Peter Cheyney - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born in 1896, Peter Cheyney lived only 55 years until June 1951. For much of his early life, Cheyney occupied himself as a police reporter and crime investigator. Until he became successful as a crime novelist, he was often quite poor. It is said that he got his start through a bet; when Cheyney remarked that anyone one could write a book in the idiom of the American thriller, he was bet five pounds that he could not. Cheyney sold his first story as the result of this bet. Cheyney wrote his first novel, the Lemmy Caution thriller This Man Is Dangerous in 1936 and followed it with the first Slim Callaghan novel, The Urgent Hangman in 1938. The immediate success of these two novels assured a flourishing new career, and Cheyney abandoned his work as a freelance investigator. Sales were brisk; in 1946 alone, 1,524,785 copies of Cheyney books were sold worldwide.

A meticulous researcher, Cheyney kept a massive set of files on criminal activity in London until they were destroyed during the Blitz in 1941; he soon began to replace his collection of clippings. Cheyney dictated his work. Typically Cheyney would "act out" his stories for his secretary, Miss Sprauge, who would copy them down in shorthand and type them up later.

The Slim Callaghan novels and short stories move along at a brisk and confident clip and his "Dark" series was widely praised during World War II for bringing more realism to espionage fiction. In their casual brutality and general "grubbiness," the "Dark" novels seem to have foreshadowed much of the Cold War fiction of the mid to late 1960s. Anthony Boucher placed these later works in the context of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad.

The characterization of Ernest Guelvada in the "Dark" series is one of the high points of Cheyney's career. A cheerfully sadistic war operative whose objective is to deplete the ranks of opposing forces in a leisurely but thorough fashion, the loquacious Guelvada still finds the time to dress immaculately, drink immoderate amounts of alcohol and remain a counter agent.

From all accounts, Cheyney lived much like his characters, working too hard, living the fast and careless life with a breathtaking abandon that eventually caught up with him. In addition to his literary skills, “he was a fencer of repute, a golfer, a crack pistol-shot, and a jiu-jitsu expert.”

A good deal of tension and haste is found in his writing, often to good effect; one sometimes gets the feeling that Cheyney is dictating to fill up the page but even as he does so the attention he pays to mundane details in the process makes his characters and their world all the more real.

Cheyney published a semi-autobiographical volume, Making Crime Pay and after his death at least two biographical essays appeared in posthumous collections. An essay by Viola Garvin, "Peter Cheyney" appears in Velvet Johnnie a posthumous collection of Cheyney's short stories (London: Collins, 1952, pages 7–32). The other essay is anonymous.It appears in the Cheyney collection Calling Mr. Callaghan (London: Todd, 1953, pages 7–16). Cheyney published one volume of short stories, advice to critics and a few poems in No Ordinary Cheyney (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).

His Biography was Peter Cheyney: Prince of Hokum by Michael Harrison, (London: N. Spearman, 1954.)

Cheyney was buried in Putney Vale