The Dennis Wheatley Project

Wheatley, Sallust and Il Duce

2011-08-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

As I have already noted on this site, Wheatley was an admirer of Mussolini.
Black August, set some fifty years after it was written in an imagined post-revolutionary England, cites him as one of the most influential figures of the recent past (while ignoring Hitler entirely), and as late as in the autobiographies he was preparing at the very end of his life Wheatley defended Il Duce for having "done a splendid job in cleaning up Italy", and mourned the "later megalomania (that) led him to throw in his lot with Hitler" as "one of the greatest tragedies in history."
(It is certainly ironic that history generally represents him as one of the monsters of the Second World War, almost when not entirely on a par with Hitler, while the truly monstrous Stalin is allowed a seat with the heroes.)
Wheatley took a keen and informed interest in international affairs through the thirties, and it is notable how often issues relating to Mussolini's Italy crop up in his pages around this time. It is just possible, in fact, that his interest in the subject may have influenced the return of Gregory Sallust in Contraband.

I must stress that what follows here is purest speculation: I am not making a case, indeed I have far from convinced myself. But it is at least persuasive, and at least consistent with Wheatley's established method and habit.
We have seen how Wheatley allows his reading to leak into his work. Often the pattern seems to be a stray reference appearing in one book (when the subject is new to him) followed by a more deeply threaded allusion in a subsequent one, after he has digested it more fully.
A good example is the use of Huxley's Brave New World as, first, the subject of a Hollywood film in Such Power is Dangerous and then as the major structural informant of Black August, while here at the excellent Dennis Wheatley website, a contributor notes how a stray reference to Powys's Glastonbury Romance in Black August likewise announces the book's more considered use as an influence on the plot of The Fabulous Valley. As well as receiving full length treatment in two non-fiction works, Wheatley's thirties novels similarly abound in references to the Russian Revolution and the life of Charles II.

His interest in Fascist Italy is most obviously reflected in The Secret War, which is set against the backdrop of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and reflects, I think, Wheatley's genuinely undecided views on that campaign: the book, as I shall explain further in the next post, reads almost like Wheatley's argument with himself on the subject. The use of the subject goes beyond background detail, and reflects a deep and informed interest. In Drink and Ink he writes of an occasion when he was travelling in Italy at the time of the invasion, and with the prospect of war between Italy and Britain seeming likely he considered hiring a fishing boat to take him to the South of France and avoid internment.
So we know for sure that this was a subject very much on his mind at this time: what grounds are there for linking it with the reappearance of Gregory Sallust?

The question I raised in my post on Contraband was this: why did Wheatley revive Sallust in a totally incompatible time period and with many of his most significant characteristics from his first appearance muted or changed? Why not simply invent a new character with a new name?
Well, let us begin with that surname. I haven't speculated on the nature of any link with his Roman historian namesake until now because I had presumed that there wasn't one, and it remains likely that there was no particular reason why the name had been chosen at first.
But by the time of the character's reappearance in Contraband it is possible that Wheatley's reacquaintance with the original Sallust may have prompted Gregory Sallust's comeback.

One of the few real-life figures namechecked in Secret War is General Graziani. The key military figure in Italy's African wars, he was a fascist cult hero, and a deeply charismatic individual who liked to portray himself as a romantic idealist and intellectual, and to compare himself with the great military leaders of Ancient Rome. I'm only surprised that he doesn't play more of a hands-on role in the book: he strikes me as exactly the kind of man to have appealed to Wheatley's sense of imperial grandeur. Whenever he needed guidance or inspiration, he would claim, he would turn to his "lords and masters": Caesar, Tacitus, Livy - and Sallust.
Sallust (more properly Gaius Sallustius Crispus) was Wheatley's kind of historian: partisan, rowdy, patriotic and with a reputation for immorality that resulted in his temporary banishment from the Roman Senate. His books have something of the sparky, belligerent flavour of Old Rowley and Red Eagle.
In 46 BC he joined Caesar in his African campaign, leading to his appointment as governor of the province of Africa Nova, hence his idolisation by Granziani. It seems certain that in his study of Graziani and the African campaign, therefore, Wheatley would have been reminded of Gregory Sallust by reading of his ancient namesake.

It may have been at this point that he first entertained the idea of reusing Sallust rather than invent a new character in his forthcoming Contraband. It's a slender reed on which to hang a hypothesis of this sort, I admit, but there is one other link that just might push it from possible to plausible.
The original Sallust was born at Amiternum in the country of the Sabines. Is it mere coincidence, therefore, that the all-new 1930s model Gregory Sallust should be given as love interest a woman named Sabine Szenty?

Contraband (1936)

2011-08-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

"... But don't you see that if silk can be smuggled in other things can as well. To bankrupt our business houses and cut our customs revenue in half is only their first objective. Unless we can checkmate them they'll start dumping anarchists and agitators here by the hundred - all the scum whose full-time job is to spread discontent and ruin. Then they'll send cargoes of illicit arms to their secret depots, and bombs, and poison gas and every sort of foulness to desecrate England's green and pleasant land. For God's sake man! Forget petty larceny for a bit and give me a free hand to stop that arch-traitor Gavin Fortescue staging a red revolution."

Wheatley speaks a little in Drink and Ink of how, having had the idea for Contraband, he went about plotting it, specifically how he found the right location for the criminals' base.
But he says nothing of how the idea came to him, or why he decided on his most audacious notion yet: to bring back Gregory Sallust, the anti-hero of his novel Black August, which had been set fifty years in the future, and relocate him in the thirties present.

There's no question that this is the most interesting and original aspect of the book that finally appeared.
Though time and familiarity - the latter itself a kind of backhanded tribute - may have blunted its innovations to the casual reader, it's worth remembering just how conceptually bold Contraband is.
Of course there was nothing new in authors reviving favourite characters and giving them new adventures, as Wheatley himself had done with 'those modern musketeers' the Duke De Richleau and his friends. (Though Wheatley had been unusual in bringing them back, after their successful debut in Forbidden Territory, not in another political spy adventure but in a supernatural horror story.)
But here is where he really begins to build his own alternative world, Wheatley Land, the endlessly self-referential literary theme park.
Not only does he bring back Sallust, blithely inserted in an entirely incompatible decade from his debut, but also pits him against another returning character from an entirely different and unconnected work: Lord Gavin Fortescue, last seen trying to buy out Hollywood in Such Power Is Dangerous. (And we also welcome Sir Pellinore Gwane-Cust, perhaps the greatest name conceived for a fictional character in the history of the written word, making his first appearance, in a chapter entitled 'Enter an Eminent Edwardian'.)
No reader could hope to keep up with such wild cross-referencing, so here are those faux-scholarly footnotes, so endearing a recurring feature in his later books, in which readers are directed towards the other relevant titles in the canon, complete with dates and publishers, like the citations in a scholarly thesis.
The decision to revive both characters is interesting (though Wheatley sadly makes us privy to nothing of his reasoning), Sallust for the reasons already given, and Fortescue because Such Power had been Wheatley's least favourite of his own works to date (more so even than The Fabulous Valley, which he felt was below par but at least distinguished by the thoroughness and research that the more knocked-off Such Power had lacked.)

Bizarrely, though the book begins by providing an entirely new backstory for Sallust (he's now a First World War hero, and Rudd, his landlord cum manservant, is his former batman) Wheatley still directs the reader to Black August for "further particulars of Gregory Sallust, Mr Rudd and his curious caravanserai in Gloucester Road".
But almost from the first this is a different Sallust as well as an uprooted one; he's markedly less cynical, opportunistic and self-motivated. In Black August he had been close to traitorous in his self-interest; here he is much more the classical Wheatley hero.
One wonders why, with so much altered, Wheatley bothered to call him Gregory Sallust, as so little of the original character remains. The only thing left now, really, of the original Sallust to distinguish him from any other Wheatley hero is his slightly greater physical ruthlessness.
At the beginning he attacks one villain with a broken bottle ("the ugliest weapon in the world") leaving him "clutch(ing) at the torn and bleeding muscle" of his arm, while the final discovery, on which the climax hinges, comes not as the result of serendipity or clever deduction but by the simple expedient of having Sallust torture the information out of the villain's chief henchman.
Having first suspended his quarry by the shoulder joints, he then threatens to burn his eyes out if he doesn't talk:

"Good God, sir, you can't!" exclaimed Rudd, suddenly paling. "It - it's fiendish."
Gregory swung on him. "You fool! My woman's life depends upon my loosening this brute's tongue and I mean to do it."
Rudd shuddered. "Sorry, sir. Looked at like that o' course you're right."

According to Drink and Ink, Rudd was based on "Lewis, my second cellarman when I was a wine merchant, of whom I was very fond", but here and there I thought I caught more than a stray echo of Lugg, manservant to Margery Allingham's detective Albert Campion:

They had hardly settled down when Rudd came in wheeling a dumb waiter with half the contents of a baker's shop spread out upon it.
"Mon dieu!" she exclaimed. "Do you expect me to eat all this - or have you a party of twenty people coming?"
"No, it's just Rudd," he laughed. "Rudd's fond of cakes and he gets all the ones that we can't eat."
"'Arternoon, Miss," Rudd said with a sheepish grin. "You won't take too much notice of Mr Gregory, I hope. He's always been a one what likes a leg pull."

Today, with intertextual hi-jinx so settled a feature of the postmodern literary landscape and no longer enough to surprise us, Contraband can perhaps be seen as one of Wheatley's least ambitious books.
The profusion of twists, interconnected subplots, and patented ante-climax, climax and post-climax formula with which he liked to dazzle readers are for the most part replaced with a straight arrow narrative and what most readers would by now be able to recognise as unabashed adherence to formula.
It's a short book, easily read in two or three evening settings, and for the first time in Wheatley I found myself less than carried away by it. In particular, I loved the ingenuity and charm of the smugglers passing secret messages using a code based on Ariel's songs from The Tempest, but I wasn't convinced, either that it would work, or that Sallust would have cracked it in the way he did. As an idea, it feels rushed. Equally typical of this corner cutting is a late sequence in which we and Gregory are brought up to speed on what has been happening in our absence by Wheatley's turning a large chunk of exposition into dialogue completely inappropriate for the character charged with delivering it. (If you know the novel, I'm thinking of Milly's update on what has been happening at Quex House after she finds the dead policemen.)
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this was the beginning of a glittering career for Sallust, who would become one of Wheatley's most popular and enduring regulars over the coming decades. But when read - as I am reading it - in ignorance of those later books and with only Black August to compare it to, then this new adventure for a fresher, more upright, less dour and altogether more Robin Hood-like Gregory Sallust has to be counted a disappointment.

But this is all, of course, irrelevant.
Nobody bought this book and thought anything of the sort in 1936: they were just glad to get their hands on the latest Wheatley page-turner.
And it begins quite delightfully, with Sallust stumbling into an international espionage conspiracy by following an exotic woman from a Normandy casino, just twelve hours before he is supposed to return to England, purely in the hope of having his way with her.

The more he studied her, between making bets, the more the desire to do so strengthened in his mind. He could never bring himself to be anything but "uncle-ish" to "nice" girls, however attractive, and he barred respectable married women, except on rare occasions, on practical grounds. The aftermath of broken hearts and tear-stained faces with possible threats of being cited as co-respondent by an injured husband was, he considered, too heavy a price to pay. He preferred, when he took the plunge into an affair, a woman whom he could be reasonably certain was content to play his own game. Nothing too easy - in fact it was essential to his pleasure that she should move in luxurious surroundings and be distinguished of her kind, and so quite inaccessible except to men of personality even if they had the wealth which he did not. Then, when victory was achieved, they could laugh together over their ruses, delight in one another to the full and, when the time came as it surely must, part before satiation; a little sadly, perhaps, but as friends who enriched life's experience by a few more precious moments.

( I love that "except on rare occasions".)
And despite the fact that she almost gets him killed before he's even introduced himself, the minxy Miss Sabine Szenty fits the bill admirably, it would seem, being "no bread and butter miss but an adventuress, perhaps even a poule de luxe, one of those rare exotic women for the sake of whose caresses millionaires commit crazy follies and sometimes come to ruin, disgrace, and suicide".
Not only does she have the characteristic mysterious beauty of the Wheatley heroine ("the dark pencilled eyebrows which curved back like the two ends of a cupid's bow, the points rising almost to her temples, and the sleek black hair, parted on the side and flattened on the crown but spreading into a mass of tight jet curls behind her small pink ears"), she smells good too:

She seemed to radiate warmth by merely sitting beside him as they bumped over the pavé of the old streets back to the harbour, and a faint delicious odour, not so much a definite perfume as the scent of daily coiffured hair, freshly washed silks and a scrupulously tended person - the hallmarks of a superbly soignée woman filled the darkness of the taxi.

As who would not, it's not long before Sallust is displaying frankest adoration:

He bent above her. "The gods are being kind to me in my old age. Most beautiful women are either good, stupid or vicious. And you are the marvellous exception. Lovely as a goddess, clever as an Athenian and a bad hat like myself, yet one who still has decent feelings. I'm going to kiss the lips off you once we land in France."

If it's this Wheatley you're after, the unabashed master of heightened prose, you will not go unrewarded.
The Communist agitators are stirringly described as "red servants of evil", and there are the usual swipes at the higher literary critics: "Some people sneer at reading detective fiction but I don't," reflects Mrs Bird, the villain's housekeeper; "I could make a fortune writing thrillers if I weren't so darned lazy," opines Gregory. And there's the customary mention of friendly rivals, this time the Raffles stories. ("Good stories those," says Mrs Bird, "We don't get many like them now; more's the pity.")

Does anything frighten Sallust? According to Wheatley:

He possessed more courage than most men but one thing that really scared him was to see firearms in the hands of a woman. They were so much more likely to go off unexpectedly.

Amidst all the corn are two brilliant sequences in Wheatley's best manner. One is the heroes' near-death in treacherous quicksands (oddly, a feature of the previous Gavin Fortescue adventure too) in which Wheatley again displays his mastery of screw-turning slowed pace, so every second of their torment is stretched to nerve-snapping point.
The other plays the same trick but even more impressively, as Sallust, jumping from a plane for the first time, believes that his parachute ripcord has failed to work, and we share his terror as he plummets towards the earth. But he has simply not allowed for the slight time delay, and in fact the chute opens perfectly. The ordeal, which could have lasted only a few seconds, is stretched by Wheatley over two nail-biting pages. This is true literary sleight of hand.

Murder Off Miami (1936)

2011-07-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

When I laid out the ground rules of the Dennis Wheatley Project in my introductory post, I wrote the following:

Of the non-fiction, I will certainly be including his studies of Charles II (Old Rowley, 1933), the Russian Revolution (Red Eagle, 1937) and the history of Satanism (The Devil & All His Works, 1971), but will mention only in passing the 'crime dossiers' (1936-9) and the greater part of his autobiographical writings, for the time being at least.

The inclusion of the crime dossiers in the list made little sense, in that they were not works of non-fiction, and in truth, the only real reason I opted to give them a miss was because I didn't have them, and assumed they'd be hard to get hold of. (The remaining three still might be.)
But just as I was about to embark on a reading of Contraband, a reader with the splendidly Wheatleyesque name of Zack Urlocker called my bluff, and compelled me to rethink my decision and track down what he considered a delightful piece of the Wheatley jigsaw.
Duly shamed, I acquired a second hand copy of the book that actually came next in sequence: not Contraband, but Murder Off Miami.

Lest any readers be unfamiliar what these crime dossiers were, they were an unlikely collaboration between Wheatley and his friend J. G. Links, not the sort of chap one might have expected to have any great interest in murder stories, or in Wheatley for that matter, being a highly respected art historian, world expert on Canaletto, and author (my wife reminded me this morning) of that delightful guide book Venice For Pleasure. Links and Wheatley had in fact been close personal friends since they met when the former was still a teenager; in Drink and Ink Wheatley describes him as one of his "Jewish lifelong friends" and adds "I am very proud to have had such a man as an intimate friend for over fifty years."
According to his account in the same book, the two were engaged in literary speculation in the mid-thirties when Links suddenly opined that there should be a detective story that abandoned all flights of narrative fancy and instead just stuck to the raw material of the investigation. Wheatley, intrigued by the idea, then suggested that as well as being composed of 'undramatised' police reports, interviews, statements and the like, the book could also include actual physical evidence, as well as facsimiles of letters, postcards, telegrams and all the other materials relevant to the investigation. By arranging all this material in sequence, a narrative will therefore emerge, stripped of all but its essential components.

It was a brilliant idea, although anathema to those who felt that the English detective novel should be setting its sights at high literary status: to such an outlook Wheatley's and Links's notion was retrograde indeed. But to those who savoured such books specifically for the intellectual exercise of pitting their wits against the criminal, and by extension the author, the idea was a brilliant one. You can imagine Sherlock Holmes turning gratefully to such a concept in the lulls between cases: a more sensible alternative to the cocaine bottle as remedy for lack of mental stimulation.
Therefore, it seems, Links set about devising the whodunnit plot - for which Wheatley admitted he had little aptitude - while Wheatley concentrated on the narrative structure and dialogue. (It remains to be questioned how accurately he maintains the lingo of thirties American cops and robbers: much of the transcripts play fair by the linguistic rules of a Warner Brothers gangster movie, though occasional references to characters being 'befogged' and 'no better than they should be' perhaps qualify as lapses.)
Delighting in their task, they assembled a rich assortment of realistic documents, on various types of paper in varying colours, thicknesses and sizes, and interspersed them with samples of hair, a discarded match and a piece of bloodstained curtain. (A measure of the fun they must have been having is indicated by the fact that a copy of 'No Ordinary Virgin', the first novel published by Wheatley's wife Joan under the pseudonym Eve Chaucer, is clearly visible in the police photograph of the victim's state room.)

