PETER CHEYNEY – Uneasy Terms. Slim Callaghan #9. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1947. Collier, US, paperback, 1989. First edition: Collins, UK, hardcover, 1946. Film: British Pathe, 1948, with Michael Rennie as Slim Callaghan.

   Earlier recorded cases of Slim Callaghan, it has been suggested to me, were ersatz American PI thrillers — Cheyney’s ham-handed attempts to imitate hardboiled fiction on the behalf of British readers — what those on this side of the ocean could have a steady diet of, if so desired, but something of a rarity on the other side of the Atlantic. This is a fact that I may have misunderstood — I have not read anything by Cheyney in many years — so corrections to anything I may say in this paragraph or what follows are more than welcome.

   It may be relevant that this was the last of Mr. Callaghan’s adventuress, not counting a large number of short stories. I say this because what I read was a very well done combination of the British manor house mystery and a case tackled by a semi-enigmatic tough guy private eye, and I enjoyed it very much.

   Dead is the stepfather of three very individualistic women: Viola, beautiful and charming but perhaps not as strong as she should be; Corinne, beautiful but a very smooth liar; and Patricia, quite young and a bit of a vamp, or her idea of a vamp, based on the motion pictures she has seen. It seems that someone had sent the dead man a letter that caused him to try to engage Mr. Callaghan’s services, but the delay caused by a mysteriously drugged drink on the latter’s end means that the two never actually meet, not until it is too late.

   The case is complicated, and Slim does not make Scotland Yard’s investigation any easier by messing around with the evidence at the crime scene. While skating on thin ice with a detective in charge named Gringall, who knows him from before, Slim has to sort through a tangled web of lies, many of which involve who tried to make phone calls and when (and from where); who was married to who and when; a blackmailer named Donelly, the kind of guy women can’t resist; and what a simple enough will (on the face of it) can unwittingly disrupt, if not destroy, the lives of the next generation several times over.

   There is also a fight scene worthy of a film director such as William Witney, a brutal one that Slim is able to walk away from, but barely. A pure brain wizard like Hercule Poirot, Slim is not. Even though I had the twist at the end figured out early on, this was a tough one to put down.