Mon 26 Jul 2010
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: PETER CHEYNEY – The Stars Are Dark.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[2] Comments
by Bill Crider:
PETER CHEYNEY – The Stars Are Dark. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1943. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1943. Reprinted in paperback several times, including as The London Spy Murders, Avon #49, 1944.
Cheyney’s best work is his series of espionage novels generally referred to as the “Dark Series,” of which The Stars Are Dark is the second. Here, the breakneck pace of the Caution books is slowed by a genuine interest in character, which makes the story stronger.
Quayle, the master of a British spy ring in World War II, is faced with the task of dealing with a man who has come from Morocco with what he says is important information about German troops there. Is this man what he seems?
Quayle puts his agents into action, not hesitating to risk their lives to discover the answer, but it is Quayle who does the most work and takes the most risks.
Cheyney does an excellent job of conveying the world of spying, with all its twists and double crosses. No one is what he seems, and everyone knows that; but no one is sure just what anyone else really is. Quayle tells his people no more than they need to know. Readers of John Le Carre and William Haggard would recognize Cheyney’s world at once.
Not all Cheyney’s books with “Dark” in the title belong to his spy series, but another good one is Dark Duet (1942), first published in US paperback as The Counter Spy Murders (Avon, 1944). The Stars Are Dark was retitled The London Spy Murders (Avon, 1944).
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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.
July 26th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Anthony Boucher introduced an anthology of Cheyney’s Dark novels and Raymond Chandler praised DARK DUET. SINISTER ERRAND of the Mike Kells series was filmed with Tyrone Power, Patricia Neal, Hildegarde Neff, Stephen McNally, and Karl Malden (Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin are in it too).
Cheyney is often credited (or blamed) as the transition between the Clubland scene of Buchan and Sapper and Ian Fleming and James Bond, and while better written, the opening of CASINO ROYALE could have come straight out of Cheyney.
Aside from Quayle the other running characters in the series are Ernest Guelvada a jovial skirt chasing Belgian assassin for British intelligence, charming Shaun O’Mara, and a confusing mix of Quayle’s agents with names like Kane, Kerr, and Fane. Johnny Vallon and Nicholas Gale from the Vallon series appear in DARK BAHAMA with Quayle and Guelvada.
DARK HERO, although a spy novel, is not exactly in the Dark series and features Rene Berg, an American gangster from Chicago who ends of a British agent in occupied France. The American paperback edition was reprinted as THE CASE OF THE DARK HERO.
July 26th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Peter Evard Quayle (note the name similarity to Peter Southcote Cheyney), is largely based on the author, right down to his bald pate and fringe of hair. Whether or not he owes anything to John Creasey’s more tradional Gordon Craigie I can’t say — the Craigie titles are much more along the line of the Clubland books and Edgar Wallace, though the Norman Deane titles about Bruce Murdoch (the Liberator) and the Withered Man and the later Dr. Palfrey titles Creasey wrote owe a bit to Cheyney — especially the latter since Palfrey is every bit as ruthless and hands on as Quayle.
Whatever can be said about Cheyney as a writer, his ‘voice’ was hugely influential on both British and French (and European in general) popular fiction (only Simenon equals him). Jean Bruce’s OSS 117, San Antonio, Francis Coplan, Leo Malet’s Nestor Burma, Nick Jordan, Jo Walker Kommisar X, Jerry Cotton, August Le Breton (RIFIFI), M.G. Braun’s heroes, Gerard Villiers Malko Linge, and Delacorta’s Serge Gorosh and Alba (DIVA) are all Cheyney influenced. On the British side David Hume, John Bentley, Berkley Gray, Hank Janson, Gerard Fairlie’s Johnny McCall, Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora, and to lesser extent Len Deighton and Adam Hall all imitate or expand on the more Americanized Cheyney voice. I would argue that some Cheyney influence — indirect perhaps — shows in Dick Francis work as well. Even Victor Canning’s Rex Carver tales echo some of the Cheyney voice, and Ian Fleming certainly did in the Bond novels (many of these writers are better than Cheyney by leaps and bounds).
Virtually the entire original paperback mystery genre in England and Europe was greatly influenced by Cheyney’s popularity (James Hadley Chase was also disproportionately influential)and his writing style — in many cases more so than the originals like Hammett and Chandler (in some ways Woolrich was more influential in Europe than their work or Cain’s).
Why is anyone’s guess, but you can’t underestimate being in the right place and the right time with the right book. But don’t make the mistake I see repeated on this blog of thinking they read Cheyney because they couldn’t get the real thing. Most of the major American hard boiled writers were well represented in England and Europe (there was even a British edition of BLACK MASK)before the war when Cheyney was already selling two million books a year. They loved Peter Cheyney — not as ersatz American hard boiled fiction, but as Peter Cheyney, and even after the war when there was no shortage of the major American writers in Europe conceivable Cheyney stayed at the top and in print.