The result was so plainly original that they seemed assured of success. What they hadn't accounted for, however, were the various practical obstacles to successful publication.
The complicated physical nature of the work would make it extremely expensive and time-consuming to produce, with a specially-employed staff to insert the samples of evidence, all of which would have to be separately provided - they would need a lot of hair, fabric and matches, even for a relatively modest print run! And then, because the book was presented as a dossier, in a cardboard folder, it was difficult for book shops to stock and display. Furthermore, the fact that the solution was revealed in a sealed section at the back, and various pieces of evidence were included in packets, meant that it was difficult for lending libraries to keep satisfactory copies. And all this in addition to the question of whether readers would take to the notion in the first place: it all added up to something of a risky venture.
In the event, by Wheatley's count, the book sold 120,000 copies in six months, despite initial scepticism from booksellers. ("Hatchards took only six copies," Wheatley notes in Drink and Ink, before adding triumphantly, "Queen Mary came in on the day it was published and bought the lot.") Declaring itself "a new era in crime fiction" on the cover, and dedicated inside to publisher Walter Hutchinson ("who always has the courage to back a new author of promise or a new idea"), it was deemed another spectacular success for Wheatley.

Set entirely aboard a pleasure boat, the book details the police examination of what is at first thought to be the suicide of eccentric soap magnate Bolitho Blane. But when heel marks are spotted on the missing man's carpet, consistent with his body being dragged to the porthole, and sponged-out patches of blood found on the curtains, Florida's ace Inspector Kettering decides to investigate more deeply, and uncovers a deadly rivalry between Depression-struck businessmen desperate to corner the world soap market. Even Japan is interested, in the form of inscrutable Inosuke Hayashi of the Shikoku Products Company, suppliers of soap to the Japanese armed forces. Could he have killed Blane to get his hands on his suds?
And what of the boat's owner, himself a soap tycoon fallen on hard times, or his pretty daughter, or the weird Bishop who faints when people enter the room, or the feckless married couple, the Honorable Reggie and Mrs Jocelyn, travelling with her wealthy mother, the formidable Lady Welter, whose fortune, with which she finances a string of loss-making Christian evangelical newspapers, is all tied up in - yes! you earn yourself a gold star! - soap.

Clearly, there are three angles from which to judge the book: as a technical exercise, successful or not on those specific terms, as a crime mystery in its own right, and as a Wheatley book.
On the first count the book is a delightful if superficial exercise in structural inventiveness. It's great fun to work one's way through the documents and consider the samples of evidence, but we don't actually learn anything from looking at a real sample of hair that we wouldn't glean from the accompanying description: no actual revelations are contained within the 'authentic' components, and the book would be just as clear and effective as a narrative if reissued without them (as it apparently has been). They're cute but not actually clues in themselves, and the novelty of their inclusion remains just that.
As a murder mystery it is pretty effective, I thought: I like to think of myself as no soft touch to a wily novelist intent on sleight of hand, and the revelation came as a complete surprise to me, at least. I think it's fair to say that all but the most practiced mystery buffs will feel as useless as Inspector Kettering, who declares himself "completely at a loss" in his report's final summing-up to his superiors, only to then receive the cable from Florida Police Lieutenant Schwab that opens the final, sealed section of the book, and begins: "To Detective Officer Kettering, Solution of murder perfectly clear on evidence submitted..."
The clues are all there and I certainly didn't spot them - I'd love to hear from any other readers who did.

Obviously, if viewed as a Wheatley novel Murder Off Miami can only be counted a pleasing diversion, albeit an extremely pleasing one. The characters are at best sketches, and I found myself longing for Wheatley's authorial voice to blunder inappropriately in and give us his true measure of them, especially when they are so obviously Wheatley characters in all but the degree to which we are able to get to know them. From their names (Carlton Rocksavage, Nellie Orde, Silas Ringbottom) to their interests (a copy of 'The Saint In New York' is passed around between them, earning Leslie Charteris his second name check in a Wheatley adventure), they read like the working sketches for characters in some forthcoming, 'real' Wheatley novel.
In particular there is the delightfully typical figure of Count Luigi Posodini, an Italian nobleman and playboy, revealed almost instantly to be one 'Slick' Daniels, a sharpie and all-round bad egg, no more Italian than anyone else on board. (One of his many aliases, it is interesting to note, is 'George Gordon-Carr', an echo, conscious or not, of Wheatley's shady friend and mentor, the late Eric Gordon-Tombe, himself never short of an alias or two.) Not dissimilar to Nicolas Costello in They Found Atlantis, or for that matter to any of Wheatley's other selfish, immature and excitable Latin types, he surely merits true fictional immortalising. ("Fire away, friend, fire away!" he cheerfully exclaims when Inspector Kettering, having discovered his true identity, suggests a few further questions.)

The same goes for perky young Miss Ferri Rocksavage who, as the only entirely blameless suspect, ends up a virtually unknown quantity, whereas in a straightforward novel she would presumably take centre stage as the heroine. (As to who would be the hero for her to pair off with at the end: well, none of this crowd, that's for sure: presumably Wheatley would have taken the pleasure cruisers out of radio range and beyond police assistance, and rewritten Inspector Kettering as an amateur sleuth already on board.)
I wanted more than a mere thumbnail sketch, too, of the dodgy Bishop of Bude, terrified of having his part in a frustratingly unspecified 'unsavoury episode' in 1917 revealed to the world. Indeed, all the characters cry out for a full Wheatley pen portrait, especially when they come immortalised in such delightful staged photographs.
There's lovely Ferri Rocksavage, looking confidently at the camera, a thoroughly modern cigarette smouldering unapologetically in her raised hand. Smiling a little too raffishly for my liking is the Hon Reggie Jocelyn, a pair of noisy checked socks prominently on display. His wife Pamela is certainly lovely in her slicked-backed Kay Francis hairdo, but unlike Ferri is photographed in uncommunicative profile - what has she to hide? For my money Mr Hayashi looks about as Japanese as Count Posodini is Italian, and I challenge anyone to hold the intimidating gaze of the terrifying Lady Welter for more than a second.
And as for the oddball Bishop... well he's posing a little too nonchalantly for a man of the cloth, I'd say, bald but for a few patches of white hair but sporting a fine pair of jet-black eyebrows. Under normal circumstances, Wheatley the novelist would surely have drawn our attention to those.

They Found Atlantis (1936)

2011-01-24T02:37:00.000-08:00

I read most of They Found Atlantis in Cornwall, in early morning sessions by the sea, not far from Land's End, as the early morning breakers crashed against the rocks. The perfect backdrop for an entertaining if at times utterly insane fable.
The first half of the book is pretty straightforward stuff, a maritime adventure combining underseas exploration with a bit of high society intrigue, some sex, rivalry and a gangster plot above water level. Wheatley was by this time well practiced in the art of keeping two simultaneous plots on the move, and the opening chapters, mixing gangster thriller and sea adventure story, are as accomplished as ever.
But then, halfway through, it switches abruptly and - by me, at least - quite unexpectedly into outrageous sci-fi fantasy, as our intrepid heroes, stranded on the ocean bottom with no hope of returning to the surface, encounter an undersea kingdom of Atlanteans who grow plants in a sealed chamber, spend months asleep during which their astral bodies wander the surface of the earth and follow the lives of the inhabitants (on waking they then update their fellows with the latest developments, soap opera-style), see by earthlight, live for several hundred years, enjoy group sex, are forbidden from mentioning bad things lest they cause bad thoughts, and are plagued by a sub-race of blind, fish-eating sea humanoids and briefly glimpsed savage mermen.
Our heroes end up among them, get married and are then booted out again when sexual jealousy - long since evolved out of the gene pool of these enlightened ancients - leads to manslaughter. Not fancying spending the rest of their lives with the savage mermen they clamber up through the earth's crust to freedom.
Oh yes, and the one who's supposed to be an heiress isn't, and the one who's supposed to be just her dowdy relation turns out to be the heiress, and the attempt by smart-spoken gangster Oxford Kate (a man) to fleece her comes to nothing.
But I sense this is getting confusing. Let me retrace my steps.

What we have in They Found Atlantis is a Wheatley who has taken a gamble with fantastic and supernatural elements in The Devil Rides Out and seen that gamble pay off, plunging fearlessly into science fiction absurdity with a relish that I sometimes found myself wishing had been more cautiously applied. There is much wide-eyed fantasy, a schoolboy-like delight in the creation of alternative worlds, some left-over horrific detail from Devil (the description of the travellers' escape from the fish men is gruesomely described: "Tripping and stumbling over dead bodies and writhing wounded they literally hacked their way through the mass of short, naked, stinking, grey-white people"; Wheatley accurately describes the tableaux as "like a scene from hell conjured up by the vivid brush of some early Flemish painter"), and all combined with the usual clean-cut character dynamics of the straight, Rider Haggard-style adventure yarn.
Add to this the now customary fruits of his peripheral research, including lots of real, interesting scientific information about the techniques of undersea exploration that sits oddly indeed alongside the mermen, and you have a book that cannot fail to be interesting, but which must ultimately be counted among Wheatley's most eccentric diversions.

Of course, we don't doubt that they will find Atlantis - the title hints as much - but the discovery that it is still tenanted, and by a race of free-loving paganist weirdoes (this is the second book in a row in which characters have patiently explained to uptight western moderns the ancient glories of polygamy), will surely take most readers undefended.

Atlantis as a concept in a work of fiction I can swallow, but the non-Darwinian farrago of the book's final chapters I found a little too daft. Learned disquisition on the Atlantean phonetic alphabet further adds to the book's weird if often undeniably beguiling mix of rationalism and madness.

This is what Atlantis looked like, according to Wheatley, his wife, and his step-daughter

The book - which Wheatley described in Drink and Ink as "one of the best I have ever written" - was inspired by Wheatley's reading of Half Mile Down, adventurer William Beebe's account of the undersea discoveries he had made in his 'bathysphere', a reinforced iron sphere that allowed him to explore to depths previously impossible. The book had been published in 1934, and must have immediately set a train of thought in motion for Wheatley, who was fascinated by Beebe's account of the strange, twilight world beneath the waves, and the many strange and undiscovered lifeforms who make their home there. Wheatley dedicated the novel to Beebe when it was published two years later. (According to Phil Baker, Beebe was gracious enough to write him a letter of thanks, presumably for including so much of the technical detail concerning the bathysphere he had included in his own account.)

Beebe and his bathysphere

What Beebe made of the book's more fantastic episodes I do not know, nor am I sure how, when and why Wheatley decided to tie Beebe's invention with the myth of Atlantis in the first place. Judging by past form and Wheatley's own temperament, one might have expected something more along the lines of an undersea treasure hunt, with competing groups looking for treasure lost on the ocean bed. (This all sounds a lot like Peter Benchley's The Deep, and I was frequently reminded of Benchley's novel in the early stages of Wheatley's.) Almost certainly, I think, this would have been Wheatley's approach prior to the success of The Devil Rides Out, but the public response to that novel could well have emboldened (and drawn) him towards more fantastic themes.

It's possible that he may have read of the Atlantis myth during research for Devil: certainly there had been a revival of interest in the subject in the first half of the twentieth century, as an offshoot of Theosophy and similar occult and esoteric revivalist movements. But Wheatley does not mention anywhere that he took any particular personal interest, and it is relevant that (as noted in this extremely interesting discussion of the book and its influences) it is never clear when reading the book if Wheatley is himself a believer or simply using the old myths to help spin his yarn. (Whereas part of the unique power of Devil Rides Out derives from the reader's certainty of his absolute sincerity when describing Satanic powers.)

That the general occult research undertaken for Devil may have been his primary source of influence is further suggested by this passage, doubly interesting for its foretaste of the homunculi that would later become central to To The Devil, A Daughter:

"As with all other nations we had had in our midst from the beginning certain persons who practiced what, for want of a better name, I will call the Black Art. At first they were comparatively harmless, dealing only in spells, love-tokens and minor witchcraft, but the time came when they began to concern themselves with what you call 'science' and that proved the most unholy alliance which has ever entered the world.
"... the sorcerer-scientists saw their great chance to corrupt our people with their evil arts. They carried out many experiments in order to see if they could not succeed in creating life without the sanction of the Gods. 'Black' magicians in your upper world have endeavoured to do the same and have, as you may know, at times been partially successful. Such creatures are incubated in large glass containers and are termed Homunculi. They have the rudimentary form of man yet lack that God-given flame which you call the Soul. Our masters of Evil succeeded in the dread mystery at last, thus introducing a new and hideous race upon the earth. Beasts which moved and talked and functioned just like men although, unlike the lowest forms of true animal, they had not the faintest spark of the divine nature in them."

(That contentious swastika reappears too, in the pagan rites of the Atlantean women: "When she had done she kissed them both, made the sign of the Swastika on their foreheads, breasts, and thighs with a curiously scented oil from a tiny bottle...")
But another possible influence, of course, may have been his old mentor and prototype of Gregory Sallust, Eric Gordon Tombe (see here), who would have responded both to the wild esoteric fantasy and Greek classicism of the myth. Certainly the pagan Utopia that is Wheatley's Atlantis, all magic powers and no-strings sex, has a very definite touch of the Tombes about it:

"You see, each of us make what we require for ourselves and nothing more" Lulluma explained "and when we wish to eat we gather whatever fresh fruit is in season from the trees or net a fish in the lake and cook it. All waste is consumed immediately after by the earthshine."

"How does that work?" he asked. "It seems to have all the properties of sunshine."

"It has," she assured him. "You doubtless know that the centre of the earth is molten and gives off gases which are exactly similar to those which shoot out in great flames from the sun. Long ago our people tapped that source of heat and light and then it was a comparatively simple matter to conduct it through certain minerals so that it should give a steady glow. The circular arrangement round the roof enables the trees and plants to benefit from it at every angle in the same degree so that they are never distorted in one direction. The result is similar to that produced by the movement of your sun."

"Forgive me, but there are so many things I want to ask you" he smiled down at her. "From the way you speak you are obviously familiar with our upper world?"

"There is little do here" she answered enigmatically "except make love!"

"You find that pall at times?"

"No, never - because we do not abuse our zest for it. Once every year or two each of us has some tremendous affair which lasts a few months, then when we are satiated for the moment, we go away. Later the urge rises again and when we feel it really strongly we take our happiness with another."

"You speak of going away. What do you mean by that?"

"Two of us are always what you would call 'on duty' here. It was the turn of Nahou and myself when you arrived. The others spend most of the year in sleep. Sometimes we sleep for a month or more at a stretch, and during that time our spirit travels - as quickly as an ether wave. We have learned to direct it to the place where we wish to go. The eyes of our invisible bodies can observe your customs and our ears can hear your speech. That is how we have learned your languages and know quite a lot about you, but there are many things you do which puzzle us still."

The party's prudishness in particular tickles the Atlanteans: "They do not understand nakedness, as we do who are so old in time that we have come to appreciate the wisdom of reverting to the customs of simple savages in some things," they muse, then educate: "You will soon learn the joy of being free from such stuffy clothes and your skins will be the better for it."

I did find myself hoping, as the travellers become more and more enamoured of this dreary paradise, mooning about with a bunch of hippies twenty thousand leagues under the sea and never a thought for the world of fine wines and Hoyo cigars they have left behind, that the Atlanteans would suddenly prove less obliging than they seem, possessed of a sinister side, perhaps even that the whole thing may have been some kind of trap... but no, in true W. B. Yeats fashion it is we who are not worthy of the faeries, and when nasty human emotions cloud the antiseptic perfection of Atlantis it is time to travel back to the surface with all the other reprobates.

I get the feeling the champagne was flowing a little too freely at the Wheatleys' when much of this was being penned, and it is a relief on the occasions, not rare but not quite frequent enough, when the man's bluff cynicism shows through the hippy-dippy veneer. ("What do you hope to find if we go on," asks Nicolas in response to the suggestion that they should proceed further into the strange and perilous undersea world into which they have stumbled, "the Ritz-Carlton Grill Room round the corner or a handy Lyons?")

And there's a fascinating, lengthy passage in which the hero questions an Atlantean wise man as to the mechanical means of their survival underwater, and how such fantastic things as we have been bombarded with for several chapters could possibly be. Each absurd invention of previous episodes is accounted for in patient, thorough, painstaking and surely redundant detail, with each point made clear followed by some fresh objection, and again by a fresh explanation - of a sort demanded surely, by this time, by no more than one reader in a hundred. (Any who needed such validation to accept the events of the book would have given up on it long before it arrives!)

In moments like this it's as if the tension between Wheatley the fantasist and Wheatley the rationalist is actually being acted out on the page.

Certainly he is at his most relaxed and characteristic when then book is above water, the thrills are rational, and the pace measured enough for his customary expansiveness, discursiveness and trademark merciless characterisation.

The hero McKay (referred to as 'the McKay' throughout, and modelled on a recent acquaintance of Wheatley's, Captain Magee RN Retd, "a delightful character" who also contributed technical information to Black August, according to Drink and Ink) is a salty rogue, with Wheatley's own preferences in politics, women and lifestyle, presented, like so many Wheatley heroes, as somewhat rough around the edges, somewhat older and more dissipated than your average fiction adventure hero and by no means classically handsome, but possessed of tremendous strength of personality. And here is Wheatley on the heroine, Sally:

Sally's skin was good, her nose straight, her mouth full and red, her teeth excellent, the eyes wide set but not large enough to give her face distinction. She was attractive but not a real beauty.
Her cheeks were just a shade too full and nothing, she knew, could alter that any more than the most skilful plucking would ever convert her golden eyebrows from semi-circular arches to the long narrow Garboish sweeps which she would have liked. Besides, shame of all shames, her otherwise quite perfect figure was marred by thick ankles.

