# The Cheyne Mystery — Character guide

> Key figures in The Cheyne Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts.

- [Maxwell Cheyne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/maxwell_cheyne.md): Cheyne is a young Devon man of leisure whose comfortable world is upended when his house is ransacked and he is chloroformed, apparently for a document he never knew he possessed. Impulse rules him more than cold reason,
- [Inspector French](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/inspector_french.md): French takes charge of the case after Cheyne's visit to the Yard, and his temperament is the opposite of his client's: unhurried, skeptical, and quietly relentless. He suspects the conspirators have been preparing for we
- [Joan Merrill](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/joan_merrill.md): Joan is taken by Sime and his associates under a ruse—likely told Cheyne has been in an accident and is asking for her—and held drugged and helpless at a house in London. French, walking back to the Yard, quietly reckons
- [Arnold Price](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/arnold_price.md): Price's claim to the barony of Hull depends on documents that the gang is clearly desperate to obtain, and his stake is what transforms a puzzling burglary into a motive-driven conspiracy. Cheyne's decision to pursue the
- [Mr. Speedwell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/mr_speedwell.md): Speedwell calls on Cheyne after the burglary and drugging, probing gently for anything the young man might have noticed, and Cheyne can tell him nothing—yet Speedwell's sly look and his pointed reminder of his address su
- [Susan Dangle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/susan_dangle.md): Susan is planted in the Cheyne household as a servant, and Cheyne realizes only later that she overheard his dinner-table talk of Plymouth and passed it on—she is the channel through which the gang learned his movements 
- [Blessington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/blessington.md): Blessington moves through the affair as the polished front man of a gang that has rehearsed every falsehood, from literary flattery to a fabricated inheritance, each designed to separate Cheyne from a letter he barely un
- [Mr. Hubert Parkes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/mr_hubert_parkes.md): Parkes belongs to the ordinary machinery of law and property that surrounds the Cheyne family, the kind of man whose presence at a door or in a letter seems unremarkable until it isn't. Cheyne finds himself unable to acc
- [M. Dangle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/m_dangle.md): Dangle presides over a family enterprise that photographs documents, trades in propositions, and treats crime as a business to be negotiated rather than a line to be feared. He can be disarmingly fair, even charming, adm
- [Mrs. Cheyne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/mrs_cheyne.md): Mrs. Cheyne, once Mrs. Hazelton, lives at Warren Lodge with her daughter Agatha and a staff that includes the watchful Susan, occupying the domestic world her son keeps trying to protect. When she and Agatha return to fi
- [Charles Sime](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/charles_sime.md): A man who provides information to the investigators.
- [James Dangle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/james_dangle.md): An elderly member of the Dangle household.
- [Otto Schulz](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/otto_schulz.md): Schulz enters the story as a wounded man in the bed next to Dangle's, fading from a head injury while the man beside him listens. What he knows, and what he says as he weakens, becomes the seed of the letter, the tracing
- [Mr. Arthur Lamson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/mr_arthur_lamson.md): A man who appears to be connected to the crime.
- [M. Lowenthal](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/m_lowenthal.md): A foreign contact involved in the conspiracy.
- [Miss Cheyne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/miss_cheyne.md): A relative of Maxwell Cheyne.
- [Tom Lewisham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/tom_lewisham.md): A young man who works on the Enid.
- [Hake](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/hake.md): A minor character, possibly a servant.
- [Brother Fritz](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters/brother_fritz.md): Otto Schulz's brother.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cheyne_mystery_se/characters