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