A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Francis M. Nevins:

   
PETER CHEYNEY – This Man Is Dangerous. Coward McCann, US, hardcover, 1938. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1936. Reprinted many times in paperback. Film: Sonofilm, 1954, as Cet Homme Est Dangeureux (This Man Is Dangerous) (with Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution; director: Jean Sacha). Released in the US as Dangerous Agent.

PETER CHEYNEY

   Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) never visited the United States in his life and knew next to nothing about Americans, but in the late 1930s be became an instant success in his native England and in Europe, especially France, as a writer of fake-American hard-boiled novels.

   In This Man Is Dangerous and ten subsequent titles, he chronicled the adventures of rootin’ -tootin’ two-gun-shootin’ Lemmy Caution, an indestructible FBI agent who downs liquor by the quart, laughs at bullets flying his way, romances every dame in sight, and blasts away at greasy ethnic-named racketeers – and (in the later novels) Nazi spies.

   Americans, of course, saw these ridiculous exercises for what they were, and only the first few were ever published here. Certainly no one would read Lemmy Cautions for their plots, which are uniform from book to book — all the nasties double-crossing each other over the McGuffin — nor for their characterizations, which are pure comic strip.

PETER CHEYNEY

   But mystery fans with a taste for lunacy may be attracted by Cheyney’s self-created idiom. Lemmy narrates his cases in first person and present tense, a wild-and-crazy stylistic smorgasbord concocted from Grade Z western films, the stories of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, eyeballpoppers apparently of Cheyney’s own invention (like “He blew the bezuzus” for “He spilled the beans”), and a steady stream of British spellings and locutions.

   Nothing but quotation can convey the Cheyney flavor. From This Man Is Dangerous:

    I says good night, and I nods to the boys. I take my hat from the hall an’ I walk down the stairs to the street. I’m feeling pretty good because I reckon that muscling in on this racket of Siegella’s is going to be a good thing for me, and maybe if I use my brains an’ keep my eyes skinned, I can still find some means of double-crossing this wop.

   From Don’t Get Me Wrong (1939):

    Me — I am prejudiced. I would rather stick around with a bad-tempered tiger than get on the wrong bias of one of these knife-throwin’ palookas; I would rather four-flush a team of wild alligators outa their lunch-pail than try an’ tell a Mexican momma that I was tired of her geography an’ did not wish to play any more.

   From Your Deal, My Lovely (1941):

PETER CHEYNEY

    Some mug by the name of Confucius — who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables — once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin’ around bein’ impervious to the weather an’ anything else that was goin, an’ lookin’ like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was suffering from woman trouble.

   Lemmy Caution became so popular on the Continent that Eddie Constantine, an American actor, portrayed him in a series of French films. These films were so successful that Jean Luc Godard used Constantine as Caution in his New Wave film Alphaville.

   Eventually Cheyney launched a second wave of novels, written in a spare ersatz-Hammett style and featuring Slim Callaghan, London’s toughest PI. But for those who love pure absurdity, and appreciate the wild stylistic flights of Robert Leslie Bellem and Henry Kane and Richard S. Prather, a treat of comparable dimensions is in store when they tackle the adventures of Lemmy Caution.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

   

PETER CHEYNEY