I say, steady on, old chap!
That reference to Garbo is one of a pair, by the way: elsewhere Camilla, the phoney heiress, contemplates breaking into movies and "outgarboing Garbo". Wheatley always took a keen interest in movies and movie people (a character called King Karloff is mentioned in passing, and one of the Atlanteans is likened to Mae West: a deliciously unimaginable image!), but it was perhaps ill-feeling towards their latest attempt to adapt his own work (The Secret of Stamboul, see here) that caused him to create the utterly repellent character of Nicolas Costello, crooning romantic lead of Hollywood movies, thief and coward, one of Carmilla's many jealous suitors and the ultimate cause of the travellers' ejection from Atlantis.
Sally and McKay have this exchange after the latter describes Costello as "that little filth":

"Nicky's not so bad. He's rather fun I think, and quite a famous film star. You've only got a hate against him because you don't like crooners - you said so the other day."
"I'd croon him if I had him in a ship with me," said the McKay grimly. "I took a dislike to that young man before I even knew what brand of idiocy he indulged in..."

Wheatley later describes Costello as "resplendent in a pale blue flannel suit that no man other than a film star would have dared to wear", and, as he exercises "the muted cross between a tenor and alto which he called his voice", observes:

Some people like listening to crooners. Obviously many people must, for the records of the theme songs from Nicky's pictures sold in their millions all over the world. Camilla certainly did, and lay back with half-closed eyes savouring to the full the primitive emotionalism of 'Dear baby God gave me, I'm holding your hands' and 'In all the world, Mother - there's no one like you'. Not so the McKay, who fifty feet away in the deck lounge, trumped his partner's trick, apologised and muttered fiercely: "God! how I'd like to tan that youngster's hide!"

It is in passages like these, rather than the more bizarre stretches of Jules Verne-like fantasy, that the authentic Wheatley voice is most clearly heard.

Wheatley on film: “The Secret of Stamboul” (1936)

2010-08-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

Other than to briefly mention the fact that it exists, Wheatley has nothing whatsoever to say about The Secret of Stamboul in his autobiography.
Odd, because whatever he might have thought of it at the time, by the time he was writing Drink and Ink, with The Lost Continent and To the Devil a Daughter behind him, it must have seemed a most uncharacteristically reverent production.
As an adaptation, it is probably the most solid of all the Wheatley movies.
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It scores over The Forbidden Territory in particular in the better location work allowed by what seems to be a somewhat higher budget (both films were produced by Richard Wainwright; this one was directed by Andrew Marton). It also boasts a stronger cast, with early appearances from James Mason as Destime and Kay Walsh as Diana, and a gorgeous-as-ever Valerie Hobson as Tania (above).
The real star of the show, however, is actor-playwright Frank Vosper (who you may remember from Hitchcock's original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much) as the eunuch Kazdim. Vosper doesn't quite match the grotesque physical dimensions of Wheatley's description, but he catches fully the innate repulsiveness of the character. Sadly, it was his last screen appearance: the following year he drowned after falling mid-ocean from a transatlantic liner. Despite much initial speculation the death was officially declared accidental.
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Of course, the screenplay comes with its full expected share of alteration, omission, concision and simplification.
Swithin Destime understandably becomes Larry Destime, and there seems to be no covert government involvement in his going to Turkey: he is employed by Diana's father just to sniff around on the off-chance that something's brewing that might affect his tobacco business. For this reason, Diana is not as heavily involved in the affair, and the entire dynamic of her relationship to Destime is reversed: she falls for him and more or less stumbles into the perils from which he must save her.
Tania, on the other hand, is completely reimagined and given Diana's centrality to the plot: she and Destime get heavily involved from the start, and we are made instantly aware of her double-agent status. She is working for the eunuch with extreme reluctance (she's not that bothered by the deception and duplicity in the book until she falls in love) and even before meeting Destime is engaged in attempting to double-cross him and escape his clutches. Since the plot no longer requires her to fall for Peter, his role in the action is also greatly reduced, and he is played (by Peter Haddon) almost as comic relief, as a Ralph Lynn-type silly ass.
To make things simpler, the revolutionaries' gun depot is at the tobacco plantation itself, and Reouf is an employee of the company and a chance acquaintance, rather than the source that Destime in the novel spends some time deliberately attempting to locate. More charmingly, the secret jihadists' rendezvous is no longer a covert gathering on a rooftop but a stylish nightclub, where the clientele sip cocktails and listen to lounge jazz in illicit fezzes and veils.
But while these changes make only a slight effect on the plot's initial trajectory, their combined effect necessitates a wholesale rewriting of the ending, not least in its complete removal of the British Embassy's involvement. It's an amateurs' job the whole way, with Destime and Tania, assisted by Peter and Diana, foiling the revolution themselves.
Under the circumstances it seems only fair that Tania should be allowed to live past the climax, and that she and Destime should walk into the future together.
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The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935)

2010-08-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

This is what you call starting with a swagger:
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If the postman who served the southern side of Belgrave Square that summer had not been a 'lewd fellow of the baser sort', many things might have panned out differently.
It is doubtful if Diana Duncannon would have met a certain distinguished foreigner who was then visiting London. Swithin Destime might have terminated his career, unusually brilliant to that date, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The life of an elderly Russian lady, then living in Constantinople as a refugee, might have been considerably prolonged, and a number of other people might not have had the misfortune to lose theirs in the flower of their youth. The Turkish Government would have found itself - but there, the postman was a 'lewd fellow of the baser sort' and, strange as it may seem, it is just upon such delicate matters as the glandular secretions of postmen and their moral reactions to the same that the destinies of human beings and the fate of nations hang.
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So, just how do you follow The Devil Rides Out?
Do you attempt some bold new change of direction? Do you labour over a sequel that you hope will be twice as good but which will probably just be twice as long? Do you retreat into two years of indecision before daring to write again, only to have the new work tepidly received? Or do you get straight back in the saddle and come out blazing with a back to basics, business as usual barnstormer?
Wheatley, no surprise, chose the latter course, and re-entered the fray with a tale of political intrigue, exotic locales and dire peril: The Eunuch of Stamboul. It is a novel in the grand Wheatley tradition, a return to the meat and potatoes espionage thriller that he had not attempted since Forbidden Territory, and yet another unqualified success.
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It also makes for fascinating reading just now, since its central question - whether Turkey will embrace Western modernity or retreat into Islamist medievalism - is as relevant as ever, especially in the light of current debates over the country's fitness or otherwise for EU membership.
The action is set against the background of Kemal Ataturk's modernisation drive, which enforces religious freedom through political coercion, and concerns the planned insurrection of a group of starry-eyed jihadists who yearn for the liberty of theocratic enslavement.
This is the very paradox consuming the Middle East today, and Wheatley's commentary on it, as surprisingly even-handed as it is characteristically robust, makes for a genuinely timely read. The pleasures of a Wheatley novel are usually to be found in the remoteness of their mores and concerns from modern life, and the insight they offer into the everyday concerns of generations past. The excitement here, by contrast, is to be found in how bizarrely contemporary so much of its backdrop seems.
At first he seems foursquare on the side of the Islamists, his Dumas-loving side identifying with their renegade romanticism and oppressed-status, and finding much humour in the vulgarity of Kemal's faux-Western innovations. In one scene he contrasts the authentic Turkish musical entertainment at a secret jihadi meeting with the "revolting crooning of some western barbarian" on a transistor radio in an adjacent building, and allows a Turkish woman over two pages to convince Swithin Destime, our hero, of the rightness of polygamy: "Monogamy might suit the West perhaps although even that was doubtful, and she produced statistics to hammer home her point."
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It was a long speech and so admirably built up that Swithin had to admit the logic of the speaker's views - at least as far as the people she represented were concerned. If these Eastern women were content to share a man, as they had done for centuries, why should they not be allowed to continue to do so and, now that many of them were taking up careers there seemed a better reason than ever for two or more to divide the labours entailed by children and a home between them. Of course, few Western women, he realised, would be content to accept so short a sex life, that was the big snag, but apart from it and the question of Christian morality, the system, if adhered to, appeared wholesome when compared with the scandalous fraud and collusion which arise from the English divorce laws...
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Destime is almost swayed by the rhetoric of heroic idealist Reouf:
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"Kemal did much for Turkey in the War and after, but he has sacrificed the soul of our nation for the material trappings of the West. We are not a European people and we never shall be. No wearing of bowler hats, jazz music and the co-education will ever make us so. We are Asiatics and the ways of our fathers which endured for centuries are those best-suited to our needs."
"Yet, you admit that sweeping reforms were long overdue."
"Truly - and they have now been carried out - but that could have been done without laws which force us to sin fifty times a day in the sight of Allah, or treaties which tie us down to the permanent acceptance of territorial limitations making us into a Third-Class State."
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Largely because of the potential threat to British interests, however, Wheatley gradually navigates the reader into opposition, precisely at the point when political activism gives way to religious fundamentalism:
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For one awful moment Swithin held his breath. The word 'Jehad' flamed through his brain with all its terrible possibilities. Of the patriotic ravings of young Reouf he had taken little stock but this was a very different business. It even far exceeded the scope of the determined internal revolution of which he had learned in the last ten minutes, for a Jehad meant the preaching of a Holy War. These people were not out only to destroy Kemal and reinstate the old law of the Koran but, with all the bitter zeal of blind fanaticism, they meant to carry their full programme into actual practice. It meant the certainty of another flare-up in the Balkans, their co-religionists would probably rise in sympathy and begin massacres of Europeans in India, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and, taking into consideration the unstable state of things in Europe, perhaps even be the kindling spark leading to the supreme horror of a war to the death between fresh combinations of the Great Powers.
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How chilling is that line: "... their co-religionists would probably rise in sympathy and begin massacres of Europeans in India..."? As Wheatley has one character note in typical style: "there's no reasoning with these birds..."
Here, though, Britishness is still a force to be measured:
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The Daimler's engine purred and, with a superior glance at Malik, the cockney chauffeur let in the clutch. The Turk stood watching with impotent fury blazing in his eyes. He would cheerfully have given five years of his life to be able to draw his gun and haul Swithin out of the car at the point of it - but he dared not. A small silk Union Jack fluttered gaily from a slim staff on the Daimler's bonnet. No policeman - be he black, white, yellow, or brown, lays hands with impunity upon the property of His Britannic Majesty's accredited representatives the wide world over - and Malik knew it. Stirred by profound emotion he spat, while Swithin, no less stirred by the portentous meaning of that little flag, looked away quickly and lit a cigarette.
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As noted, our hero is one Swithin Destime, Wheatley's most delicious name for a hero since Black August's Kenyon Wensleydale. He's kicked out of the Guards when he comes to the aid of dishy Diana Duncannon at a dinner party, by punching a "garlic-eating bounder" pestering her on the lawn. When the bounder turns out to be Prince Ali of Turkey, a sensitive political situation can only be avoided by having Destime, and his fellow pugilist Peter Carew, resign their commissions. Later, however, Diana's father offers Destime a job at the Turkish depot of his tobacco company, so as to snoop undercover among the locals and discern if there is any truth to the rumour that some form of uprising in the offing, and if there is, what that might mean for Blighty.
Diana ("cool and lovely in an outrageously fashionable hat") is a slightly new kind of Wheatley heroine: not merely feisty and resourceful (as was customary in his books) but the controlling force, and coquettish to boot. She repeatedly makes a fool of Destime, who is still underestimating her to the very end. He, by contrast, is a pretty hopeless amateur, relying chiefly on luck, guesswork and fisticuffs: exactly like the literary heroes with whom Diana mockingly compares him.
And Wheatley being Wheatley, he can't resist making the comparisons explicit:
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In his mind, he sought desperately for a way of escape, but he could think of nothing. Again Diana's taunt came back to him and he wondered miserably just what those gifted amateurs of fiction did when they had walked blithely into the arms of their enemies. Bulldog Drummond, he supposed, would have tackled the present situation with fantastic ease... Bulldog might not be exactly subtle, but at times he certainly possessed the advantage of being devastatingly heavy handed. Then there was that other fellow, an infinitely more dangerous gentleman adventurer, 'The Saint'. Swithin had followed his amazing prowess in many countries, through fifteen novels, and admired him greatly. The remarkable flow of cheerful badinage which he managed to sustain even in the most desperate situations was a joy to read, and his methods a perfect example of how matters should be handled in the present instance.
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But Swithin is no Saint, and virtually every major suspense episode is motivated by him behaving foolishly:
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He had failed - failed utterly from the very beginning. By not foreseeing that Tania's was such a likely post for the police to plant a spy he had given himself away to Kazdim through entrusting her with that letter. By failing to catch and warn Reouf of Kazdim's identity that night when they left the cafe together he felt that he had been largely responsible for the poor boy's death. By not troubling to take the most elementary precautions at his flat he had walked blindly into the arms of the enemy, then, when almost miraculously his life had been spared, he had been crazy enough to place himself in Ali's clutches, where the veriest tyro would at least have taken care to find out the name of the Military Governor of Constantinople before risking a visit to him - and now, by his supreme folly in asking Diana to meet him at the Tobacco Depot, he had given her away to Kazdim too.
He had failed, not only in carrying out his mission, which he realised now was a thing of comparatively small account, since it only concerned investing certain sums of money but, through his incompetence, new wars were to be sprung on an unsuspecting world and , above all - a thing far nearer home - that woman whom he had considered hard and selfish but who was brave and proud, and whom he now knew that he loved so that he would go down to hell itself to help her, was to be humiliated, befouled, broken and tortured, in body and spirit. His cup of bitterness brimmed and spilled over when he recalled his refusal to take her warning - that he had not the brain or nerve for the job he had taken on so arrogantly - and knew it to be true.
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He does redeem himself, for sure, but thanks to a lot of luck.
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As for Kazdim, the Eunuch himself, he's the head of the secret police, and a clandestine Islamist, much given to tying his enemies' limbs together and dumping them in deep water.
I suppose Wheatley must have realised that after Mocata his readers would no longer accept a mere ruffian for a villain. Kazdim, therefore, is a real showstopper:
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He was a tall man with immensely powerful shoulders but the effect of his height was minimized by his gigantic girth. He had the stomach of an elephant and would easily have turned the scale at twenty stone. His face was even more unusual than his body for apparently no neck supported it and it rose straight out of his shoulders like a vast inverted U. The eyes were tiny beads in that vast expanse of flesh and almost buried in folds of fat, the cheeks puffed out, yet withered like the skin of a last year's apple, and the mouth was an absurd pink rosebud set above a seemingly endless cascade of chins.
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The book offers the best example yet of Wheatley's climax-upon-climax formula: knowing, perhaps, that he wasn't going to top Devil Rides Out conceptually (though the astral bodies put in a reappearance), he has gone all out to top each action climax with another. The book just doesn't want to stop, and there are times when you wonder if it ever will. But it works: the effect is neither counterproductively exhausting, nor ridiculous.
Especially notable here is how the secondary character of Peter is used to achieve this effect, since it shows a genuinely clever awareness of narrative structure. The character is present at the beginning, cleverly reintroduced halfway through, and then held in reserve for Wheatley's cleverest 'last dash' yet, stepping in to foul up the works after Destime's efforts, finally, appear to have succeeded.
Our heroes are saved, ultimately, by the timely intervention of Tania, ("attractive enough to have caught the eye of the most hardened misogynist"), Kazdim's gorgeous paid agent. Swithin gets the measure of her halfway through, but Peter falls hard and naive for her, and as soon as he is entrusted with the important government commission to which all Destime's efforts have been directed, he promptly makes an ass of himself and allows her to betray him as ordered.
But now, tormented by conscience, and driven mad with guilt and hatred after the death of her mother at Kazdim's hands, her (literally) insane bravery saves the day at the cost of her own life.
This is also something new for Wheatley: his first tragic heroine, inspired perhaps by Devil's Tanith, whom he had shockingly killed halfway through, only to wimp out and bring back to life a few chapters later. Tania, who resembles Tanith in more than just name (the unwilling servant of the principal villain, loved by a secondary male hero who wants to 'take her away from all of this', a refugee) gets no second chance, and her death is powerfully woven by Wheatley into the breakneck action climax.
Ultimately, Swithin, Diana and Peter foil the revolution, avert catastrophe, earn the undying loyalty of Kemal (the first example in Wheatley of a real-life figure with a speaking role) and save the British Empire - temporarily at least.
The book ends with an official proclamation from Kemal to his people, to which one can only add 'Amen':
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Those followers of the Prophet who wish to continue the practice of their ancient faith are free to do so, as also are the Christians and the Jews. But let them beware how they attempt to tamper with the machinery of State. Religion and nationality are things apart.
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If you hate Wheatley's style, good luck to you and there's no more to be said.
But if you do have a sweet tooth for this kind of thing, this is one of his most efficient displays yet.
No sign yet of autopilot.

