Don t Get Me Wrong - Inscribed to Dennis Wheatley - Peter Cheyney 1939 - Collins, London - First Edition First edition of Peter Cheyney’s fifth Lemmy Caution novel. In fine and thus scarce dust jacket.

From the library of Cheyney’s friend and fellow author Dennis Wheatley with his wonderfully illustrated bookplate, and inscribed on the title page ‘
ToTo Dennis, from Peter Cheyney.’ On the back flap of the dust jacket is a review from Wheatley “Peter Cheyney is now becoming a definite menace to all other thriller writers; for who will read any other thriller writer but Cheyney if they can get a chance?”

Wheatley described Cheyney as ‘
the greatest liar unhung but a magnificent story teller’.
  ‘Lemmy Caution, became so popular on the Continent that Eddie Constantine, an American actor, portrayed him in a series of French films. These films were so successful that Jean Luc Godard used Constantine as Caution in his New Wave film ‘Alphaville’’ – Francis M. Nevins, 1001 Midnights.

Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney (1896-1951) was the first British writer to admit the influence of the American Hard-boiled school, the rumour is he began them after a bet of £5 that anybody could write a book along the lines of an American thriller, leading to his first novel ‘
This Man is Dangerous’ featuring Lemmy Caution. During the 1920’s Cheyney worked for the Metropolitan Police as a police reporter and crime investigator, until his prolific writing career became successful (in 1946 alone, over 1.5 million copies of his books were sold). A meticulous researcher, Cheyney kept a massive set of files on criminal activity in London.

References: Herbert, ‘
The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing’, 201. Reilly,’Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers’ (1980), 300.

Octavo (book size 19.8x13.5cm), pp. 284 [1 (About the Author)] [3 (publisher’s ads)]. In publisher’s brick red cloth, spine lettered in black, signature of author blocked in black to front board, all edges trimmed. Dust jacket priced ‘7s. 6d. net’ to lower corner of front flap.
  Condition: Very good, some spotting to fore-edge endpapers and first few pages, in fine dust jacket, light rubbing to corners and spine ends, faint vertical crease to front panel.   Ref: 109928   Price: HK$ 9,000