Peter Cheyney's Dark Series Book Cover Gallery: From Dark Duet (1942) to Dark Bahama (1950)

From 1942 until 1950 (the year before his death), British hard-boiled crime writer Peter Cheyney published an eight-book series of spy novels – the "Dark" Series. The novels detail the exploits – both wartime and postwar – of a rotating cast of counter-espionage agents of British Intelligence, notably Michael Kane and Ernie Guelvada, along with their boss, Peter Quayle. All were first published in hardback by Collins in the UK, as follows:

1. Dark Duet (1942)
2. The Stars are Dark (1943)
3. The Dark Street (1944)
4. Sinister Errand (1945)
5. Dark Hero (1946)
6. Dark Interlude (1947)
7. Dark Wanton (1948)
8. Dark Bahama (1950)

I blogged about a signed limited first edition of the fifth one, Dark Hero, last week, as part of a periodic run of posts on signed books, but I've also been picking up first and other editions of some of the other instalments in the series here and there over the past couple of years. I'm still missing two of them – The Stars are Dark and Dark Interlude – but since I'm not in any special hurry to plug those gaps in my collection, and seeing as I'm on the subject of Cheyney, I thought I'd gather the ones I do own together in a "Dark" Series gallery post, with links in each instance to the relevant pages on the Official Peter Cheyney Website. Like so:

Dark Duet, Collins hardback, 1942
The Collins first edition/first impression of the debut "Dark" novel is quite a rare book; I nabbed this copy on eBay a couple of years ago, but there are at present fewer than half a dozen copies of the Collins first edition/first impression available online. The dust jacket design is uncredited, in common with all the Collins editions of the Cheyney novels I own, but that's a great photo of Cheyney and, I believe, his second wife, Kathleen Nora Walter (nee Taberer), on the back.

The Dark Street, Pan paperback, 1963 (originally Collins, 1944)
This is the first Pan Books paperback edition of the third "Dark" novel, cover art by J. Oval (alias Ben Ostrick); I found this copy in a stack of paperbacks in Lewes (the picturesque East Sussex town in which I live and work) secondhand bookshop A & Y Cumming, paying, I think, a pound for it.

Sinister Errand, Collins hardback, 1947 (originally 1945)
I have a feeling I was under the impression when I bought this copy of the fourth "Dark" novel a few years ago online that it was a 1945 first edition. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a 1947 edition (printed in the Netherlands); note the reviews of the novel itself on the jacket flaps – always a giveaway that a book is a later impression.

Dark Hero, Collins hardback, 1946 / Collins paperback, 1950
Dark Hero I blogged about last week, but as well as the wrapper of the Collins first edition I've also included here the cover of the 1950 Collins paperback, published as part of their White Circle "pocket" range. Splendid Bravington Rings advert on the back cover there.

Dark Wanton, Collins hardback, 1948
This copy of the Collins first of the seventh "Dark" novel came from Badger's Books in Worthing – a fine secondhand bookshop to spend an hour or two in, if you're ever that way. The jacket has seen better days, but then I don't think I paid more than three or four quid for the book.

Dark Bahama, Collins hardback, 1950
Finally, there's this, my most recent Cheyney acquisition: a first edition of Dark Bahama, which I bought last year in Othello's in Essex at the start of the Jones–Day family holiday; follow this link for the first in an interminable series of increasingly daft posts about that holiday.

Dark Hero by Peter Cheyney (Collins, 1946): Signed Limited Presentation Edition

Thus far in this periodic series of posts on signed books I've showcased signed and sometimes inscribed paperbacks and hardbacks by Elmore Leonard, Jack Gerson, Kate Atkinson and P. M. Hubbard. But I've plenty more hitherto-unseen-on-Existential-Ennui signed books in my collection, and I'll be unveiling some of the more intriguing and even exciting signed and/or inscribed ones over the coming weeks. Like, for instance, this one:

A British first edition of Dark Hero by Peter Cheyney, published in hardback by Collins in 1946, dust jacket design uncredited. Cheyney is best known for his hard-boiled crime fiction, especially his Lemmy Caution novels, but he also penned a good number of espionage works, Dark Hero being one of them – the fifth instalment in his eight-book "Dark" series of spy novels, which began in 1942 with Dark Duet and ended in 1950 with Dark Bahama, and which all feature to some degree master spy Peter Quayle. Although this one is more the story of Rene Berg, one-time Chicago gunman-turned-scourge of the Nazis-turned-secret agent – shades there in Berg's origin of Desmond Cory's later secret agent, Johnny Fedora.