Wheatley on film: “The Devil Rides Out” (1968)

2010-08-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing that above anything else has saved Wheatley's name from falling into literary oblivion it is Hammer Film Productions' version of The Devil Rides Out.
For every one person truly familiar with Wheatley's work there are many dozens who think they are, thanks to some formative encounter with this movie. To them, Wheatley is merely a writer of sensational black magic stories, populated by goat men, horse-back skeletons and giant spiders - but at least they can tell you something about him, which is probably more than you can claim for, say, Edgar Wallace. In the final analysis, the service the film has done his legacy almost certainly outweighs the not inconsiderable disservice.
Certainly Wheatley professed himself entirely happy with the movie, writing in Drink and Ink that:
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... the script-writer [respected American fantasy author Richard Matheson] stuck, as far as film technique permitted, to the story. I wrote to him at Hollywood to thank him for that. His reply was, "I have written several novels myself and had their film versions murdered by the script-writers; so when I became a script-writer myself, I swore that I would never mess up another author's story."
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Wheatley's benevolence towards the film may simply be attributable to the fact that, unlike almost all of the other screen adaptations of his work, it was a significant box office hit, and created a renewed interest in his books. Certainly his attitude is hard to explain on any other grounds, given his general antipathy towards the film versions of his books and his dislike for the way in which they tinker with his plots. For while the film is a definitive and enjoyable example of Hammer Horror, as an adaptation of the novel it cannot really be counted a success. In particular, his claim that it does not significantly deviate from his original plot is simply not true.
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The driving force behind the film's production was its star, Christopher Lee, who admired Wheatley's novels (being sympathetic both to their morality and their metaphysics), and had recently become his neighbour in London and struck up a friendship. In his autobiography, Lee recalls:
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After years of urging black-magic themes on Hammer, I had a breakthrough with The Devil Rides Out. Conservative, Hammer had always worried about the Church's reaction to the screening of the Black Mass. But we thought the charge of blasphemy would not stick if we did the thing with due attention to scholarship.
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It is a consequence of this reticence that the film so relentlessly stresses its characters' Christian credentials (no reference here to Simon's Jewishness) and also, alas, nervously plays down some of the picturesque grotesquerie of the Satanism sequences. The replacement of Wheatley's bestial orgies with rather tame drunken revelry was inevitable, but it was a shame to ignore the visual potential of this:
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While the crowd had been busy at the tables, their leaders had donned fantastic costumes. One had a huge cat mask over his head and a furry cloak, the tail of which dangled behind him on the ground; another wore the headdress of a repellent toad; the face of a third, still masked, gleamed bluish for a moment in the candlelight from between the distended jaws of a wolf, and Mocata, whom they could still recognise by his squat obesity, now had webbed wings sprouting from his shoulders which gave him the appearance of a giant bat.
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Most significantly, the film removes all reference to the Talisman of Set, around which Wheatley's entire novel revolves, and the pursuit of which is Mocata's sole aim. Without this, or any clear alternative indication of what Mocata is doing (beyond general, unspecified Satanic stuff), his actions in the film actually make no sense at all. In particular, his relentless pursuit of Simon and Tanith and his substitution of Fleur (renamed Peggy in the film following the fair-enough decision to ignore Princess Marie Lou's exotic backstory and instead make her plain Marie Eaton, Englishwoman) seems irrational and self-defeating.
In the novel, Simon and Tanith are astrologically vital to his quest, and Fleur substituted for a specific reason:
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"What is this Talisman? Rex mentioned it last night."
"It's the reason why Mocata is certain to make every effort to get possession of me again," Simon's voice came back. "It is buried somewhere, and adepts of the Left Hand Path have been seeking it for centuries. It conveys almost limitless powers on its possessor, and Mocata has discovered that its whereabouts will be revealed if he can practice the ritual to Saturn in conjunction with Mars with someone who was born in a certain year at the hour of the conjunction. There can't be many such, but for my sins I happen to be one, and even if he can find others they may not be suitable for various reasons."
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(...)
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The Duke nodded. "The prayers of a virgin woman are amazingly powerful in such instances, and the younger she is, the stronger her vibrations. You see, a little child like Fleur who is old enough to pray, but absolutely unsoiled in any way, is the nearest that any human being can get to absolute purity. ..."
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But in the film Simon is simply the newest recruit to Mocata's circle, with no particular significance to his (unstated) plans. After De Richleau spoils their meeting by abducting him, Mocata continues to go after him out of pique, and abducts Peggy to punish them when he is thwarted, making him both petty and curiously self-destructive, since as things stand in the film it would surely be in his interests to stop annoying De Richleau once he realises how formidable an opponent he is.
.
Then, just as they had done with their version of Dracula ten years before, Hammer have for budgetary reasons kept all the action in one country, thus ruling out the entire climax, which saw the heroes travel to France and then to a mountain temple in Greece in pursuit of Mocata. While the loss of this final section is regrettable in itself, especially for anyone who comes to the film after reading the novel, it also has the more serious effect of undermining Wheatley's very carefully devised structure. As we have seen, his technique was to have one major action climax about two thirds in, and then, just when the reader is lured into thinking the danger is resolved, to suddenly plunge the heroes into greater peril and rush to another, even more dramatic climax. The substitution of a brief dash to a basement room and the relatively easy use of supernatural incantation to defeat the satanists is not merely disappointing on its own terms, it also seems even more anti-climactic for coming after the film's most dramatic sequence - the visitations in the library. If the cross-country pursuit of Mocata had to have been omitted, then the library scene should have been moved to the ending.
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As sheer entertainment, the film deserves its ever-growing reputation as one of the key works of British horror cinema, and a few of its deviations do count as improvements, not least Charles Gray's performance as Mocata, more effective, I think, as a silkily sinister Englishman than a physically repulsive, bald European; fat, heavily perfumed and addicted to sweets.
Wheatley gives him a good line when his final effort to remove Simon from Richard's house fails - "I will send the Messenger to your house tonight and he shall take Simon from you alive - or dead!" - but Hammer's is better: "I'll not be back, but something will..."
Christopher Lee is pretty good as De Richleau, if a little too young and lacking somewhat in the bon vivant expansiveness of the character as written: Lee's austere interpretation is more ascetic than aesthetic. (Though Wheatley was, again, more than satisfied: "Christopher took the part of the Duke de Richleau and played the role magnificently.")
The film is also to be commended for its excellent art direction, sets, costumes and period look, all of which Hammer could have sacrificed to save money but wisely retained.
The special effects, on the other hand, could have made judicious use of a few extra pennies, and most of the miniatures and superimpositions are now showing their age. The giant tarantula is an understandable substitute for the pretty much unrealisable hideous slug-like something, but its appearance is haphazardly handled. Worse, the close-up of the Angel of Death's skull face is seen against the blue-screen background that should have been removed and replaced with the background of the room - a near-unaccountably careless mistake.
In his autobiography Lee argues for a remake, noting that he is now closer to the correct age of the venerable Duc, and admitting the room for improvement in the film's visual effects:

It wasn't possible in those days to show a winged horse charge in with reins held taught by unseen hands and stirrups extended by unseen legs. Our horse's hooves slipped about on the studio floor, and though the animal did some good stuff rearing up and trying to strike away vases of holy water, it was on the whole a relatively low-key spectacle by comparison with what we could do with computer special effects today.

I counsel caution, however. Special effects, and special effects alone, have improved since 1968! It is hard to imagine any future film version of the story retaining one tenth of Hammer's respect for Wheatley's original style and milieu. Indeed, for all its faults, one has only to watch five minutes of The Haunted Airman to realise how basically sound Hammer's film is in mood and conception.

The Devil Rides Out (1934)

2010-05-31T02:58:00.000-07:00

Go on, admit it.
You know you can quote it by heart...

I desire to state that I, personally, have never assisted at, or participated in, any ceremony connected with Magic - Black or White. (...)
Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel that it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.
DENNIS WHEATLEY

This opening disclaimer is perhaps the most instantly familiar piece of writing in the entire Wheatley canon. Personally, it immediately whisks me back to the late nineteen seventies, and to the smell of jumble sale paperbacks curling in the sun...
It also reminds me just what an astute judge of his audience Wheatley was. He realised instinctively that this was the book where he could achieve a more impressive frisson by bragging about the research he hasn't done rather than the research he has done.
But did he think, as he wrote it, that this was going to be the book, the one that would see him safely into posterity? He might well have guessed that it could become his most famous effort - but could he have ever guessed that for many, many millions it would be the only title his name would evoke? That it was, perhaps, the one thing that would save him from literary oblivion?
How did he get the idea? According to his own recollections, it was no big deal. In Drink and Ink he writes:

After finishing The Fabulous Valley, I tried very hard to think of a subject for my next book that would hit another high spot. It then occurred to me that, although in Victorian times there had been a great vogue for stories of the occult, in the present century there had been very few; so I decided to use the theme of Black Magic.

If it really was that casual, I'm almost inclined to believe in supernatural inspiration after all!
When accounting for the key to the book's enormous success, we must first acknowledge its canny air of authenticity. The suspension of disbelief necessary for a reader to engage with a fantasy story is aided immeasurably by the sense of learned authority with which Wheatley pronounces upon what are, after all, the battiest imaginable subjects. The fruits from the (now typical) mountains of research through which he ploughed found their way intact to the page: long, rambling monologues on such subjects as palmistry, alchemy, astrology and a bewildering catalogue of similar nonsense; even the existence of werewolves is given a fair hearing. Many of these subjects, biographer Phil Baker notes, Wheatley had begun studying during the war, when the carnage, and the seeming hypocrisy with which both sides accredited their victories to the same God, served to distance him still further from the Christianity he claimed to have disowned from childhood.
The plethora of sources Wheatley relied upon for all this information have been extensively enumerated by other writers, and Baker does a useful job of tracing back each purple stretch of metaphysical speculation to its origins in one or another of the dozens of obscure treatises and testimonies Wheatley consulted (or had pressed upon him by some dubious new acquaintances like Montague Summers and Alesiter Crowley).
As always when Wheatley knew he was relying generously on the work of others he simply acknowledged it: De Richleau's line "Sir George Frazer's The Golden Bough will tell you all about it" - in the middle of a very long passage about the Moon Goddess of the Carthaginians - is typical.
But the result of all this is not to weight the book down and try the reader's patience, though it seems Wheatley feared it might. (Baker reminds us that Wheatley originally inserted a questionnaire in the back of the book, concerned that readers might not want their thrills punctuated with so much esoterica, and soliciting their views on the matter.) Though the oft-made claim that Wheatley's mix of narrative and research is always crudely done gets never a welcome here, there is no question that this is an especially seamless and creative example of the technique: the research helps make the plot believable, the plot helps make the research interesting.

And though he may not have personally summoned the Goat of Mendes and invited him round for a sherry and a Hoyo de Monterrey, Wheatley did make the acquaintance of a number of prominent British occultists for some juicy tidbits.
Chief among them, as already noted, was the repellent charlatan Aleister Crowley, whose self-propagated reputation for genuine diabolistic prowess persists in certain circles even today. (His talent for self-aggrandisement is probably the only amusing thing about him: he once claimed to have fallen out with Yeats because the latter was jealous of Crowley's greater talent for poetry.)
By the time he met Wheatley his glory days, such as they were, were far behind him and he cut an unmistakably pathetic figure, all the more so for the pompous bravado with which he sought to disguise the fact. Wheatley, who saw through just about every species of humbug except supernatural humbug, had him pegged correctly from the start ("I don't believe he could harm a rabbit"), but a mutual acquaintance convinced him that Crowley had lost his powers as the result of a legendary, partially successful attempt to raise Pan in Paris that left one man dead and Crowley temporarily insane. (This story, central to the Crowley mystique, seems to acquire a new fantastic embellishment with each retelling: it is an interesting exercise to trace its journey backwards to the typically sordid and unmysterious truth.)

Dear Dennis, Love Aleister - one showman writes to another

Apparently the book owes much to a novel of Crowley's called Moonchild, but one obvious fictional source that is rarely cited as the formative influence it so clearly is, oddly enough, is Stoker's Dracula.
We know that the novel was very much a standard for this kind of endeavour, indeed several of the paperback editions carried a quote from James Hilton in the Daily Telegraph: "The best thing of its kind since Dracula." But it is strange that the superficial differences between the two works made and continue to make such a good job of disguising the many essential similarities.
Consider first the similarities in the plot: A supernatural evil that survives by spreading and corrupting the innocent has taken control of two of our heroes. To combat it, a group of friends aided by the specialist knowledge of an older savant confront it and then track it to its mountain lair before vanquishing it. Hypnotism of one of its partial victims aids them in their quest. With the prime evil destroyed, its influence vanishes from those it has affected.
Now observe the detail. There is this highly reminiscent passage, in which Wheatley points out the power and danger of his Satanists:

"They can control all the meaner things - bats, snakes, rats, foxes, owls - as well as cats and certain breeds of dog like the Wolfhound and Alsatian. (...)
Remember too this is still Walpurgis-Nacht and every force of evil that is abroad will be leagued against us."

Here we detect echoes both of the villager sharing Jonathan Harker's coach at the beginning of Dracula ("It is the Eve of St George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?"), and Van Helsing's later summary of the vampire's powers ("he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat--the moth, and the fox, and the wolf").
The links between black magic and vampirism are stressed in this fascinating dialogue between Rex and Tanith (who hails, like Dracula, from the Carpathians):

Rex passed his hand wearily across his eyes. "Don't speak in riddles, treasure. What is this thing you're frightened of? Just tell me now in ordinary, plain English."
"All right. I suppose you have heard of a vampire."
"Why, yes. I've read of them in fiction. They're supposed to come out of their graves every night and drink the blood of human beings, aren't they? Until they're found out, then their graves are opened up for a priest to cut off their head and drive stakes through their hearts."

Exactly this De Richleau proposes doing when Tanith dies, in a scene entirely reminiscent of Van Helsing's preparations to free the soul of the vampirised Lucy, over the objections of his grieving companions:

"She is dead as we know death, " said Richard slowly. "So what could remain?"
"I know what he means," the Duke remarked abruptly. "He is afraid that an elemental may have taken possession of her corpse. If so drastic measures will be necessary."
"No!" Rex shook his head violently. "If you're thinking of cutting off her head and driving a stake through her heart, I won't have it. She's mine, I tell you - mine!"
"Better that than the poor soul should suffer the agony of seeing its body come out of the grave at night to fatten itself on human blood," De Richleau murmured. "But there are certain tests, and we can soon find out. Bring her over here."
Simon and Richard lifted the body and carried it over to the mat of sheets and blankets in the centre of the pentacle, while De Richleau fiddled for a moment among his impedimenta.
"The Undead," he said slowly, "have certain inhibitions. They can pass as human, but they cannot eat human food and they cannot cross running water except at sunset and sunrise. Garlic is a most fearsome thing to them, so that they scream if only touched by it, and the Cross, of course, is anathema. We will see if she reacts to them. "
As he spoke he took the wreath of garlic flowers from round his neck and placed it about Tanith's. Then he made the sign of the Cross above her and laid his little gold crucifix upon her lips.

There seems little room for doubt that Dracula was fresh in Wheatley's mind the day he wrote that. I would think he had almost certainly read it, quite sensibly, in preparation as he embarked on the writing of a novel in a very different genre to anything he had attempted before, and that perhaps, as one of the very few fiction sources on his reading list, it influenced the structure and plot of the finished work more substantially than even he realised.

Such is the book's importance as Wheatley's first black magic novel, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is also the first of Wheatley's novels in which characters from an earlier novel reappear.
'Those modern musketeers', the Duke de Richleau ("art connoisseur and dilettante"), Simon Aron ("the frail, narrow-shouldered English Jew"), Rex Van Ryn ("giant shouldered, virile and powerful" with "his ugly, attractive, humorous young face") and Richard Eaton ("sceptical... but devoted to his friends whatever their apparent folly"), who had first appeared in the as yet unpublished Three Inquisitive People and made their official debut in Wheatley's first novel The Forbidden Territory, are here pressed back into service to grapple with the forces of darkness.
The regular reader is thus given the double pleasure of seeing familiar old friends return, and not in a mere retread of their earlier adventure but rather in a totally different and thrilling new context.
It is interesting to speculate why Wheatley chose to revive them in this story at this time. It is not merely the fact that Wheatley loved these Dumas-inspired adventurers and simply couldn't wait to use them again. I think it might well have struck him how easily they could be made to fit into the structure of Dracula: Simon as Jonathan, Rex as Quincy Morris, Richard as Arthur Holmwood, Tanith as Lucy, Marie Lou as Mina and above all De Richleau as Van Helsing: the older, slightly mysterious, slightly eccentric but immensely wise leader of the group, a man of incredible knowledge, ingenuity and authority, and an expert on seemingly every subject under the sun.
De Richleau's past is as intriguing as his present - we know that as a consequence of his part in a failed coup to reestablish the French monarchy in the 1890s, a "government of bourgeois and socialists" have barred him from ever returning to his native France - and he is therefore a man very much after Wheatley's heart. His taste in all things is impeccable, even if Wheatley dares on rare occasions to question it, as in the decor of his bathroom:

Some people might have considered it a little too striking to be in perfect taste, but De Richleau did not subscribe to the canon which has branded ostentation as vulgarity in the last few generations, and robbed nobility of any glamour which it may have possessed in more spacious days.

So take that! And isn't 'more spacious days' a lovely little phrase? Of course, things are not what they once were, but he's pragmatic enough to make the best of it:

His forebears had ridden with thirty-two footmen before them, and it caused him considerable regret that modern conditions made it impossible for him to drive in his Hispano with no more than one seated beside his chauffeur on the box. Fortunately his resources were considerable and his brain sufficiently astute to make good, in most years, the inroads which the tax gatherers made upon them. 'After him,' of course 'the Deluge' as he very fully recognised, but with reasonable good fortune he considered that private ownership would last out his time, at least in England where he had made his home; and so he continued to do all things on a scale suitable to a De Richleau, with the additional lavishness of one who had had a Russian mother, as far as the restrictions of twentieth-century democracy would allow.

This much we knew already. Now we learn that he also knows tons of stuff about black magic, which is handy, as yet again one of the four is in dire peril; not Rex this time but naive Simon, who has got himself mixed up with a bunch of high society devil worshippers, led by the bald and lisping Damien Mocata, addicted to chocolate and reminding one character of an enormous egg.
His followers are a motley assortment of creeps and crazies, and virtually every reviewer of the recent biography has relished quoting Wheatley's summing-up of them: the mandarin "whose slit eyes betrayed a cold, merciless nature", the hare-lipped "red-faced Teuton", the "fat, oily-looking Babu in a salmon pink turban" and, of course, the French banker with half of one ear missing. A grisly catch indeed, but hardly evidence of any sin greater than reliance upon literary cliché.
Even Baker himself, who knows better, disingenuously claims that their "grotesque qualities show a simplistic characterisation of evil by physical disability" and that "it is also noticeable that most of them have the misfortune not to be English."
A misfortune shared, in that case, by three of the book's five heroes - a Frenchman, an American and a Russian - to which Wheatley adds a Jewish fourth with apparent obliviousness to how unusual and admirable the gesture is. As for the physical anomalies; well, Wheatley just loves describing such things, and he doesn't stop at the villains. De Richleau has "devil's eyebrows", Gregory Sallust a disfiguring scar that gives him a "queerly satanic" appearance, Rex is "ugly", Simon frail and narrow-shouldered with a beak-like nose. (Later, in Mayhem In Greece, Wheatley became surely the first and only writer of mass-market thrillers to feature a mentally-retarded hero.)

