Peter Cheyney

Talking Pictures TV gives the following preview:

 Uneasy Terms (1948) on Saturday at 7.50pm sees Michael Rennie in the lead as private eye, Slim Callaghan. When his client is murdered, suspicion falls on the man’s stepdaughter, but Slim is determined to find the real culprit. Also stars Moira Lister.

It was a reminder of one of the almost forgotten figures of British crime fiction, Peter Cheyney. He was a successful writer of sub-Hammett hard-boiled thrillers in the 1930s and 1940s, which still sold well in the decade following his death in 1951. There was a dark hinterland. He had been an enthusiastic organiser of Oswald Mosley's bully-boys before the war. If I recall correctly, he passed himself off to his New Party colleagues as "Captain" Cheyney, a rank above that which he actually achieved in the army. His friend and fellow writer Dennis Wheatley is quoted as summing him up as "the greatest liar unhung but a magnificent story teller." 

He must have thought better of anti-Semitism after the war, because he wrote a sympathetic novel about a holocaust survivor.