Ten years ago we published Peter Cheyney’s first novel This Man is Dangerous. This spring we proudly publish his twenty-fifth novel Dark Hero. In the course of those ten years Peter Cheyney has added success to success until to-day he is perhaps the world’s most popular author. His exuberant style, his wise-cracking dialogue, his “can’t-put-it-down” plots, his tough, sophisticated characters and pin-up dames, have put him in a class by himself. Admirers of Lemmy Caution and Slim Callaghan will find in Dark Hero something that is different – something that is at once grim, soul-searing, unforgettable. It is a tremendously dramatic story – the saga of one man’s fight in a world of fighters. The “dark hero” of the story is Rene Berg. We see him first, lying rotting in all the degradation of a German concentration camp. Rene still owed certain loyalties – not least to himself. He wanted to live, for life he was convinced still held something very sweet for him. His has been a strange odyssey. One-time gunman in Chicago, the glamorous city that had first dazzled the eyes of a lonely boy from a farm in the Ozarks, Berg had drunk his fill of adventure. The sins of the ex-gunman had surely been expiated by that last great fight for Nazi-occupied Norway. Now all that is left, or so it seemed, were the bitter dregs, but Berg had still to rise from the bitterest humiliation to his greatest moment. And it is his story Peter Cheyney tells in a stark, restrained, dispassionate style that reaches the heart of the reader.