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