Another odd myth that has grown around the book, articulated at length by Baker, is that it is an 'appeasement novel', subtly promoting the cause of rapprochement with Nazi Germany.
"In all his interviews about his career and the genesis of The Devil Rides Out," writes Baker, "Wheatley never once mentions the salient fact that it is an Appeasement novel."
Which would indeed be odd were it true: whatever else Wheatley may have been, he was not a hypocrite and he was never afraid to nail his colours to the mast. As late as the autobiographies he was writing at the time of his death, he was still frankly and cheerfully expressing his admiration for Mussolini and Franco, but it is obvious from his writings that he always considered Nazism to be exactly what it was: Communism's evil twin, and an equal threat to personal freedom - the essence of everything he loathed. The tragedy of Mussolini, he once wrote, was his decision to throw in his lot with Hitler.
Hitler is not cited in Black August as a formative hero of the past, though Benito is. In stark contrast to scores of leftist writers and intellectuals, Hitler never had Wheatley's vote.
"Given the link between occultism and right-wing thinking, it is oddly appropriate that the greatest occult novel of the twentieth century should have a subtext of peace with Nazi Germany," continues Baker.
This is not such a 'given'. Fascism is not 'right wing', always assuming that by that nebulous term we mean some kind of Conservatism; it is a progressivist, revolutionary ideology antithetical to Conservatism's abhorrence of centralist control and the omnipotent state. This error leads to the mistaken view that Wheatley, a reactionary monarchist and unresolved stew of traditionalist and libertarian impulses, belongs politically somewhere along a road that leads to Nazism, and was thus capable of harbouring sympathies towards them. He was not.
But then, if we do allow the link between the adolescent power-worship that characterises occultism and similar political ideas compatible with Nazism (and I'm happy to for the sake of the argument) how does it make it "oddly appropriate" that a book about the opposing, tracking down and vanquishing of occultists, who are described in the most condemnatory terms throughout as vile and wicked degenerates, "should have a subtext of peace with Nazi Germany"? Surely accepting the terms of Baker's proposition would render such a thing entirely inappropriate!
And let's face it, subtext-hunting in Wheatley is a fool's errand: Wheatley rarely did anything subtly, and if he wants to make a political point, he'll make sure we don't have to go looking for it.
So what is the evidence for this unique gesture of subtextual sleight of hand on Wheatley's part?
Well, Mocata is seeking the whereabouts of the Talisman of Set (in fact the old boy's mummified penis), a kind of unholy grail, with the power to open a gateway to the underworld and allow the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to "poison the thoughts of peace-loving people and manipulate unscrupulous statesmen, influencing them to plunge Europe into a fresh calamity." 'Fresh' because this, De Richleau tells us, is precisely what happened prior to the Great War, and so our heroes are concerned not only with saving themselves but also preventing a second World War.
The first of two relevant passages occurs after Rex and De Richleau abduct Simon from the occultists' gathering. He is taken unconscious to the Duke's swanky flat, where Rex is amazed to see him place "a small golden swastika" around Simon's neck for protection against the infernal elements:
.
"... he'll be pretty livid I'll promise you. Fancy hanging a Nazi swastika around the neck of a professing Jew."
"My dear Rex! Do please try and broaden your outlook a little. The swastika is the oldest symbol of wisdom and right thinking in the world. It has been used by every race and every country at one time or other. You might just as well regard the cross as purely Christian, when we all know it was venerated in early Egypt, thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The Nazis have only adopted the swastika because it is supposed to be of Aryan origin and part of their programme aims at welding together a large section of the Aryan race. The vast majority of them have no conception of its esoteric significance and even if they bring descredit upon it, as the Spanish Inquisition did upon the cross, that could have no effect upon its true meaning."
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In the context of the passage, Wheatley had no need whatever to say that the Nazis "bring discredit" upon the swastika. But he nonetheless chose to do so. A little later, allowing De Richleau a rare, perhaps even unique admission of intellectual error, he disowns it entirely:
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Rex did as he was bid. "But why are we wearing crucifixes when you put a swastika on Simon before?" he asked.
"I was wrong. That is the symbol of Light in the East, where I learned what little I know of the Esoteric Doctrine. There, it would have proved an adequate barrier, but here, where Christian thoughts have centred on the Cross for many centuries, the crucifix has far more potent vibrations."
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This hardly qualifies even as ambivalence towards Nazism: it is careful disassociation, tinged with frank distaste.
So with the swastika a decided red herring, all hope of establishing the book as an appeasement tract is riding on this intriguing passage, much later:
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"You're referring to the Great War I take it," Rex said soberly.
"Of course, and every adept knows that it started because one of the most terrible Satanists who ever lived found one of the secret gateways through which to release the four horsemen."
"I thought the Germans got a bit above themselves," Rex hazarded, "although it seems that lots of other folks were pretty well as much to blame."
"You fool!" De Richleau suddenly swung upon him. "Germany did not make the War. It came out of Russia. It was Russia who instigated the murder at Sarajevo, Russia who backed Serbia to resist Austria's demands, Russia who mobilised first and Russia who invaded Germany. The monk Rasputin was the Evil genius behind it all. He was the greatest Black Magician that the world has known for centuries. It was he who found one of the gateways through which to let forth the four horsemen that they might wallow in blood and destruction - and I know the Talisman of Set to be another. Europe is ripe now for any trouble and if they are loosened again, it will be final Armageddon. This is no longer a personal matter of protecting Simon. We've got to kill Mocata before he can secure the Talisman and prevent his plunging the world into another war."
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Now, I've read this passage over and over, forward and back, and I just can't see how it can be made to say appeasement.
The attempt to exonerate Germany from instigating the Great War was hardly a freakish stance to take at the time, and in its argument is scarcely unreasonable, though of course debatable. Neither can it be read as reflecting a veiled sympathy for modern Germany: De Richleau, as we have seen, affects a coolly dismisive view of the Nazis, exactly the view we should expect him to take of murdering, progressivist revolutionaries. Further, Wheatley the storyteller needs to justify a supernatural explanation of the affair, making Rasputin the obvious first choice of prime mover. Had Rasputin been a German, he would still have been irresistibly tailor-made for the role, and the Duke may well have amended his history lesson accordingly.

But more important than any of this is the temperament of the work, which seems to me brazenly confrontational. De Richleau is saying that vigorous action must be taken to prevent another war; he is saying that those who wish to bring fresh destruction upon Europe must be confronted and opposed. In other words, if we want to read it metaphorically, Mocata and his horsemen stand for (or behind) the warmongers, and appeasement is the very course of action that De Richleau is counselling against. The book is warning of war, and obviously wishes to avert it in time as who would not, but the appeasement of open aggressors is nowhere advocated, nor remotely consistent with Wheatley's, or de Richleau's, worldview.

In true Wheatley style, the book proceeds at a consistent pace until about the halfway mark, before resolving itself into a series of climaxes, each good enough to end the book, but each more tense and effective than the last. (And so mesmerising are the ingredients and the flavour here it is easy to forget how familiar we are with the recipe by now.)
First we have the race to the Sabbat, in an attempt to prevent Simon and Tanith from undergoing their satanic baptism. Wheatley brilliantly gives this chapter the flavour of reportage by presenting it as a series of short paragraphs, each stating the exact time at which the detailed event takes place (and also reusing the 'overlapping narrative' technique first used in The Fabulous Valley.) It is a brave idea, and entirely successful.
Then we have the al fresco sabbat itself, at which a hideous apparition of the Goat of Mendes is summoned, and from which Rex and the Duke narrowly manage to rescue Simon by driving at the throng full-speed with their headlights on:
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Drunk with an inverted spiritual exaltation and excess of alcohol - wild-eyed and apparently hardly conscious of each other - the hair of the women streaming disordered as they pranced, and the panting breath of the men coming in laboured gasps - they rolled and lurched, spun and gyrated, toppled, fell, picked themselves up again, and leaped with renewed frenzy in one revolting carnival of mad disorder. Then, with a final wailing screech from the violin, the band ceased and the whole party flung themselves panting and exhausted upon the ground, while the huge Goat rattled and clacked its monstrous cloven hoofs together and gave a weird laughing neigh in a mockery of applause.
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This too is top-hole stuff, yet still it is merely an hors d'oeuvre, for still to come is the ordeal in the library, as the heroes crowd inside a chalk pentacle on the floor while, all around, Mocata masses the forces of evil in sustained assault:
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"What's that!" exclaimed Simon, and they swung round to face the new danger. The shadows were massing into deeper blackness in one corner of the room. Something was moving there.
A dim phosphorescent blob began to glow in the darkness; shimmering and spreading into a great hummock, its outline gradually became clearer. It was not a man form nor yet an animal, but heaved there on the floor like some monstrous living sack. It had no eyes or face but from it there radiated a terrible malefic intelligence.
Suddenly there ceased to be anything ghostlike about it. The Thing had a whitish pimply shin, leprous and unclean, like some huge silver slug. Waves of satanic power rippled through its spineless body, causing it to throb and work continually like a great mass of new-made dough. A horrible stentch of decay and corruption filled the room; for as it writhed it exuded a slimy poisonous moisture which trickled in little rivulets across the polished floor. It was solid, terribly real, a living thing. They could even see long, single, golden hairs, separated from each other by ulcerous patches of skin, quivering and waving as they rose on end from its flabby body - and suddenly it began to laugh at them, a low, horrid, chuckling laugh.
.
This memorably disgusting creation, oddly reminiscent of an earlier description of Mocata himself ("He reminded me of a large white slug") proved too bizarre for the special effects team at Hammer, whotherefore replaced it in their film version with a more prosaic giant tarantula. The other thing that Wheatley is able to do and film-makers are not, of course, is control the pace, so that simply by varying the amount of detail with which he describes moments of time he is able to stretch some suspense sequences to excruciating length, and compress others to convey breathless excitement. By repeatedly doing this 'pull back, rush forward' switch here he combines nail-biting tension with brilliantly-conveyed thrills. The whole chapter is a masterly display.
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But even this he tops, again using one of his tried and tested techniques. The danger reaches fever pitch, is repelled, and normaility is resumed. It feels like the end of the novel; we, and the characters, breathe deep sighs of relief.
Then he wallops us with the sudden realisation that the problem has not been solved, the peril has not gone away but only increased - in this case via the abduction of Richard's infant daughter Fleur - and what we thought was a finale is revealed as merely a prelude.
The final section is all action, an affair of chases and pursuits and escapes, with Wheatley carefully balancing the supernatural with more proasic thrills. The ordeal in the library was all spook show, and ended with the heroes gaining a tremendous amount of knowledge as to where the villain has gone, where he will be at a certain time in the future and what he intends to do with the abducted child, all obtained by supernatural means. If the book had simply allowed them to act on this and save the day - and a lesser author, figuring we've had thrills enough by this time, might well have done just that - the reader would feel cheated: suspension of disbelief in otherworldly powers is easy enough when they're working against our heroes, and provide an almost insurmountable challenge to their ingenuity, but it would be far too lazy, and dramatically unsatisfying, to use them as a cheap means of gaining them an advantage. (This is a mistake the film version makes, albeit accidentally, in its ruthless streamlining of the story after the library sequence). To omit the plane journey, the brushes with the police, the tense stand-off with the French banker and the final chase up a mountain in Greece would make the ending far too easy and uneventful after the pentacle scene, and would feel like a cheat.
This way, the reader is let back in as a participant: like the other characters, we can only stand by and watch as De Richleau intones the Su-whatsit ritual, so it does us good to get back to the tricky piloting of four-seater planes and the kind of dangers that can be solved by a good sock on the jaw. Too much esoterica can be distancing, but a little fisticuffs between the diabolic courses works wonders for keeping our appetite for spells and incantations keen, so we never feel jaded or want to accuse Wheatley of over-egging the pudding.
It also, of course, lets Wheatley the yarn-spinner loose, permits him a bit of globe-trotting, and at last gives him an excuse to get inside a fancy restaurant. (The most the plot would allow prior to the trip to Paris was a surprisingly first class country inn, though in a concession to the dramatic mood of the moment he grudgingly has the characters not really enjoy the fine spread he nonetheless lays on for them and describes for us.) And by the time we get to the ending - which is, to put it charitably, pure claptrap - we have no objections: Wheatley has us in his spell.
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No question, this is one of the great novels of Wheatley's career, a masterly juggling act that keeps the twin balls of esoterica and action in the air over three hundred frantic pages without ever dropping them once.
It's a book that even Rex Van Ryn might have enjoyed reading, and that's praise indeed, for, when Tanith asks him if he has encountered any of the esoteric doctrines in his past reading, he explains:
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"No, I wouldn't exactly say I have as far as I can remember. The Duke would know all about them for a certainty - and Richard Eaton too, I expect - because they're both great readers. But I'm just an ordinary chap who's content to take his reading from the popular novelists who can turn out a good, interesting story."
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Who could he have had in mind?

The Fabulous Valley (1934)

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Upstairs, Patricia was humming a little tune to herself as she combed her brown curls round her fingers... 'Oh, how good it is,' she thought, 'to be young and attractive, and going out to dinner with someone one really likes...'
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Roger Philip Wisdon Philbeach had seen the traces of powder on Michael's lapels that night in the Carlton after she had been up to Aasvoglerkop. He wanted some of that powder himself...
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A mad, wild rage, which made his heart catch in his throat at the thought of the way in which he had been treated, filled him with a sudden renewal of energy and, completely forgetful that in his present state he could not have stood up to a well-grown girl, he set off at a brisk pace to pursue and attack his despoilers...
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'Oh, for God's sake!' Michael pleaded. 'We're half crazy with anxiety. That swine told us before he pushed off in his boat that he'd got them in a nice little cage and he was going to make them both sing to-night. Can't you understand what that means?'
'What's that you say - cage?' The Captain's eyes brightened suddenly. Then he went on half-reminiscently:
'Could it be the same man, I wonder - but no - it's ten years since we heard anything of him. Yet now I come to think of it the description fits this chap from what little I remember.'
'Are you thinking of the Gorilla?' one of the other policemen broke in...
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Ten minutes later it had disappeared over the crest, leaving the Van Niekerks and Sandy to face their last night behind the protective barrier of fire from the remaining timbers of old John's wagon. Then . . . eighty miles of desert or . . . the leopards!
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The Fabulous Valley is a romp, a ripping yarn, the pulpiest of pulp fiction: a multi-character saga in which an assortment of greedy relatives and a few criminals attempt to beat each other to a vast fortune by following the clues in an enigmatic will.
According to the document, there is, somewhere in the remote desert of South Africa, a valley littered with diamonds. They are there for the taking, provided the seeker survives the various perils - natural, human and legal - that stand between them and the ultimate prize...
Like many another potboiler of its era, The Fabulous Valley begins with the reading of the will. The great advantage of the will-reading first scene to the novelist is that it not only sets up the plot but also gets most of the main characters in the same room at the same time. He is then able to introduce them to the reader one at a time at his leisure and convenience.
We can make pretty shrewd guesses from the first which are most likely to emerge as heroes and which as villains, and which are most and least likely to survive to the last chapter. And as always with Wheatley there is the strong reliance on phrenology, facial characteristics and the qualities (or otherwise) of the characters' chins, from which he confidently discerns and imparts reams of psychological meaning.
This job done, the fun and games begin, and the reader is swept into a breathless and always enjoyable treasure hunt, with the full quota of treachery, chases and murderous attacks, culminating in an epic trek through the South African desert. The ever-deepening spiral of deception, misunderstanding, revelation, cross, double-cross and coincidence becomes almost a bewildering comedy.
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It's all very effective but entirely formulaic, and this is the first of Wheatley's books, really, of which there is little of especial interest to note. When reading the books for the purposes of this exercise, I always keep a notebook at hand, frequently stopping to note important passages and sketch out first drafts of what I want to say. It suddenly struck me this time, however, that I had got to page 82 and still not written anything.
This is not to say I wasn't enjoying it, because I was. But for the first time I had the feeling that this was a work by Dennis Wheatley, bestselling author, rather than Dennis Wheatley, young man with something to prove. The book is a trifle, in both senses: a thing of small ambition perfectly realised, and a dessert between more substantial courses.
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Of course, he owed himself a trifle, if ever an author did. He had written four hugely successful books in less than two years, and he and Joan "felt that we deserved a holiday." They opted for South Africa, but Wheatley the novelist was immediately inspired by the things he saw and heard there, many of which found their way directly into The Fabulous Valley: a house previously owned by Gandhi when he was a lawyer practicing in Johannesburg (in the period when "he started all his stupid nonsense", as Wheatley has one of his characters express it); the Amalati, a gang who would creep up behind the unwary and throttle them with bicycle chains, the dangerous roads leading to Portuguese East, and the unfenced nature reserve with its roaming leopards and lions.
But, as Wheatley recalls in his autobiography, the primary inspiration for the book was a chance remark by High Commissioner Charles de Water:
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Up in the vast wastes of South West Africa there is a small area known as 'The Place of the Great Glitter'. The sand there is sprinkled with uncut diamonds and in moonlight they give off a faint glow. Several prospectors are said to have stumbled on this field and picked up from it a fortune in an hour; but, as there is no water within many miles of it, many more have died of thirst in that arid land.
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Whether or not it had been Wheatley's intention before setting off on the trip to look for likely material for his next book, The Fabulous Valley inaugurated what would soon become a regular tradition of using his holidays deliberately as fodder for the novels. In this way he felt better able to justify, as research trips, the lavish excursions all over the globe that almost uniquely had the power to drag him away from his writing desk for prolonged periods. He would return from these jaunts with a plot idea and a mass of historical, geographical and colloquial detail with which to embellish it, and bestow upon it that feeling of first hand reportage that was also the hallmark of Hemingway and Fleming.
He did not begin the book immediately on returning, however: first he knocked off a film script for Gaumont British. (His Guiding Star was intended as a vehicle for Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, but the bad luck dogging Wheatley's attempts to break into cinema continued to exercise its influence, and the film was never made.) This done, he set to work with a vengeance, producing the book with his usual energy and intolerance of all distractions, pleasurable or otherwise.
Two things stand out above all. One is his genuine talent for evoking the exact sensations of place and climate, conveying his characters' physical ordeals - exertion, endurance, exhaustion, heat, insects, thirst, burning sun - with a genuinely uncomfortable aplomb. He is a master of this far from negligible art, and his gifts are on full display in the book's second half. The diamond quest itself is resolved two thirds in, then just as we are expecting the plot to resolve itself neatly and predictably, Wheatley lets rip with his trademark climaxes upon climaxes upon climaxes.
Second, he also makes interesting use of overlapping and non-linear narrative, so that events we have already read of from one perspective are described again at the end of a later episode describing the experiences of another character. In this way the plot threads are tied together without the need for frequent cross-cutting. I have no idea if this is truly innovative, but it feels innovative.
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Despite these points, Wheatley rightly felt the book fell below his best standards: "Although the book sold well," he writes in Drink and Ink, "I never thought much of it." Though never a tiresome or unengrossing experience to read, it is certainly not a book that lingers much in the memory. One suspects that Wheatley did not care for it for the same reason he dismissed Such Power Is Dangerous: because he wrote it quickly and easily. But while Such Power outweighed the hastiness of its formulation with a genuinely unusual and fascinating central idea, The Fabulous Valley sticks firm to the most basic formulae of popular adventure fiction. It is, unquestionably, a time-filler - for its author every bit as much as its readers.
But if any of those readers were nurturing the feeling that Wheatley had run out of surprises they were soon to have their fears rudely disabused. Writing at his usual furious rate he returned almost immediately to his very highest form with a book that remains one of the touchstones of British genre fiction, its title still common parlance nearly seventy-five years after it was written: a little something called The Devil Rides Out.

