BY HANK REINEKE
It would be inaccurate to dismiss Peter Cheyney’s “Lemmy
Caution†as just one more James Bond knock-off. Caution was, from the outset, more of a hardboiled gumshoe than super
spy. The character also pre-dates the
creation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, with Cheney having churned out ten Lemmy
Caution thrillers from 1936 to 1945. James Bond’s creator was certainly conversant with Cheyney’s work in the
spy/thriller canon. Fleming’s friend and
biographer John Pearson would recount Fleming’s excitement when his first James
Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), was
described by one critic as a “sort of Peter Cheyney de luxe.†One review enthusiastically
anointed first-time novelist Fleming as “the Peter Cheyney of the carriage
trade.â€
Such favorable comparisons stoked Fleming’s confidence in
his craft. Cheyney’s novels were great
sellers in their days, reportedly selling some 1,500,000 copies at peak. Today, with the passing of time, his books are
at best-dimly remembered. Much like the
novels of Sax Rohmer, they are recalled mostly by bookish types interested in
the time-capsule pulp mysteries of the 1930s and 40s. Cheyney’s novels – similarly to unfortunate
passages and caricatures present in several of Fleming’s own aging works, to be
fair – would be considered too politically incorrect in this day to appeal to most
readers of contemporary mysteries.
Following the success of the publication of From Russia with Love - and the
attendant hosanna’s of critical acclaim - Fleming would distance himself from
the Cheyney comparisons. In a letter to
his publisher Jonathan Cape, Fleming expressed a degree of wariness to the
interest of the Daily Express in
developing James Bond as a character in a proposed comic-strip series. While acknowledging the potential
exploitative and financial windfalls of the venture, Fleming argued his
champagne enterprise might somehow be devalued by his creation’s appearance in a
series of cartoon strips: “A certain
cachet attaches to the present operation and there is a danger that if stripped
we shall descend into the Peter Cheyney class.†Fleming wasn’t alone in his newly found disapproval of Cheyney’s déclassé
novels. Famed mystery writer Raymond
Chandler too would dismiss Cheyney as an author having written only “one good
book.â€
The film adaptations of Cheyney’s “Lemmy Caution†featuring
American actor Eddie Constantine would also pre-date EON’s James Bond series by
nine years. The first Lemmy Caution film
La môme vert-de-gris was
released in France in May of 1953, one month following the publication of
Fleming’s first James Bond novel that April. If Sean Connery’s tenure as James Bond was
occasionally fractious and mostly disowned by the actor, Constantine was more
accepting of his typecast as Lemmy Caution. It was a character of whom the American actor was rarely dismissive of.