Fri 10 Mar 2017
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.
March 10th, 2017 at 3:03 pm
Cheyney (1896-1951) tends to be overlooked and his best work is greatly under-rated. His output is now in the public domain in some countries.
Most if not all of Cheyney’s best can be explored at http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/PeterCheyney/PeterCheyney.html. I’m curently enjoying Cheyney’s “Dark” series of wartime spy novels.
Roy Glashan added most of these to his ebook “RGLibrary” just last month along with Uneasy Terms. The html versions can be converted easily to mobi (for Kindle reading) using Calibre. Unlike many other producers of ebook versions, Mr Glashan (80) takes considerable care to present books clean of formatting errors. He started making ebooks as a retirement hobby after taking early retirement in 1993 from a 30-year career in the field of international broadcasting and, later, information technology.
March 11th, 2017 at 2:21 am
Chap
I made the mistake of reading one of Cheyney’s “Dark” series books some 60 years ago, and not making much of a go of it. I was too young to appreciate it. After reading this one, I’m certainly encouraged to read more of him now, Dark or not.
March 10th, 2017 at 11:02 pm
Solid Callaghan outing and great fun. The film with Michael Rennie as a physically perfect Slim is available now on YouTube.
March 11th, 2017 at 2:30 am
Cheyney has jumped several hundred slots on my What Do I Read Next list.
March 11th, 2017 at 2:33 am
And here’s the link to the Michael Rennie film. I make no promises but I intend to watch it very soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6sHrVNBzsk
March 11th, 2017 at 7:19 am
I have read one Cheyney till date: I’ll Say She Does. That had a nice twist at the end. One day, Ill like to download the Cheyneys available and read them in order.
March 11th, 2017 at 1:14 pm
I love Peter Cheyney. Although his UK roots can be traced to Edgar Wallace and Leslie Charteris, he’s the first writer UK to incorporate that U.S. tough guy Black Mask element into his work, which eventually begat James Hadley Chase and dozens of UK hardboiled writers from Hank Janson to Carter Brown. The Lemmy Caution books were his most popular in the UK and Europe (sort of Dan Turner on LSD, if one can wrap one’s head around that!) and I recently re-read The Stars Are Dark, which is key Cheyney, though my favorites of the Cheyney novels are these Brit private eyes (the most prominent being Slim Callaghan) who seem to me a nice job of channeling US PI’s like Sam Spade, Mike Shayne, Rex McBride etc through a Brit sensibility.
March 11th, 2017 at 1:33 pm
Thanks, Stephen. Even more impetus to read Cheyney again soon!
March 11th, 2017 at 1:17 pm
Cheyney has been reviewed several times on Mystery File. I just reread the review of IT COULDN’T HAPPEN LESS by David Vineyard in 2010.
I have the one biography that’s been done on Cheyney. It’s titled PETER CHEYNEY: PRINCE OF HOKUM. Written by Michael Harrison and published in 1954 it’s 303 pages long. I read it a long time ago and have a vague memory that it was interesting.
March 11th, 2017 at 1:31 pm
Here’s the link to that long review David did for IT COULDN’T HAPPEN LESS, an earlier appearance of Slim Callaghan:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=2824
You can use the search box somewhere in the right column to find the other Cheyney reviews that Walker mentions.
March 11th, 2017 at 3:04 pm
Stephen, I’m not too sure about whether Cheyney’s roots can be traced to Leslie Charteris in addition to Edgar Wallace (who influenced just about every British thriller writer).
The first Saint yarn was published in The Thriller, a UK Amalgamated Press story paper, in 1929. Stories about Alonzo MacTavish, Cheyney’s Raffles-style character sometimes said to have been modelled on the Saint, were appearing in syndication in Australia from 1926 onwards. ( http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/PeterCheyney/Short/TheAlonzoMacTavishOmnibus.html )
Perhaps the Michael Harrison biography Walker has mentioned has the answers to when Cheyney’s work first appeared in the UK. From the Official Peter Cheyney Website, I understand the book has him writing short stories by 1924. The Fiction Mags Index has Charteris’ first listed story published in 1928 in Hutchinson’s Adventure & Mystery Story Magazine.
March 11th, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Thanks to Brother O’Keefe for the Alonzo correction. I always enjoyed those stories and had no idea that they dated from that far back. I wish a contemporary writer would do an indepth Cheyney bio as he was by all accounts a most interesting and prolific fellow.
March 11th, 2017 at 11:39 pm
The Alonzo stories are also available at Roy Glashans site.
As for Cheyney influences I would say Hammett certainly, and Greene and Ambler for the Dark series. I suspect Alonzo had the same roots as the Saint, Bulldog Drummond, Waldo the Wonderman from Sexton Blake, Wallace, Anthony Trent, the Rat (film with Ivor Novello), Blackshirt, Raffles, and Arsene Lupin.
March 12th, 2017 at 7:10 am
Concerning influences on Cheyney, I would definitely say the Lemmy Caution series was influenced by Carroll John Daly. Lemmy sounds just like Race Williams.
March 12th, 2017 at 5:28 pm
Stephen, There is a later bio that was previewed by its author last July at The Rap Sheet. http://therapsheet.blogspot.co.nz/2016/07/cheyneys-dark-times.html
I don’t have a copy of the book, but Michael Keyton certainly seems to be a “number one” Cheyney fan! To quote:
“…Cheyney (1896-1951) 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 James 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.”
March 12th, 2017 at 5:48 pm
I was happy to have Michael Keyton promote his book about Cheyney on this blog also:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=40322
It was his book that prompted me to pick up the copy of UNEASY TERMS I just reviewed when I spotted it in a used bookstore not too long ago. I’m glad I did.
March 12th, 2017 at 5:38 pm
Also if you go to the very end of The Rap Sheet article there is a link to a long two part article on the Bear Alley site about Peter Cheyney with many cover scans of the paperbacks.
March 13th, 2017 at 3:42 pm
Steve, Peter Cheyney Uneasy Terms is just a Collins not a Collins Crime Club – none of his books were published under that imprint
March 13th, 2017 at 6:51 pm
Thanks, Jamie. I’ll correct that right now.