Thu 26 May 2016
Book Announcement: MICHAEL KEYTON – ‘Cheyney, Behave’ Peter Cheyney: A Darker World.
Posted by Steve under Books Noted[12] Comments
by Michael Keyton
I came across Peter Cheyney when I was somewhere between twelve and thirteen. A church bazaar or second hand bookshop, the memory is blurred. What remains clear is that being basically stupid and already with the propensity to read what I wanted to read, I assumed at first the book was a western ‘Peter Cheyenne’ being some kind of cowboy. When it became clear that it wasn’t a western, I put the book down convinced Peter Cheyenne was an American thriller writer.
I forgot all about him (well almost, the name having some kind of magic) for almost forty years. And this ‘forgetting’ is key to the whole story. Peter Cheyney was the most popular and prolific British author of his day. He was also the most highly paid. His curse perhaps is that he undoubtedly influenced Ian Fleming, for Bond is nothing more than a glamorous composite of the Cheyney ‘hero’. Cheyney created the template that Fleming developed, and the rest is history. Bond got Chubby Broccoli and celluloid fame, Peter Cheyney obscurity and critical censure.
John le Carre, when asked about spy books that might have influenced him as a child, gave the following response. He duly bowed his head to Kipling, Conrad, Buchan and Greene, and then referred to the: ‘…awful, mercifully-forgotten chauvinistic writers like Peter Cheyney and Co.’
John Sutherland made a similar point, referring to Cheyney’s Dark Series as the ‘high point of a resolutely low flying career.’ These two, wonderfully pithy, assessments are true to a point. They are also skewed by the cultural background and literary talent of both men.
Cheyney was chauvinistic, and no great shakes in terms of vocabulary and style, but he shouldn’t be forgotten ‘mercifully’ or otherwise. Cheyney’s success as the most highly paid writer of his time does not necessarily qualify him as a literary giant, but it does show that his work reflected the attitudes and mood of a huge swathe of the population, amplified it and played it back to them. Cheyney talked to the popular mood rather than the concerns of an educated elite. It was ‘everyman’ who bought his work in droves.
During the dark years of World War II and the austerity that followed, Cheyney’s novels were taken into battlefields, were exchanged for ten cigarettes in POW camps, and at a time when fabric was rationed, women fantasised about the glamorous Cheyney femme fatales in their satin and silks, sheer stockings, ruffles and bows. Read Cheyney and you’re reading violence and brutality set in a fashion catalogue.
For those jaded by pilgrimages to Baker Street, Cheyney provides a welcome alternative. Most of his many heroes, villains and victims live in a very small area of London. Some are unwitting neighbours, and all jostle each other on the same roads and streets, ghosts in parallel worlds. These are mapped, allowing the reader to go on his or her own ‘Cheyney walk.’
Cheyney, Behave recaptures a lost world and provides an eye-opening analysis of a popular culture we might prefer to forget. The book examines the importance of cigarettes and alcohol in Cheyney’s world, his attitude to ‘pansies’, racism, women, and the unconscious but jaw-dropping sexism of his age. It analyses the significance of Cheyney’s ‘Dark’ series in terms of war propaganda and how Cheyney accurately captured the effects of war on prevailing morality.
In his books you will find misogyny, homophobia, racism, sexism and chauvinism and, at their core, idealism and a deep vulnerability. In terms of market forces they reflect a world long past, one far different from ours but fascinating and worth understanding. Read Cheyney, Behave and judge for yourself.
May 26th, 2016 at 4:23 pm
I have often wondered why the most deadly curse any work of fiction can face is being dated.
Why so many like to read of foreign and forgotten places with all its differences but not be willing to accept a different time and culture.
Of course I am as guilty as everyone else. We all have social issues that become our buttons to push. I can barely make it through Fleming and Spillane due to its sexism. But it also does not bother me that there are others who enjoy those authors, readers able to enjoy or ignore those traits I can’t.