Black August (1934)

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(NB: Page references refer to the Heron edition.)
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Black August is an extraordinary novel that shows Wheatley still in that first flush of energy and invention that had made 1933 such a productive and successful year.

His next book, The Fabulous Valley, would mark the first appearance of Wheatley the formula writer, able to coast on his reputation and skilled assembly of tried and tested ingredients, but Black August was another strikingly fresh direction for an author who, at this time, specialised in nothing but.

The book is a political thriller - part warning, part satire and all adventure - as well as a work of futurism set, according to the author's preface, "many years hence."

Exactly when the events of the book take place is difficult to work out from the text itself, though in Drink and Ink Wheatley confirms:

As a subject I chose the biggest canvas I could think of - red revolution in England in an unspecified future. Actually, I had in mind about 1960. Strangely enough, I referred to 'the mob burning all Queen Elizabeth's lovely furniture in Buckingham Palace' although as her present Majesty was then only a little girl and the daughter of King George V's second son, I could not possibly have supposed that she would become our Queen.

In his recent biography The Devil is a Gentleman, Phil Baker traces a number of the book's ideas and, he suggests, its very inspiration to the General Strike of 1926, quoting Wheatley's claims in his autobiography that he volunteered to help the strike breakers, and was forced to fire a pistol in the air to disperse a mob that had threatened to lynch them.

Like Orwell's 1984, the book is far more a satire on contemporary trends than a genuine attempt at predictive futurism in the HG Wells tradition. This may be seen by Wheatley's complete disinterest in speculative detail in any sphere bar the political: the social structure, technology, transport, clothes, speech, morals and manners are all plainly and undisguisedly those of the nineteen-thirties. This of course raises the question of why he bothered to set it in the distant future at all, when he could have simply staged his revolution some time in the thirties. There's no obvious answer in the book itself, though it seems reasonable to conclude that the main inspiration was Huxley's Brave New World.

Though Baker is of course right to link the book to the fears of revolution that the General Strike inspired in Wheatley and others, it is odd that he makes no mention of Huxley with reference to its themes and structure. (As too often when discussing - or not discussing - the novels, he strongly gives the impression that he has not actually read it.) Wheatley had name-dropped Huxley in his previous two books, and by this time the two men had in fact struck up, if not quite a friendship, certainly a very respectful acquaintance. (That it was an unequal relationship intellectually may have factored against its longevity, and certainly there is a surprising note of sycophancy in the letters Wheatley wrote to Huxley that Baker quotes in The Devil is a Gentlemen.)

Pace Huxley, the book is framed not as an impartial record of the imagined future but as a tract, a warning - this is where we're headed if we don't look out. And while it may have seemed to many - and today would probably seem to far more - that both the fears and the prescribed remedies of the two authors were likewise antithetical, wiser generations than our own may yet conclude that, on the issues that most mattered to them, Wheatley and Huxley are on the same side of the ideological fence. All that differs are the uniforms - or in their case, perhaps, the ties.

The opening pages, which deal with the imagined interim period between the era in which the novel is set and that in which it was written, are fascinating speculation, especially when viewed in the light of what we now know about the causes, course and legacy of World War II, which hasn't happened here.

As the young man glanced at her his quick blue eyes took in the headline of the paper lying at her side:

'FURTHER SABOTAGE BY POLES - MORE GERMAN GARRISONS WITHDRAWN'

and his mind leapt back to the previous summer. With superb generalship, the veteran officers of the German army had carried out a classic campaign, subduing the whole of Poland in the short space of ten weeks while the French army looked on, biting their nails with fury yet impotent to help their allies, being themselves in the throes of that revolution which terminated the nine months' reign of the Fascist puppet-king, Charles XI of France.

The book makes reference to several real world developments, and mentions a few real people by name.

Lenin predictably gets Wheatley's pen in the neck, but Mussolini gets a clean bill of health: "Mussolini laid the foundations of the new Italy so well that they will pull through somehow," the hero explains at one stage, going on to describe him as "one of the few men who will survive when the history of this century comes to be written." (Interestingly, Hitler, who had taken power in Germany during Wheatley's emergence as a writer does not get a mention.)

Wheatley never did quite lose his enthusiasm for Benito, explaining in Drink and Ink:

To my mind Mussolini had done a splendid job in cleaning up Italy, making his nation far more prosperous and introducing the beginnings of the first Welfare State; and that with very little persecution - no more than confining a few hundred really dangerous Communist agitators in a prison island. It was one of the greatest tragedies in history that later megalomania led him to throw in his lot with Hitler.

As for General Franco, he had my vote every time...

.(picture source)

The book's nominal hero is Kenyon Wensleydale, aka Lord Fane, initially described by the heroine as a"pampered imbecile". Fane supports the monarchy, military and aristocracy ("They may consider us effete, but England wouldn't be England without a Burminster in the background," his father explains), and views the masses as a largely empty vessel capable of being led in any direction. He is standing for the anti-revolutionary 'United British Party', which "stands for everybody who has a stake - either by inheritance or personal gain - in this England our ancestors have made for us; and that applies to the tobacconist with the little shop, or the girl who has fifty quid in the bank, every bit as much as these titled people you seem to think so effete."
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It's worth remembering Wheatley's own views on democracy here, as outlined in Drink and Ink:

This very sensible form of government has now degenerated into something very different from the original. Every male and female over the age of eighteen now has the right to vote in favour of the party which he or she thinks would govern the country best. But what are their qualifications for this? The standard of education of the vast majority is distressingly low. They do not read the serious papers, have little knowledge of what is happening in other countries, no knowledge at all of economics and have few interests outside local problems. How can it possibly be maintained that young fellows who tear up the seats of railway carriages or girls whose only thought is to have as much fun as possible without getting put in the family way should be allowed to have an equal right in electing a government as, let us say, a university Professor?

Wheatley's solution, which he attributes to the novelist Nevil Shute:

Everybody should have one vote, but (additional) qualifications should entitle anyone to extra votes... so that it would be possible for exceptional people to have up to six votes. This system would ensure a continuance of democracy, but give greater weight to the opinions of people really qualified to judge the issues.

The heroine, Ann Croome, is perhaps the most half-hearted Marxist in literature, loudly proclaiming herself a class warrior in her first encounter with Fane and dining with him at the Savoy a dozen pages later. ("Ann reddened; somehow her Socialistic theories seemed rather futile and childish in the atmosphere of this luxury hotel.")

By the time they marry (the night before they expect to be executed by Communist revolutionaries) her former beliefs have been no so much recanted as simply forgotten. Fane puts it down to her youth: "... that was only stupid nonsense gleaned from the adolescent debating societies at Cambridge. One of half a dozen ways of blowing off excess of youthful stream."

Luckily, however, she's also a looker ("her figure was perfectly proportioned and her ankles were a joy") and so Fane is able to see beyond her troublesome preoccupations: "For a second he felt inclined to laugh at her bitter antagonism to the existing order, but it was growing upon him every moment what an unusual little person she was."

"What could Ann do against the enticements of these charming people?" Wheatley asks us on her behalf not long after.

What indeed.

Far more entertaining than uppity Ann is Fane's sister Veronica, who converses on an almost constant level of slangy, Jazz Age triviality:

Directly after the meal was over Veronica stood up. "Well, darlings," she declared, "I'm going to have an L. D. on the B. without my B. and C."

"What is the girl talking about?" muttered the Duke.

"A lie down on the bed without my bust bodice and corset," she laughed, kissing the bald spot on the back of his head. "Don't be rash and get yourself strung up to a lamp-post or anything while we're away."

In Drink and Ink Wheatley tells us that Veronica, whom he tellingly misremembers as the novel's heroine, "was a portrait of Joan's closest friend, Betty Earle, later the Marquise de Chasseloup Laubat", so we must assume that Veronica's delightfully fizzy dialogue ("What rippling rot, Fiona. Everybody gets divorced after two years these days") was to some extent modelled on a real life version, described elsewhere by Wheatley as "one of the gayest people I have ever known."

Here she is in conversation with Fane on the subject of his growing infatuation with Ann, she of the awkward principles but joyful ankles:

'What did you really think of her?' Kenyon asked.

'Oh, she's quite a sweet and too devastatingly bedworthy for words!'

'Veronica! Why must you always drag that in?'

Her eyes opened wide. 'Snakes and ladders! Why not, my poor fool. You don't want to discuss higher thought with the wench, do you?'

'Of course not... but...'

'But what?'

'Oh, nothing.'

Veronica put down her teacup with a deliberate bang.

'S'welp me Gawd, but I believe 'e is thinkin' of makin' an honest woman of 'er after all!'

'No,' said Kenyon, 'I'm old-fashioned enough to feel that I do owe something to the family and it would pretty well break old Herbert up.'

Veronica shook her head sadly. 'My dear, you are loopy, there's not a doubt about it. You don't want to marry the girl, you don't want to discuss the state of your soul with her, and you don't even want to play slap and tickle - at least you say you don't. What the devil do you want?'

The first half of the novel exists in its highly Huxleyfied world of political-futurist polemic. But Wheatley being Wheatley he cannot sustain it, and in its second half the book becomes a full-blooded adventure romance, with the usual assortment of perils, clinches and cliffhangers. Ironically, however, this transition from ideas to action is effected via the introduction of probably the most subtle, unusual and effective of all Wheatley's fictional creations: Gregory Sallust.

With practiced nonchalance, Wheatley records in Drink and Ink that "Gregory Sallust made his first appearance in this book as its hero. His physique and personality were based on those of my dear, unscrupulous friend of the First World War, Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe."

In fact, the character is a loving tribute to Tombe, recasting him in the dimensions Wheatley felt his personality deserved, conceived perhaps even as a means of keeping alive the man who had been his best friend and the most important influence in his life.

Here's how Wheatley describes his mentor - and virtual hero - in Drink and Ink:

He had a great sense of humour, was completely immoral and immensely knowledgeable. He weaned me from reading trash to books by the finest authors of all nations and to books about ancient civilizations and the occult.

Gordon Eric was also a crook of the first order. He never robbed people, but swindled insurance companies and the government out of considerable sums.

The balance of their relationship is evident from the bookplate Wheatley commissioned, showing him imbibing wisdom at Tombe's cloven feet, a bottle of champers and a saxophone in the foreground reminding us of the Jazz Age hedonism through which Tombe's paganism was filtered:

While Tombe was eventually murdered and his body concealed - a fittingly flamboyant end to a flamboyant life - Sallust would live on as Wheatley's recurring World War II hero, a counterpart to the Napoleonic Roger Brook.

Needless to say, this man is not the Sallust we first meet here, not least because the Second World War hasn't happened in Black August, and Sallust, many years after the forties, is of the age at which he participates in the war in future novels.
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On our first meeting with Sallust we are reminded not only that Wheatley likes to draw psychological inferences from the physical properties of his characters, but also that his heroes are frequently described in unflattering terms. (A point often forgotten by those who complain about the frequent ugliness and deformity of his villains.) Sallust has a "long, rather sallow face" made "queerly Satanic" - a fascinating adjective indeed! - by a long scar. By his own admission, he also mysteriously possesses "the sort of eyes which can see better in the dark than most people's".

One of the first things we learn about him is that he is an atheist, another direct nod to Tombe, but in the light of Wheatley's popular image of defender of all things traditional a somewhat shocking characteristic for a hero.

"Forty-minute sermons on Sundays when I was at prepatory school made me antagonistic to the Christian Church," Wheatley reminisces in Drink and Ink, "and as I grew older my reason confirmed this dislike." But it was Tombe who intellectualised his disinterest and impatience with the discipline of Christianity, introducing him to paganism and Eastern esoterica from which the author constructed his own faith piecemeal.

Interestingly, Sallust defends Christ against the iconoclasm of sensationalist modern art on the grounds that "Christ was a great man - and I hate to see Him mocked at by these filthy pseudo-artists." This could easily be a direct quote from Tombe, memorised, perhaps even jotted down, by his devoted acolyte.

Sallust, like Tombe, is an outright villain rather than a rogue, with whom Wheatley asks us to sympathise on account of his invention and audacity rather than any explicitly or traditionally redeeming characteristics. It makes for a highly unusual kind of hero: not innovative, perhaps, but certainly very modern, with upright, uptight Fane offered almost as a security gesture, a kind of compensatory alternative if Sallust's outrages prove too rich for the reader's blood.

Oddly, though, the character became progressively more conventional and respectable as his adventures progressed.

Writing in Drink and Ink not long before his death, Wheatley stresses that Sallust was "physically at least" a portrait of Tombe, but "apart from ruthlessness, the characters of Gordon Eric and Gregory as he developed had little in common."

That's 'as he developed', you'll notice: the Sallust of Black August is an unprincipled opportunist and seems a far more than merely physical reproduction of Tombe: if he mellowed as his adventures progressed, perhaps that was Wheatley imagining the future mellowing of a friend who was denied the chance to do so in real life.
But for now at least, Sallust is all Tombe. "He's a proper blackguard, but I like the man; this sort of thing needs guts," one character explains, and Fane tells us: "He seems to be one of those exceptional egoists who really have the courage to throw all established ideas overboard and carry their theories into practice regardless of the cost."

And he's certainly unscrupulous, with self-preservation always his highest priority:
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Silas laughed suddenly. 'You'll be a Kommissar-General before we're through.'

'Well!' Gregory smiled back at him., 'I've no rooted objection to Kommissars providing I'm one myself. Care for a stroll, Veronica?'

She smothered a fake yawn. 'Why not, O reincarnated Vicar of Bray.'

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Predictably, Sallust's appeal (Wheatley speaks at one point of his "apparent misogyny", an interestingly ambivalent phrase) divides Ann and Veronica:

'Really! Do you mean that you have fallen for him then?'

'No - not quite. But I always have been attracted by the type of blackguard who has brains and guts providing they have a sense of humour and the decencies.'

' I like to listen to him, but I should hate him physically.'

'Would you? Well, I'm afraid I'm a shameless hussy,' Veronica confessed. 'That wolfish look plays the devil with the back end of my brain. One might get hurt but I bet that man knows how to make love.'

'Yes, but not the kind of love that appeals to me. I'm a simple soul just liking to be cuddled and cuddle in return - fior ages and ages and ages. It's laziness, perhaps, but it's the sort of thing I'm always wanting from the right kind of man. '

'No, you're just deliciously normal, my sweet, and if I wore trousers I should be as crazy about you as Kenyon is - but I'm just a nasty vicious slut...'

Sallust and Veronica seem destined to pair, and we watch Sallust's growing infatuation with her without surprise. What is surprising, then, is the late emergence of another character, Silas, as a rival for her hand, still more so his swift and final success in the matter (even after Wheatley has pragmatically informed us of Sallust's sexual conquest of her). Wheatley, who surely had no intention at this stage of reviving Sallust (in some series of futuristic adventures presumably) must have decided on purely literary grounds that it would have been a betrayal of Sallust's character to blithely pair him off with the first eligible female with whom fate presents him. Perhaps he felt he owed it to his extraordinary friend Tombe. Whatever, it is an an enigmatic loner that Sallust begins the book and in the same way he takes his leave: a most satisfying job of characterisation indeed by Wheatley.

Of course, he proved too good a character not to revive, but it was curious that Wheatley chose to do so by making him the hero of a series of WW2 novels, thus invalidating the events of Black August. In retrospect it seems odd that Wheatley didn't give this new character a different name - he could still have been inspired by Tombe - especially since Sallust Mark 2 is by necessity shorn of most of the cynicism and mercenary opportunism that was so central to his character as originally conceived.

Wheatley must have fallen for Sallust as much as he had for Tombe and it's not surprising: while his other regular characters are wonderful but one-dimensional heroes distilled from a lifetime's infatuation with boys' adventure literature, Sallust - especially in this debut adventure - is something altogether more. Pitched somewhere between Fleming's Bond and Conan Doyle's Holmes, he could be the most interesting, best conceived and developed character in the whole Wheatley canon.

. A few staples of Wheatley's later works make early appearances here. These include his advocacy of cross-class relationships (here, as invariably in his work, sexual in their engine, but emnating presumably from his own lower middle-class infatuation with the aristocracy) and also the matter-of-fact use of accurate occult predictions as a plot point.

