Tue 28 Mar 2017
THE LOST BOOKS OF PETER CHEYNEY, Part One, by Keith Chapman.
Posted by Steve under Authors[3] Comments
by Keith Chapman
My email traffic has been buzzing with Peter Cheyney messages, both “to” and “from.”
UK bibliographer Steve Holland of the Bear Alley blog, which has in the past run several lengthy posts about this hugely successful author of thrillers in the 1940s and ’50s, recently wrote to say: “Amazing to see all these forgotten works by such a major author turning up.”
Now available at Roy Glashan’s freeread.com.au (a Project Gutenberg offshoot) is The Deadly Fresco, which made its first appearance as a newspaper serial in Australia in 1932.
In Roy’s pipeline are several more such full-length works, written as much as eight years prior to publication of the “first” Cheyney novels recorded at Wikipedia, the Thrilling Detective website, the Official Peter Cheyney website, etc.
Just a few days ago I told Roy about The Sign on the Roof, serialized in the Auckland Star from September 14 to October 5 in 1935, and about Death Chair serialized in the New Zealand Herald from May 21 to July 16 in 1932. (Very incidentally the NZ Herald was the first paper I worked on after arriving here in 1967, and I was an Auckland Star sub-editor at the time of its closure in 1991.)
Roy replied, “I wasn’t aware of the existence of this novel [The Sign on the Roof]. ”
Steve Holland found an advertisement in a British newspaper announcing serialization of Death Chair in the Sheffield Mail in 1931. It said, “Mr Peter Cheyney is already well known to Sheffield Mail serial readers who remember his splendid stories The Vengeance of Hop Fi and The Gold Kimono.”
Both these serials were also syndicated and ran in Australian and New Zealand newspapers, such as the Auckland Star and the New Zealand Herald. Digital image files can be seen at PapersPast, a website of the National Library of New Zealand.
Roy tells me he has ebook versions of the pair in the pipeline for his RG Library at freeread.com.au. The Vengeance of Hop Fi‘s first appearance that he knew of was the serialization in the Auckland Star beginning on July 7, 1928.
The FictionMags Index has novella, presumably abridged, versions of the Hop Fi and Komino stories listed under the pen-name “Stephen Law” and published in 1937 in single issues of the Amalgamated Press’s Detective Weekly. FictionMags also lists a newspaper serialization of The Sign on the Roof in The Hawick News (Scotland) in 1935.
Whetting my reading appetite for these well and truly forgotten books, not known to have been in print since the 1920s and ’30s, is this quote from the NZ Herald:
“The Death Chair is an astounding story told by a great writer in his most brilliant form. It is drama, pathos, humour, a story that captivates the minds of all who read.”
Note: Part Two of this two-part article appears here.
March 28th, 2017 at 9:40 pm
I just read FRESCO, looking forward to more. It will be interesting to see if some early stories have echoes in later works.
March 29th, 2017 at 3:51 pm
I’m sure you will find those echoes, David, although none of these “lost” books are as polished as Cheyney’s later novels. My suspicion is that the original newspaper serials were sold by Cheyney’s own agency: “In 1926 he founded and directed the Editorial and Literary Services Agency. He and his staff researched, wrote and sold stories and features to newspapers and magazines throughout Britain and overseas” [Collectors’ Digest, March 1999]. Whether newspaper sub-editors of that period would have had the inclination or competence to prepare the material for publication in a way a book editor/publisher might is open to question.
Newspeople’s predominant attitude during my time in the industry is that “magazine” content is of far less importance than news or even advertisements. Consequently it’s the first item on a page to be adjusted to meet other demands on space.
In FRESCO, Chapter VI is headed “Five Frescoes”, but as far as I can see no fresco is mentioned until the opening paragraphs of Chapter VII. I suspect The Chronicle‘s sub-editors in Adelaide might have moved the chapter break either for reasons of space or to give a more effective cliffhanger/curtain to the previous installment.
I was also baffled earlier by the way the name Nirac was abruptly introduced into the story, although Duplessis does later mention the man was named to him in a conversation with Anne de Guerrac not actually recounted in the story — or the version of it the newspaper uses.
A lot of the dialogue comes in unrealistic slabs, which also bothers me. It suggests bits of natural “business” unimportant to the progress of the story, but which might make its reading more pleasurable, have been deleted.
Since Roy Glashan compiled his fine Bibliographic Note which appears at the beginning of the ebook we now have, I made an online search of the British Newspaper Archive. It produced the additional info that Deadly Fresco was serialized in The Ballymena Observer, Antrim, Northern Ireland, from Friday, 3 August, 1934. Whether it had an earlier appearance in the UK remains unknown.
March 29th, 2017 at 10:41 pm
It’s always fun to see writers cannibalize other work to use Chandler’s term for the process. Since Cheyney tended to repeat certain motifs and characters it will be fun to see there evolution.