Peter Cheyney

Peter Cheyney aka Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse-Cheyney was a British crime fiction writer who was actively writing between 1936 and 1951. Cheyney is best known for his short stories and novels about agent/detective Lemmy Caution, and private detective Slim Callaghan.

He began to write skits for the theatre as a teenager, but this ended when the First World War began. In 1915 he enlisted in the British Army as a volunteer, in 1916 was wounded on active service and published two volumes of poetry. The next year, 1917, his military service ended. Starting in the late 1920s, Cheyney worked for the Metropolitan Police as a police reporter and crime investigator. It is said that he got his start through a bet; when Cheyney remarked that anyone could write a book in the idiom of the American thriller, he was wagered 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 him of a flourishing new career, and Cheyney abandoned his work as a freelance investigator. Sales were brisk; in 1946 alone, over 1.5 million copies of his books were sold worldwide.

He died at age 55, after having fallen into a coma. He was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in London.