Kane looked at her appreciatively. 'I don’t know whether anybody’s ever told you, but you’ve got the swellest pair of legs I’ve ever seen, ’ he said. Valetta looked at him sideways along her dark eyelashes. He thought she was very beautiful; her mouth delicate, sensitive, almost tremulous. He could look at it for hours on end. It was that sort of mouth . . .
’The British, once they take the gloves off – once they forget to play cricket, to be English gentlemen – they are the toughest things on earth, ’ says one German espionage agent to another in Dark Duet. And the trouble with Michael Kane, hero of this spy thriller, is that he never plays cricket with Nazi spies . . .
Dark Duet was originally published in 1942.
’Action as slick and fast as ever’ Observer
’Peter Cheyney is the Damon Runyon of crime’ The Times
O autorze
Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney was born in Whitechapel in the East End of London. After serving as a lieutenant during the First World War, he worked as a police reporter and freelance investigator until he found success with his first Lemmy Caution novel. In his lifetime Cheyney was a prolific and wildly successful author, selling, in 1946 alone, over 1.5 million copies of his books. His work was also enormously popular in France, and inspired Jean-Luc Godard’s character of the same name in his dystopian sci-fi film Alphaville. The master of British noir, in Lemmy Caution Peter Cheyney created the blueprint for the tough-talking, hard-drinking pulp fiction detective.