—while the hero, Callaghan, who uses muscle when necessary, primarily thinks his way through a case by winnowing the real clues from the red herrings, untangling motives, and hazarding on some lucky hunches.

Such changes not only produced subtler books but also freed Cheyney to give more personality to his series hero. Callaghan himself is a seedy, hard-bitten, outwardly cynical detective who conceals a soft spot for a pretty face and figure. Cheyney applied his talent for surprise and intricate plotting to Callaghan’s character as well. Sometimes surprising the reader by seeming to betray his own client, Callaghan might also plant incriminating evidence to frame another suspect or appear to blackmail someone linked to the case simply to enrich himself. This playing of both ends against the middle shapes the early novels more than the later ones, although most characters throughout the series size up Callaghan as an opportunist. Callaghan’s shady conduct is always explained, however, in the final chapters as simply tactics to gain time or goad the culprit into revealing his guilt. If Callaghan has a code, in fact, it would be to remain faithful to his client. The later, less violent novels even indicate a slight softening of the detective. In the opening chapters of They Never Say When (1944), for example, after he has found a client’s jeweled coronet and stopped her blackmailer, Callaghan returns her retainer of a thousand pounds because, he says, the jobs were too easy. Cheyney wrote a number of Caution novels and Callaghan novels, and numerous short stories about these characters; this British hard-boiled tradition was later to continue in the works of James Hadley Chase and Carter Brown.

Dark Series

If the Callaghan books took the surprises of the MacTavish stories and the action of the Caution novels and added to them a more subdued, Hammett-like writing style, the Dark series of novels that Cheyney wrote in the 1940’s was somewhat more ambitious. In these books, Cheyney began to focus more on character and theme. Although various characters recur in many of the novels in this group, the series is distinguished more by its brooding, sinister atmosphere than by any unifying hero. In fact, no single character appears in every book of the series, and some of the novels do not even deal directly with espionage.

For example, in Dark Hero, Cheyney presents a character study of a naïve youth who slides into crime and violence. Indirect exposition and a shifting narrative focus supply pieces of this character’s personality. The prologue describes the wartime efforts of the hero, Rene Berg, to revenge himself on the subcommandant of his prisoner-of-war camp. Chapter 1 follows Berg after the war as he mysteriously contacts old acquaintances in his effort to hunt down and kill a woman who had also betrayed him. Flashing back to Prohibition Chicago, chapter 2 uncovers the roots of these two betrayals. A young Berg first arrives in the city in this chapter and gradually falls in with bootleggers at the midpoint of the novel. By breaking up the linear exposition of most crime novels and by revealing the effects of Berg’s actions before their causes emerge, Cheyney is able to probe Berg’s motivations and to highlight his changing emotions more clearly.

Cheyney’s fondness for involved plots and double-crosses lent itself perfectly to the shadow world of wartime espionage, where loyalties were suspect and treachery existed everywhere. Dark Duet (1942) is a good example of Cheyney’s work in espionage fiction. The two protagonists, Michael Kane and Ernie Guelvada, are British agents assigned to kill a female saboteur loose in England. Cheyney’s concern with the tensions between love and war both sharpens character and gives greater coherence and suspense to the developing story: Kane has concealed his espionage work from his lover, Valetta Fallon, and constantly warns his partner Guelvada about the perils of emotionalism in their work. It develops that Guelvada’s least suspicious approach to the saboteur necessitates an innocent flirtation with her. After her eventual liquidation, Kane and Guelvada seek her paymasters in Lisbon, where Guelvada meets a former lover unknowingly in league with a Nazi agent. Suddenly, the truth of Kane’s warnings begins to register on him. In the climax of the novel, the Nazis plan to retaliate against Kane by working through Valetta Fallon back in England. Exploiting her loneliness, they insinuate an agent into her company to kindle a romance and win her confidence. Through him, the Nazis tell Valetta that Kane has betrayed England and is really a secret German spy. Cheyney’s surprises in the denouement of Dark Duet include Nazis working as false Scotland Yard men to feed Valetta more lies about Kane’s wartime activities. Before the tension is resolved, both Kane and Guelvada must face squarely the difficulties of the conflicting pull between the lonely efficiency of the secret agent and his normal desire for company. Each ends the book alone.

Published in the 1940’s, the Dark novels appeared at a time when espionage fiction was evolving from the patriotic chivalry and uncomplicated politics of John Buchan’s thrillers to the more cynical, morally ambiguous climate of post-1960’s spy novels. A breakthrough book that had helped trigger this change was W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or, The British Agent (1928). Eric Ambler’s early spy novels (such as Background to Danger, 1937, and Epitaph for a Spy, 1938) also contributed to this development by emphasizing character, good writing, and a keen political sense. Ambler published six of these novels before the start of World War II. Cheyney’s Dark series played its part as well, and the atmosphere and tone of later books such as The Secret Ways (1959) by Alistair MacLean and Donald Hamilton’s series of paperbacks about agent Matt Helm recall to some extent the sinister landscape in Cheyney’s novels of intrigue. By the time of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the action thriller of the World War II period had deepened into the more sophisticated and more literary espionage fiction of the Cold War.

Cheyney propounded no theory about crime fiction. He produced his books quickly and maintained a growing popularity in his lifetime. Yet this success was based on great versatility—unexpected twists, lower-keyed writing in the Callaghan novels, and an emphasis on character and theme in the Dark series.

Principal Series Characters:

• Alonzo MacTavish , a rogue and a gentleman jewel thief, engages in elaborate ruses.
• Lemmy Caution , an American G-man, slugs hoodlums, solves murders, and meets up with many dangerous dames. Caution narrates in a rough-and-tumble present tense that contributes to the speed and camp of the novels.
• Slim Callaghan , a virtuoso liar and hard-boiled private eye, is also canny, resourceful, and tough. He chain-smokes Players cigarettes as he sleuths in the dark streets of London. In the second novel, Callaghan Investigations has prospered and relocated from Chancery Lane to Berkeley Square, where Callaghan also keeps an apartment.
• Effie Thompson , Callaghan’s secretary, in the first book is called
• Effie Perkins . Attractive and caustic, Effie barely contains her jealousy and anger over the many beautiful women Callaghan encounters.
• Detective Inspector Gringall of New Scotland Yard is Callaghan’s rival on the police force. Although often exasperated by Callaghan’s withholding of evidence, Gringall nevertheless gradually comes to respect Callaghan’s basic integrity and shrewdness.
• Everard Peter Quayle , the spymaster, coolly juggles his operatives so that each knows only as much as is needed for his part in a particular mission.
• Ernie Guelvada is an agent who likes to perform his jobs with an artistic flair.
• Shaun Aloysius O’Mara is a special operative who is called in whenever a job appears endangered.

Bibliography

Harrison, Michael. Peter Cheyney, Prince of Hokum: A Biography. London: N. Spearman, 1954. At more than three hundred pages, this is by far the most comprehensive source on Cheyney’s life and career.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Includes readings of Cheyney’s Dames Don’t Care, Can Ladies Kill?, and You’d Be Surprised.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structuralist analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Briefly mentions Cheyney and helps readers place him within the context of the genre.