Then, as usual, there is the casual interpolation of extensive research and facts gleaned from Wheatley's own experience: Wheatley the wine merchant tells us why the Navy can't take vintage wine to sea (page 129), and there's some clever and knowledgeable stuff about powering a ship from below decks and disabling the bridge (page 160).

I also liked the way the characters pack a picnic hamper before taking desperate flight, and the manner in which Wheatley cannot restrain himself from passing adverse judgement on decor and furnishings in even the most tense, hectic and action-packed sequences, such as when our awareness of Ann's discovery of the site of a grisly double murder is delayed by Wheatley's observation: "The furniture was in keeping with the house, an Edwardian mahogany dining-room suite, heavy and tasteless."

Later the characters arrive at "a cheap eating house... of the type usually run by Italians; polonies and tarts coverd with coarse coco-nut decked the window beside a water-bottle with a lemon stuck in the top."

What is especially notable about the last passage is that it is inserted in the very heart of one of the book's most suspenseful episodes, as the heroes are trapped by a murderous mob with little prospect of escape. In the subsequent fight for their lives Wheatley stops to tell us that Fane uses "a hideous china vase" to bludgeon his assailants; we later learn that a hotel bedroom is decorated with wallpaper of "a hideous shade of green", and that a "hideous pale bronze clock" adorns the mantelpiece of Ann's lodgings.

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And to anyone who had recently finished reading Old Rowley, Wheatley's resolution of the national emergency is as unsurprising as it is delightful: an army of ordinary folk shouting "Down with the reds!" enables the Prince Regent to take power.

"I have never sought a dictatorship," he proclaims, "and I give my assurance that as soon as law and order have been re-established throughout the country, I shall cease to act as a dictator." For the time being, however, the Commons is dissolved, and steps will be taken to see that such things cannot so easily happen again:

'Parliament will reassemble in due course, for it is as much a part of the Constitution as the Sovereignty itself, and time has proved that a Constitutional Monarchy is the form of Government best suited to the British people.

'But, when it reassembles, it is my intention to urge upon it the passage of bills which will make it a different body to that which we have known for many generations. (...) There will be in future no Prime Minister. That office was created solely on account of the difficulty which William of Orange experienced in speaking and understanding the English language. It is the rightful prerogative of the Crown, and, should His Majesty's condition continue to improve, as we pray it may, he will once more assume the Sovereign's ancient position at the head of the Council table.'

The book was another well deserved success.

"The advance copies sent to librarians and booksellers resulted in such staggering orders that the book had to be reprinted six times before it was published," the proud parent recalls in Drink and Ink:

"There was no question about it. I had gone to the top of the form and I was there to stay."

Old Rowley (1933)

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Reflect for a moment on how confident Dennis Wheatley must have been feeling by the end of 1933!

In order to stave off bankruptcy he decides to write a novel, does so, and instantly attracts a publisher. He then writes another, has it published and sees it become an overnight bestseller, reprinted over and over again. Shortly after, the film rights are sold.

As an experiment, he writes still another novel in a mere fortnight: though somewhat guilty over the cynicism towards his readers inherent in such an exercise - a cynicism that would never be repeated - the book is another justified smash hit.

And it's still 1933...

Something of that inevitable assuredness is reflected in the fact that he chose for his next project an historical biography, though with characteristic self-deprecation he goes out of his way in the finished book to characterise it as a mere trifle, and certainly not a learned treatise.

Old Rowley would not be the only time that Wheatley turned his talents to non-fiction, but in its lightness, and the readily-conveyed pleasure the author is clearly having in the telling of it, it remains, perhaps, his most readable. Coming as it does at the end of that first extraordinary year of industry and success, it stands as one of his most justifiably confident works of all. It is still an effortless pleasure to read.

It is not, however, an uncharacteristic work, not by any means. Wheatley's voice comes through more than clearly, and the subject is obviously not arbitrarily chosen.

Wheatley is not merely interested in the reign of Charles II; he has a deep admiration for the man that gives the book a personal and polemical momentum. Charles is clearly one of Wheatley's dearest heroes, Cromwell one of his bitterest enemies - and if you happen to share those prejudices (as I do) the book is an exhilarating job of advocacy.

Wheatley argues persuasively for the identification of Charles as the key figure responsible for dragging England out of Cromwell's dark night of anti-progressive religious mania, and on to the glories of the age of Johnson:

For two hundred years his character has been belittled as a definite policy against the weak and inept Pretenders who succeeded in the Stuart line. The legend that he was nothing but an idle, dissipated Monarch dies hard. yet in the constant sifting of the sieve of time the dross of libel falls away, leaving the gold of truth revealed. The day will come when Charles will take his rightful place in history as the wise, sweet-natured King who led his people out of darkness, anarchy and persecution into the Great prosperity of the Georgian Century.

Old Rowley, sent to free his people from "the tyranny of democracy"

Actually, Wheatley has two principle aims in mind for his subject: one is rehabilitation as a statesman, the other is humanisation, as illustrated by the very title ("the sobriquet being culled from the famous stallion of that name," Wheatley informs us, "owing to the obvious similarity of their masculine vigour"), and by the tendency to depict the King's bedchamber rather than his person on the covers of the various paperback editions.

Throughout the book, Wheatley dwells on the King's amorous encounters, partly because he evidently finds them amusing in themselves, but also as a valuable corrective to what he calls "the arctic-douche of school-taught history":

Assessing Charles' women as a whole, it is doubtful if any prince in a modern, as opposed to ancient, times ever gathered together a finer seraglio. In numbers, compared to other sovereigns, they were not excessive; but Charles was a connoisseur, and each of the six great mistresses possessed some outstanding quality of wit, intellect and or passionate loveliness which made her a real personality.

In the first and more important of these two crusades, however, he is on his deadliest form, acidly rebalancing the popular record on any number of scores, not just in matters pertaining to the second Charles but to the first also:

Such men as John Hampden unquestionably did much to establish the liberties of the English people by their staunch resistance of abuses, but it should be remembered that those abuses were no personal tyrannies introduced by Charles - they were forms of government inherited from a line of sovereigns, including Henry VIII and Elizabeth, whom we have been taught to regard as great.

Yet if the more honest of the Commons had the good of the people at heart, so also had the King. Time after time we find him legislating to protect the common people from the profiteers... It was indeed very largely his anxiety to ensure a decent standard of living to the masses which gained him the bitter enmity of the capitalist classes and lost him his throne.

His kindly thought for his poorer subjects is well expressed in the proclamation by which he repealed the Lord's Day Observance Act. 'If these times be taken from them, the meaner sort who labour all the weeke should have no recreation at all to refresh their spirits, and therefore we do order that after attending prayers, every man shall be allowed to amuse himself in any decent way which he may choose.' His people got their Sunday games, but the measure earned him the undying hatred of the Puritans.

The war therefore was waged by middle-class capitalists, who wished for greater opportunities to put money in their pockets and to force their stricter form of worship on the country...

Nobody upsets apple-carts with so infectious an energy as Wheatley!

Characterising the Cromwellians as "fanatics", he notes that "before they could bring the King to trial, even his old enemy the Parliament, from which all men of moderate views had long since withdrawn, had to be purged by Colonel Pride of no less than two-thirds of its remaining members. So that it was now a mockery of its former self and only consisted of some half-hundred embittered Puritans."

On the king's execution he is mesmerising - the book is always at its strongest when Wheatley forgets it's not a novel:

Where our War Office stands now, then stood the old palace of Whitehall, and from a first floor window of it, upon the winter morning of January 30th, 1649, the King stepped out into the drifting snowflakes that swirled about the black-draped scaffold. As he went so bravely to his tragic end, every blind was drawn; and strange as it may seem, although he had been condemned as tyrant - traitor - murderer, the streets were thronged - not with a howling mob thirsting for his blood - but with a silent and a weeping people.

Likewise on the future Charles II's successful escape:

Thus after forty-three days and nights, many of which had been passed in cold and hunger and the whole in an imminent risk of capture, the King was safely conveyed out of the power of his enemies... If one includes the servants in the many houses where he rested, there must have been close on a hundred persons in the secret of his identity, and to the poorer of these the reward offered for his capture would have meant ease and plenty all their lives long. Yet there is not a single instance of any one of them endeavouring to betray their King.

The epic closes with a fair wind, and the rising sun gilding the sails of the tall ship as it stands out to sea - and we may be certain that when the news of Charles' safe arrival at Fecamp was spread abroad, many a dust-encrusted bottle was opened and many a cup of good ale drawn, that stout hearts in England might drink - 'A Health unto His Majesty'.

When Charles returns and the monarchy is restored, Wheatley tells us that "the floodgates of joy were opened", all in the country certain that "the King alone was capable of restoring the good old times, when men were free and money plentiful."

Of what had taken place in the intervening years, Wheatley paints a bleak picture indeed, with Cromwell "march(ing) through the land, hanging, burning and slaughtering with an incredible ferocity." The end of this he later characterises with a telling phrase: "(the people) had suffered the tyranny of democracy too long".

His attitude towards the Whigs, then, may safely be predicted, though his appraisal, when it comes, still surprises (deliciously) in its vehemence:

Shaftesbury's efforts resulted in the formation of the Whig Party, pledged to overthrow the Tories under Danby and to exterminate the Catholics by an English Protestant Inquisition. The type of man who made up the better elements of his following may be judged by the seventeen Gloucestershire Lords who sent a remonstrance to the King. 'Among them there was not one who either to himself or to his father could lay claim to any honourable service performed either to the King or his father during the time of the great rebellion.' As to the worst elements, they were the fanatics and madmen who pester every Government - the human dock rats from Wapping, the hooligans, the jail-birds, and the very scum of the London gutters.

In one especially interesting passage he likens the immediate post-coronation period with the aftermath of World War I, bringing unmistakable echoes of his own 'roaring twenties' period in the wine trade:

Above all, the war was over, and these people who from their early youth had known danger, hardship, uncertainty and distress, had at last come home, freed from the clutches of foreign landladies, welcomed and restored, safe once more to ride the broad acres without fear of death, imprisonment or fine - and all in the glory of an English summer.

In our own day we have known the reaction that followed upon those years of horror, when every able-bodied man received the Armistice as a reprieve from certain death or mutilation. We know that as a result of the strain which the nation had undergone, there was an epidemic of free love, and a sudden uprush of talent among the younger generation. In the pyjama and bottle parties, the night clubs, and the doings of the 'bright young people' of the early 1920s we see reflected the license of the Restoration, and in the writings of Huxley, Coward, Joyce, Sassoon, Lawrence, to name but a few, a repetition of the flame that lit the 1660s.

He goes on to regale us with a number of anecdotes concerning the antics and high-spirited pranks of the new aristocracy, reminiscent of Bertie Wooster and the Drones Club stealing policemen's helmets. One is clapped in the stocks for disguising himself as a tinker, visiting a country village and destroying, rather than mending, the people's pots and pans. Others are nearly lynched by the people for getting drunk in a tavern, stripping naked, and then assembling on the balcony "adopting all the most vicious postures in the nude which they can think of."
As well as providing a fascinating parallel between two periods of history, the passage prompts another reflection.
Recalling Wheatley's centrality to the twenties scene, and reading his list of the period's typical authors, it is intriguing to ponder how his work - to say nothing of his critical reputation - might have differed if he had felt compelled to take up his pen a half-dozen or so years earlier than he did.

Wheatley on film: “The Forbidden Territory” (1934)

2009-07-22T03:42:00.000-07:00

In Drink and Ink Wheatley explains the circumstances by which his first novel The Forbidden Territory also became the first of his novels to be adapted for the cinema.
His account begins shortly after the completion of Such Power Is Dangerous, his thriller set within the British and American film industries, in which Alfred Hitchcock appears as a secondary character:

Back in London I met with a delightful surprise, which later proved to be the only serious setback during my career as an author. Alfred Hitchcock had long been a friend of mine and I had seen him make films in the old silent days. He and his wife, Alma, then lived in Cromwell Road. We had often dined with them and they with us. Just as a friend, without any ulterior motive, I had sent him a copy of The Forbidden Territory. He rang up and asked us to dinner. When we arrived, he said at once:
"Dennis, your book is terrific! I'm going to make a film of it. But I'm tied up at present with Maxwell at Elstree and I don't want him to buy the rights, because I'm leaving for Micky Balcon in the autumn. Hang on to the rights for a few months, then I'll get Balcon to buy them."
Naturally, I was overjoyed.

From then on, as seemed invariably the case whenever plans to adapt Wheatley for the cinema were raised, the problems began. Balcon first insisted that Hitchcock make a Jessie Matthews vehicle called Waltzes From Vienna, and then vetoed Forbidden Territory as a follow-up. Still keen to make the film, Hitchcock found a new purchaser for the rights in the form of Richard Wainwright, late of Ufa films, now an exile from Nazi Germany. (The Wainwright company would also produce the subsequent film of Wheatley's Eunuch of Stamboul.) A screenplay was prepared, cast assembled (including the distinguished Sir Gerald du Maurier, Charles Laughton's favourite actor and father of novelist Daphne) and shooting date arranged.

Now comes the sad end to the story. Du Maurier died and was replaced by Ronald Squire, an excellent light-comedy actor but hopeless for the role of the Duke. Then Balcon postponed releasing Hitch to make the film for another three months. By then Wainwright had signed up his full cast and engaged expensive studio space. The one thing we had not put in the contract was that Hitchcock was to direct the film. As director he brought over from Hollywood a cameraman named Phil Rosen, who had never been to Europe before. Rosen's wife 'discovered' a 'real great little alley' to go shopping in. It was called Bond Street.
The film did not even get a West End opening. If only Hitch had made it, Hollywood might have bought the rights of every book I wrote thereafter. But it was not to be.

Actually, Wheatley is being unfair on a few counts here.
First, his description of Rosen as "a cameraman", though perhaps a genuine mistake, is entirely wrong. Though Rosen had begun as a cinematographer - in any event a very different order of responsibility from cameraman - he was also a director of vast experience, who had made an incredible 78 films over a period of nearly twenty years before being assigned The Forbidden Territory. He was no Hitchcock, for sure, but neither was he "a cameraman"!

Second, though du Maurier's absence is to be regretted, Ronald Squire does a perfectly good job once you bear in mind, as Wheatley seemed to have forgotten by the time he wrote his autobiography, that he is in fact not playing the Duke at all, but a far less accomplished and resourceful character called Sir Charles Farringdon.
The screenplay (by Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville, the only reminder of his involvement with the project) in fact eliminates all of the novel's male heroes, and replaces de Richleau, Rex and Simon with Charles Farringdon and his sons Rex and Michael.
This reduces at a stroke the need to spend time establishing the characters, and their complicated back-stories and relationships to each other, and allows the film to simply plough straight into the action. (After all, it has to fit the whole novel into a running time of just 82 minutes, later cut to 74 for the film's US release.) Now it is a much more easily comprehensible scenario: young Rex Farringdon has been imprisoned in Communist Russia, and his father and brother have come to rescue him.
The loss of the 'modern musketeers' seems much to be regretted now, but at the time, when nobody could have known that they would become recurring characters and 'bigger' in a sense than any one novel in which they appear, it is wholly understandable.

And in fact, beyond this one major alteration, the book adheres to the plot of the novel with surprising fidelity. It simplifies and streamlines, of course, cutting out many of the book's twists and sub-climaxes, but rarely does it actually depart from the broad outline of Wheatley's story.
Wheatley, who greatly resented the liberties taken with his scenarios in later film versions of Uncharted Seas and To The Devil a Daughter seems a little stingy here in not acknowledging the respect shown by Rosen and Wainwright to his creation. He would certainly have had no reason to expect anything like the same degree of generosity from Hitchcock, who was notorious for regarding his source novels as mere inspirers of mood and ideas, their actual plots to be altered or entirely jettisoned at will. His thirties films of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn retain almost nothing of the originals beyond the central idea and main characters.

On its own terms, then, The Forbidden Territory is a thoroughly entertaining brisk jog through Wheatley's story, with some good action sequences shot on location in Latvia, and lively performances from Gregory Ratoff as Leshki, Binnie Barnes (fresh from playing Catherine Howard to Laughton's Henry VIII) as Valerie Petrovna and the beautiful Tamara Desni (who sadly died last February at the age of 97) as Marie-Louise.
Hitchcock, perhaps, may have made a better movie, but from the perspective of the Wheatley enthusiast, this is certainly one of the better screen adaptations of the man's work.

Such Power Is Dangerous (1933)

2009-07-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

"... my immediate success as a thriller writer had by then fired me with literary ambitions. Having heard that Edgar Wallace had been able to write a book in a week, I decided to find out the speed of which I was capable.
In order that I should remain undisturbed, Joe Links lent Joan and me a cottage on Cutmill Common, near Godalming, in Surrey.
There, although I worked all out, I failed to complete a book in a week; but I did so in a fortnight."

- Dennis Wheatley, The Time Has Come... The Memoirs of Dennis Wheatley - 1919 - 1977: Drink and Ink

The result - in Wheatley's own words: "a blood and thunder story set mainly in Hollywood" - was Such Power Is Dangerous. Almost immediately he felt inclined to dismiss it, lacking as it did any of the background research characteristic of his previous novel and most subsequent ones.
According to his autobiography, his disenchantment with Such Power, or more specifically with the slightly cynical experiment that led to its creation, was almost immediate:

In April, owing to the success of The Forbidden Territory, Hutchinson asked me if I had another completed manuscript that they could publish in the summer. Reluctantly, I submitted Such Power Is Dangerous, but said I did not want it to be published because it had been dashed off and was a very ordinary thriller with no informative background. After having it read, they said they wanted to publish it.
In those days publishers and printers worked fast. On 8 June we threw a party to launch Such Power Is Dangerous. The book was reprinted again and again.

Despite his misgivings, however, the book proved another immediate popular and critical success.