Dark Hero is relatively common in first – indeed there's a copy of the first edition up the road from where I'm sitting right now, in Lewes's Bow Windows Bookshop (as in, the book's in Bow Windows Bookshop; I'm not in Bow Windows Bookshop, although I suppose I could be, depending on when this post is being read – I do pop in there on occasion) – but much less common is this particular edition of the first edition. See, by 1946 Peter Cheyney had been with his British publisher, Collins, for ten years (his debut novel – also Lemmy Caution's debut – was 1936's This Man is Dangerous), and had sold millions of books for them. To celebrate both the tenth anniversary of this highly successful publishing partnership and to mark the publication of this, Cheyney's twenty-fifth novel, Collins produced a special edition of Dark Hero, limited to 250 copies, each one numbered on a limitation page opposite a photo of Cheyney (looking very dapper), and presented them to the author for him to sign and dedicate to whomsoever he chose.

This copy is number 133, and was inscribed to a C. R. Bl— ...actually I can't work out that surname – suggestions in the comments please. Anyway, whoever, C. R. Bl— was, Peter Cheyney evidently felt he – or she – merited a copy of the special edition of Dark Hero in 1946 – and for my part I felt I merited that same copy when I nabbed it on eBay some sixty-five or so years later for £8.50 – a frankly ludicrously low price when one considers that there are only about five copies available online at present, the cheapest being £75 and the most expensive being over £250.

A nice, rare book to own, then. But it's not the only Peter Cheyney book in my possession – because I've been quietly collecting the "Dark" Series especially over the past few years, as I'll be demonstrating in the next post.

The Secondhand Bookshops of Suffolk (and Essex), or, Wot Me and Rachel and Little Edie Did on Our Summer Hols, 2013 Edition

Back from a week's holiday in the wilds of Suffolk, much of which, you'll be unsurprised to learn, involved me dragging Rachel – my long-suffering partner – and little Edie – our near-four-month-old daughter – round a succession of secondhand bookshops (and one book fair) in various far-flung East Anglian villages and towns – usually on the pretence that said villages and towns were "really picturesque, honest love" (which, to be fair, most of them were). After previous such jaunts I've posted lengthy photo essays depicting our – as in, mine and (often reluctantly) Rachel's – adventures (Edie being a more recent addition), but this time I'm going to break it up a bit, either by town, or by bookshop, or in some exceptional cases by individual books bought – reason being, it strikes me that I still haven't got round to blogging about a good number of the bloody books I bought on our holidays three years ago, and since I've no idea when I'll get round to blogging about them, on this occasion I'm inclined to unveil all of my purchases, rather than, as before, simply post a picture of a big pile of books.

Mind you, there is quite a pile to unpick (not to mention unpack) this time, comprising all manner of first editions and signed editions and spy fiction and crime fiction and non-fiction; although it has to be said it's almost eclipsed by Edie's pile:

which, as you can see, comprises not only fine volumes featuring Noddy, Big Ears and Tiny Ted, but a print for her nursery wall too.

You'll be seeing much more of Edie – and occasionally Rachel – in the ensuing Suffolk-based posts, but before we'd even got as far as Suffolk we managed to squeeze in a visit to a secondhand bookshop I'd been meaning to check out for ages:

Othello's, on the way to Leigh-on-Sea, near where Rachel's folks live in Essex. Not a bad shop as it turned out; prices were reasonable, and though much of the stock of modern firsts (my area of interest) looked like it had been there for a while, there was certainly a lot of it, and I managed to emerge clutching three books (plus one for Edie; see the bottom book in her pile above, The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast) which took my fancy:

Namely:

British first editions/first impressions of Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs (Heinemann, 1989), Peter Cheyney's Dark Bahama (Collins, 1950) and Elmore Leonard's Touch (Viking, 1988). However, as I would soon discover, there was even better to come in Suffolk...