Crime Fiction since 1800 by Stephen Knight

Author:Stephen Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

VI THE ‘TOUGH GUY’ ABROAD

The private-eye form has long been imitated in American culture and around the world, but one of its earliest international locations has been, it seems, almost completely forgotten. Some British writers turned their hand to the private-eye story in the spirit, like the New York clue-puzzlers, of transatlantic imitation. James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney cranked out vaguely set and linguistically bizarre quasi-American thrillers in the late 1930s. The great surprise was Chase: actually named René Raymond, he was in the book trade when he decided to try the ‘tough guy’ approach. No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), in spite of its society-sounding title, was a grimly realistic and sadistic story set in the American south and with some elements of Faulkner in it, especially the plot of Sanctuary (1930): a probable further source was the recent Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson (1937). It had pace and vigour – George Orwell, while disapproving of the book’s value-free Americanism, as he saw it, still called it ‘a brilliant piece of writing’ ([1944] 1984: 30). The violence, sex and above all the sadism made it both a banned and a bestselling book. As Horsley notes (2001: 157–8), Chase continued to produce into the 1980s novels that were increasingly focused on sex rather than violence, though in 1961 he produced a heavily cut version of his famous novel for the English market. He did occasionally show greater subtlety, as in Trusted Like the Fox (1948, first published as by ‘Raymond Marshall’) which deals with a war-maddened British veteran who is a worse criminal than a pro-Nazi traitor, an interesting theme from Chase, who had served with distinction in the Royal Air Force throughout the war.

Less well known than Chase was Carter Brown – actually Alan G. Yates, a mild-mannered businessman who, after war service in the British navy, settled in Sydney and turned out a huge flow of tough-guy novellas for publishing houses first in Australia and then around the world. His joke-like titles (Strip without Tease (1953) and Homicide Hoyden (1954) are typical), his euphemised violence, and a focus on rich food rather than sex all seemed to target an early adolescent audience. Carter Brown showed how the private-eye form had a world-wide audience, but retained an American form – his stories were set in a vague imaginary USA.

One English writer went further, at least in geographic terms. Peter Cheyney was once very well known indeed, but now is almost completely overlooked, and out of print. During the war his sales matched Christie’s, and he established himself before Chase as a pasticheur of Hammettesque thrillers – he started before Chandler had published a novel. This Man is Dangerous (1936) introduced Lemmy Caution to a British audience – first located in London but soon reverting to the USA. It was published in New York in 1938, with some success – according to his biographer Michael Harrison his sales there reached 300,000 a year, which, intriguingly, was only a third of his sales in France (1954: 274).

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