Dark Hero

INTRODUCTION Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse-Cheyney (1896–1951), who wrote as Peter Cheyney, was a British crime fiction writer. He published mystery fiction prolifically between 1936 and 1951. Cheyney is perhaps best known for his short stories and novels about agent/detective Lemmy Caution, which, starting in 1953, were adapted into a series of French movies, all starring Eddie Constantine. Another popular creation was the private detective Slim Callaghan, who also appeared in a series of novels and subsequent film adaptations. Cheyney was born in Whitechapel, the youngest of five children, and educated at the Mercers’ School in London. He began to write skits for the theater as a teenager, but this ended with the First World War, when he enlisted in 1915 in the British Army. In 1916 he was wounded on active service. At that time, he published two volumes of poetry, Poems of Love and War and To Corona and Other Poems. The next year, 1917, his military service ended. Starting in the late 1920s, Cheyney worked for the Metropolitan Police as a police reporter and crime investigator—background he would later draw on for his crime fiction. Until he became successful as a novelist, he was often quite poor. It is said that he got his start through a bet—when Cheyney remarked that anyone could write a book in the idiom of the American thriller, he was wagered five pounds that he could not. Cheyney sold his first story as the result of this bet. Cheyney wrote his first novel, the Lemmy Caution thriller This Man Is Dangerous, in 1936 and followed it with the first Slim Callaghan novel, The Urgent Hangman, in 1938. The immediate success of these two novels assured him of a flourishing new career, and Cheyney abandoned his work as a freelance investigator. Sales were brisk; in 1946 alone, 1,524,785 copies of his books were sold worldwide. A meticulous researcher, he kept a massive set of files on criminal activity in London, but these were destroyed during the Blitz in 1941; he however, soon began to replace his collection of clippings. He dictated his work. Typically he would “act out” his stories for his secretary, who would copy them down in shorthand and type them up later. Cheyney’s “Dark” series was widely praised during World War II for bringing more realism to espionage fiction. In their casual brutality and general “grubbiness,” the “Dark” novels seem to have foreshadowed much of the Cold War fiction of the mid to late 1960s. Anthony Boucher placed these later works in the context of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Cheyney died at age 55, after having fallen into a coma. He was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in London. —Karl Wurf Rockville, Maryland