May 26th, 2016 at 5:25 pm
For all his flaws, and he wasn’t dubbed the Prince of Hokum by his biographer Michael Harrison for nothing, Cheyney isn’t just an important figure, he is also a born storyteller who captures a world and milieu better than many fine writers who were his contemporaries.
It isn’t just Bond you don’t have without Cheyney, but also Dennis Potter’s SINGING DETECTIVE, Lovejoy, Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora, Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer, and almost all the Americanized British writers of the post Cheyney era. In terms of influence on the British thriller he has the same sort of impact as Buchan, Ambler, Household, and Fleming. James Hadley Chase is a Cheyney follower too.
His impact is even greater in France where Cheyney was a big part of what became the Serie Noir series of books and writers like Jean Bruce, Sebastian Japrisot, Narjeac and Boileau, San Antonio, Delacorta, and so on. Books like Boris Vian’s I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE are the descendants of Cheyney and James Hadley Chase, not Simenon.
Sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, careless, almost every charge you can throw at Cheyney is true and deserved, but he deserves to be remembered to and I applaud this important look at his work. It is long past time for the snobbery against Cheyney’s success to be replaced with real scholarship. He is the most neglected major writer of the 20th Century, and for all his flaws there is much to be enjoyed in his work.
May 26th, 2016 at 7:09 pm
For a class I taught I would read aloud passages from one of Cheyney’s Lemmie Caution books to demonstrate the British idea of what American slang was like.
May 27th, 2016 at 5:57 am
Michael, I agree wholeheartedly about reading ‘dated’ books, but then I’m a historian. Part of the pleasure in reading, say, Barnaby Rudge, or Thackeray, is that after the initial ‘language’ shock you slip in to word patterns and mindsets that add texture and richness to the story. Same with a Buchan or Cheyney. Yep, that sounds pompous enough. I’ll stop now 🙂
May 27th, 2016 at 5:58 am
David, thank you. I can only say you’re speaking to the converted 🙂
May 27th, 2016 at 6:01 am
Randy that class sounds a hoot. Mind you, an Englishman putting on an American accent reading Lemmy Caution might be even funnier. If you’re still teaching you might find the analysis of the ‘cigarette’ ‘alcohol’ and ‘women’ equally funny.
May 27th, 2016 at 6:01 am
And before I go, thank you Steve for giving me exposure on your blog
May 27th, 2016 at 8:49 am
You’re welcome. I hope the book sells well!
May 27th, 2016 at 11:36 am
Michael, did you cover Lemmy Caution’s film career in Europe?
It is an example that a writer’s character can have influence beyond its creator.
May 27th, 2016 at 2:17 pm
Michael Keyton,
You sold one on here anyway. Bought the Kindle yesterday and the physical book soon.
Fine job all around.
Cheyney is to the West End nightclub milieu of London in the thirties and forties what Dickens was to his London, Doyle his, Simenon his Paris, or Ambler his Eastern Europe.
You come away from the Slim Callaghan novels and stories feeling as if your clothes stink of sweat, cigarette smoke, Chanel, and rye as if you spent your nights in one of those joints listening to a slinky chanteuse warbling torch songs in a smoke filled dining room.
May 31st, 2016 at 10:59 am
Michael, I toyed with the idea of adding a chapter on films, but rightly or wrongly decided against it. I didn’t think I could write much – other than generalisations, where as the books allowed me to be specific in terms of quotations. I had a similar problem with Cheyney’s book covers, which I love, until I found I could link them to Cheyney’s obsession with costume.
May 31st, 2016 at 11:09 am
David, I can only say thank you for buying the book – and the kind words. You also evoke the same mind picture I have on reading his books. Apropos the previous two comments, I’m no great film critic but instinct tells me there’s scope for an atmospheric’ TV series with high production values. Let’s face most of Cheyney’s books are already virtual scripts and a good producer could ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’.