Nor is it the negligible work Wheatley's own comments suggest. True, it was not the result of that lengthy period of research and gestation that was Wheatley's favoured method of composition. But neither is it devoid of any depth of knowledge pertaining to its subject. Far from it, in fact: the background detail reflects a far more than casual acquaintance with the world of the cinema, and the obvious authenticity with which it recreates its milieu will delight anyone like myself who happens to love thirties Hollywood.
Where this understanding came from is partly revealed in Drink and Ink: "Alfred Hitchcock had long been a friend of mine and I had seen him make films in the old silent days. He and his wife, Alma, then lived in Cromwell Road. We had often dined with them and they with us."
(Hitchcock, who, thinly disguised as 'Titchcock' plays a significant role in the denouement of Such Power, was originally intended to direct the film version of The Forbidden Territory, but I shall save that story for a forthcoming post on the film.)

Mr Titchcock, at roughly the time he found himself unknowingly working for Mr Wheatley

The novel, based in the British and American film industries of the thirties, concerns a plot to control all film output by a sinister combine, a revolutionary invention - the 'Z' Projector - set to transform the industry and thus eagerly sought by the combine's agents, and the young and beautiful English actress who stumbles into it all.
As the jacket blurb from my 1973 Arrow paperback puts it:

She was Avril Bamborough, and she was a star in British pictures. Her arrival in Hollywood on a new stage in her career coincided with the formation of 'the Combine' - a vast conspiracy to gain control of the world's film industry and then to use it as a weapon in the pursuit of unlimited power. How finally she alone was left to thwart the terrible ambitions of men who had already bought, ruined or murdered all those who stood in their path is the story unfolded in this tale...

The most instantly striking feature of the book is the obvious confidence of its author. Here we see Wheatley already so sure of himself as a story teller that he feels able to indulge in a number of the amusements that would become standard features of his books, including in-jokes, self-referencing and the use of real people as fictional characters.
Despite the prefatory note that "(a)ll the characters in this story are entirely fictitious", a great many contemporary film personalities are featured in the novel, albeit hiding beneath (usually fairly obvious) pseudonyms (a device which Wheatley would abandon in his later works).
We have already mentioned the director Titchcock, who helps Avril re-make a film that the combine have destroyed (Wheatley's portrait of him taking orders from Avril and mechanically directing a film he had not prepared himself now seems hilariously at odds with the real Hitchcock). Others making a guest appearance include Percy Piplin "and the Marybanks crowd", Pritchard Tix, Lila Dalmatia, Hustler Beaton, Cyril de Rille, producer Eberhard Lutasch, two-in-one director Von Sternheim, and - my favourite - dashing Englishman Jeremiah Mustard. (Think about it...)

Wheatley's basically cynical view of film art is reflected in a sequence in which the characters go to see the new production This Brave New World, an adaptation of Huxley's novel. (Wheatley was on friendly terms with Huxley, who gave him signed first editions of many of his books. Brave New World in particular made a huge impact - its influence would be felt again very shortly in Black August, and later in A Letter To Posterity.) Needless to say, the finer points of the book are not preserved in the imagined screen treatment, summed-up by Wheatley in an authorial aside as "one of the hundreds which are made annually to fill the yawning maw of a greedy but uncritical multitude."

Giant sky-scrapers towered to the clouds, helicopters sailed about in every direction. Upon the dance hall the producer had let himself rip, in a riot of abandoned jazzing... Much had been made of the Native Reservation Scene, but not unnaturally, the Hollywood producer had felt Mexico to be totally inadequate. He preferred Africa, in order that he might more fittingly bring in lions, tigers, elephants and every other animal he could lay his hands on.
Much, too, had been made of the Delta minors who moved on all occasions in sinister gangs with downcast heads and shuffling feet, after the manner of the slaves in Metropolis. The death-bed scene had been cut out as entirely unsuitable, also that important portion of the book when the young man is scourged by the Mexican priest. The Alpha plus damsels were the loveliest possible collection of cuties with india rubber legs. A little quiverful of soft-tipped arrows had been substituted for the malthusian belts, and these cuties let fly with delirious abandon at the boy-friends of their choice. Unfortunately a theme song had been introduced for no particular reason, and the whole point of the book lost by the complete elimination of the interview with the Jewish World Controller and its original ending. Instead, the Hollywood editors had substituted a happy understanding with regard to legal union between the more resilient of the rubber-legged cuties and the handsome young savage - the latter being suitably injected with a strong dose of the 'Oh King live for Ever' serum. However, these little alterations were hardly a matter of serious concern since Ronnie Sherringham, Avril Bamborough and Nelson Druce were probably the only people in the house who had actually read the book, and it is doubtful if more than half a dozen others had ever even heard of Mr Huxley.

Brave New World is not the only work of contemporary literature facing Hollywood vulgarisation, as one of the villains explains:

"Maybe - maybe - but it's this way, Hugo; I figure to make this picture, The Forbidden Territory. We shan't call it that, of course, but that's the name of the book - incidentally I took the trouble to read the book myself, I was that struck with the synopsis. It's about Russia and those Bolsheviks. A young American gets put behind the bars in Moscow or Vladivostock or some place, and two of his pals go out from London to rescue him. It's a great story - sledge scenes in the snow - aeroplanes - a gun-fight with the Reds in a ruined chateau, and a dash to the frontier in a high-powered car - marvellous material to work on. It's by a feller named Wheatley - who he is, God knows - but that don't matter. There's plenty of love interest too - a little Princess who got left behind when the Whites cleared out, and a Bolshie actress who's full of pep. It's got the markings of a master film - great spectacle, human interest - and educative value as well..."

(As well as revealing his preoccupation with Huxley and looking back to Forbidden Territory, the book also looks ahead to his next project, Old Rowley, presumably already gestating in his mind, when one character quotes the dying words of Charles the Second.)

Wheatley at his writing desk during the early years of his career

Again suggestive of first-hand knowledge, the book reflects the fears, widely circulated among the film community, that their still relatively young art may not survive the Great Depression. Villain Lord Gavin Fortescue, mastermind behind the sinister combine, uses the financial uncertainty of the film moguls to his advantage:

"I will not waste your time, Mr Hinckman, by beating about the bush. I have, in the last few months, gone very thoroughly into the present state of the film industry in America, England and Germany. Many of the smaller concerns are definitely in financial difficulties - even the biggest are finding it no easy matter to continue the enormous outlay necessary to support their chains of theatres and pay their stars during this period of world depression. I have come to the conclusion that conditions at the present time offer a remarkably favourable opportunity for the formation of a combine which will control the film industry of the entire world."

Needless to say, he has more than financial gain in mind:

"I wonder, Mr Hinckman, if you realise the magnitude of my conception. The world control of the entire film industry. Our revenues would be greater than the budget of any but a first class state. The wealth of Ford and Rockefeller would not compare with ours. Again, our sphere of influence would be unbounded. By the type of film which we chose to produce we could influence the mass psychology of nations. Fashions, morals, customs, could be propagated by our will - we should even be able if it suited us to fill a whole people with a mad desire to make war on their neighbour - or if we considered that a universal language would lead to world peace we could induce the children of all nations to learn English, by a decision that our talking pictures should be made in no other tongue. We should have power to do either endless good ... or boundless evil. No king or emperor would ever have had such power in the world before!"

In other words, Wheatley had spotted that which Goebbels had realised, Lenin had anticipated, and has now come to pass: that the cinema (along with related technologies in popular culture) is the greatest propaganda tool ever invented, and will eventually wield such power that governments will march to its tune rather than it to theirs. Or as Avril puts it:

For the film world it will be simply terrible, thousands of people thrown out of work, bankruptcies and suicides galore, and the power of the Press won't be anything compared to the power of the Film Dictators. They will be able to colour the thoughts of the masses in every country, and in the most subtle way of all - through their principal amusement.

Though obviously influenced by his reading of Huxley, this is both a clever and hugely prescient conceit on Wheatley's part, and one that would have practical ramifications years later when he was employed to advise Churchill's government on its war strategy.
As if Such Power had been written the day before, all his old ideas about the supreme malleability of the masses and their yawning maw reappeared. Like a benevolent Lord Fortescue, he has the following to say in his paper Some Suggestions Regarding Propaganda, quoted in Craig Cabell's admirable compendium Churchill's Storyteller:

Films will naturally play a large part in propaganda and a special bureau should be set up to collaborate with the chief executives of the big film producers to this end.
In addition to documentary and news films, fiction should not be neglected or full-length films which could be made to serve a similar purpose. Here are... (some) suggestions of the type of film I mean:

a. Might be somewhat on the lines of 'An Englishman's Home' brought up to date, but in it the principal male character would be a communist and a pacifist. We see his reactions in his home and in the factory to Imperialism and the National Government. When the war breaks out, although he is quite fit, he deliberately shirks his duty and swings the lead with the medical board to evade conscription. His girl is indignant and throws him up, but he persists in the error of his ways. There is then an air-raid in which he is caught and in which he endeavours to rescue his girl but finds her seriously wounded. As a result, he goes off to join up. This, admittedly is pure slop in such bald phrases, but the multitude loves slop, if the characters are naturally developed and the story well written up so that it can be got over.

b. A good comic film could be made called 'Grin and Bear it', in which we see a rather simple-minded, clumsy fellow join up and the awful time that he is given by his sergeant major. But he rescues his sergeant major under fire when they go into action, and is duly decorated; demonstrating that it is not only clever people who can win distinction, and that a slow-witted, clumsy fellow does not necessarily lack courage. In this film, the training of troops in camp could be demonstrated, stressing the lighter side, the jolly ragging that young soldiers get up to, the attraction of communal life with men of one's own age, the sing-songs etc, into which one could probably introduce some excellent numbers.

Returning, then, to Such Power Is Dangerous: are there typical Wheatley thrills and action to be savoured too? Yes, of course there are. Poor Avril endures more perils than Pauline: implicated in shootings, abducted, pursued and even, in the full-blooded climax, trapped to within an inch of death in a Hound of the Baskervilles-style mire:

She seized a slender alder branch, which gave under her weight, and struggled to free her leg, but her other foot was now in the deadly grip of the morass. She pulled and jerked frantically, her front leg was now in up to the knee - the branch snapped and she fell forward, wildly clutching at another tree. The sudden wrench freed her other foot, it came out with an oozy plop, but she had no time to place it carefully, and being already off her balance it came to rest beside the first. With a wicked gurgle the green slime closed about that too.

Simply terrific stuff!

The Forbidden Territory (1933)

2009-06-03T08:30:00.001-07:00

It is one of the most charming features of Dennis Wheatley's debut novel that it came about more or less by chance.

To Wheatley fans, the story of how and why he embarked on a literary career is pretty well-known, but nonetheless bears retelling.

Following distinguished service in the First World War, he took on management of the Wheatley family wine merchant business in 1919.
(It was in this capacity, in fact, that Wheatley produced his first work as a writer: Historic Brandies [1925], Old Masters: Catalogue of Old Brandies, etc [1930] and At the Sign of the Flagon of Gold [1930].)
The success of the business financed a lavish lifestyle during the roaring twenties, but Wheatley was hit hard by the Depression of the early thirties and ended up losing the business. Recently married, for the second time, and with many expenses, he found himself looking with some urgency for alternative forms of income.
From Drink and Ink, volume three of his autobiography The Time Has Come (1977):

Our most pressing worry was shortage of money. I was reduced to living on Joan, as my mother refused to help me, and I still had a number of debts... Joan was an excellent manager and we lived very quietly, practicing every possible economy. She sacked her cook and took over the kitchen. There were no more theatres, dining out or giving cocktail parties. For drink we had to limit ourselves, except on special occasions, to a glass of sherry each in the evenings.

But even economies this drastic proved insufficient:

I was perpetually harassed by letters from my new solicitor and accountant, enclosing long statements from Fearon, Block & Co. giving particulars of ways in which they claimed I had defrauded them... I could only sit, brooding, day after day in the flat.
It was my wonderful Joan who saved me from this ghastly, futile existence. I had shown her some of my short stories I had written years before, just for fun. One day she said: "Why don't you write a book? I'm sure you could."
I had little faith in my ability to do so and even if I did, and succeeded in getting a publisher to take it, I could not hope to make more out of it than about fifty pounds. But having a shot at it would at least take my mind off my worries; so I bought some paper and sat down to write a thriller.

It was accepted, and Wheatley made his fifty pounds:

The book was published on 3rd January 1933... The first printing of The Forbidden Territory had been 1500 copies, but only 800 had had the pictorial endpapers pasted in. The demand of the trade had been so large that the other 700 copies had had to be rushed out without endpapers; and orders to reprint the book had already been sent before it had even been published.
I had become a best-seller overnight.

The Forbidden Territory introduced the most celebrated of Wheatley's recurring characters: the Duc de Richleau, Simon Aron, Rex van Ryn and Richard Eaton. There were others: Gregory Sallust, of course, Julian Day, and Roger Brook. But, thanks largely to one of their later adventures called The Devil Rides Out, it is these, whom he sometimes referred to as "those modern musketeers" - inspired by his childhood love of Dumas, probably his greatest literary influence - that remain his best-known. The leader of the four, the Duke, is an elderly French aesthete and Royalist ("for us who preserve the loyalties of our birth, there is still a King of France"), unable to return to the country of his birth on account of his participation in a failed coup to restore the French monarchy, and now a citizen of the world who divides his time between wine, cigars and the imparting of a lifetime's wisdom to a coterie of younger accolytes. It was a character that, somehow, one cannot imagine anyone but Wheatley creating.
(Incidentally, my edition of the book - part of the beloved Heron series - spells the character's name throughout as De Reichleau - I have yet to discover if this is a misprint, or something that Wheatley deliberately revised - perhaps because of Nazi connotations - as the series progressed.)

Interestingly, however, The Forbidden Territory was not that first thriller he settled down to write at Joan's instigation, neither was it the first book he had accepted for publication, nor even was it the first appearance of the modern musketeers. The characters were originally created for a murder thriller inspired in part by Wheatley's feelings of resentment against his mother, in which he imagined her being drowned in her bath for her insurance. It is in the course of this narrative that the musketeers meet for the first time.
Inspired by his success at this first attempt, Wheatley then settled down to write a second adventure for the characters. It was this follow-up that became The Forbidden Territory, but both Wheatley and his publishers agreed it was much the superior of the two, and so it was duly published as his first book. (The murder thriller was eventually published as Three Inquisitive People in 1940.)

Wheatley and his wife Joan in the mid-thirties.

It is tempting to speculate what might have happened had Wheatley published his murder mystery first. Might it have typed him as a detective story writer in the Christie-Allingham-Sayers manner? Might it even, unthinkably, have been a failure, stifling his writing career at birth?
Whatever, the rousing mix of Boy's Own adventure, a very nineteen-thirties kind of sex and violence and sharply convincing incidental detail that characterised The Forbidden Territory catapulted Wheatley into the bestseller lists, where he remained until his death.

As seems to often be the case with the Modern Musketeers novels, the book deals with three of the team being assembled to rescue the fourth, in this case van Ryn, who has got himself locked up in Soviet Russia.
As a thriller, the book is virtually a textbook. Betraying none of its author's inexperience, it dives straight into the action, pencil-sketching the characters as it goes, building to climax upon climax, alternating chase and escape and cliffhanger, and always managing to offer just enough detail to make the settings vivid and believable. It was a justified success.

NB: It's definitely Richleau here.

The most interesting aspect of the novel to modern eyes, of course, is its attitude to Communism, which is one that goes well past condemnation and into hatred, characterised by a moral revulsion that remains surprising not in a man of Wheatley's class and experiences per se, but surely in a man of Wheatley's class and experiences settling down to write a crowd-pleasing thriller.
Neither should we underestimate the extent to which Soviet Russia was being sucked up to by English intellectuals and literary fellow-travellers (of the kind that Stalin would beautifully term 'useful idiots') at and around this time.
The year in which it appeared also saw the publication of Harold Laski's Democracy In Crisis (an "explanation of why capitalism and democracy are incompatible"), the year before saw Cole's Intelligent Man's Guide Through World Chaos ("I believe that the Capitalistic System has done its work, and outlived its strength and usefulness") and John Middleton Murry declaring that "Communism in some form is inevitable" in The Necessity of Communism ('32), while the Webbs contributed their comedy classic Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation in 1935. Then, of course, there was Bernard Shaw returning ecstatic from a visit to Russia, on what he seemed genuinely not to realise was a carefully orchestrated propaganda tour throughout which he was manipulated and deceived with heartbreaking ease, declaring that Russia was a more civilised country than his own. All them cornfields, and ballet in the evenings.
Then, smashing with an ingenue's incaution through all the sanctimony and sycophancy came Wheatley, blazing a path of burning vitriol through this swamp of vacuous credulity, and telling his readers that, far from heaven on earth, this Shavian paradise was a vile and inhuman hell. "I never did believe what they say in Moscow about being frightened of a combined attack by the capitalist countries," he has Simon say at one point; "they're out to conquer us - that's a certainty."
The anger that seems to underscore his convictions occasionally erupts into passages of extraordinary savagery for what is basically an escapist thirties thriller. In one sequence, the Duke kills a Russian, and Simon feels a wave of nausea at "this sudden slaying of a fellow human without warning." But De Richleau is quick to reassure him:

"There, there, my son," said De Reichleau, soothingly. "Do not waste your great heart on this scum. Praise be to God, I have killed many such. You would not pity him if you had seen, as I have, all that his kind accomplished in 1919 and 1920. I fought with Denikin's White Army, and we saw sights that froze one's heart. Little children burned to death - men with their eyes gouged out - women of our own blood, who had been kept in brothels, filthy with disease - a thousand horrors committed at the instigation of your friend Leshkin and his kind. It is a nightmare that I would forget. Come now, help me to hide the body of this dog."

Most impressively of all, Wheatley targets not just the brutality and despair beneath the surface of the Communist public image, but the actual propaganda mechanics of that image itself, the very things that made such a fool of Shaw.
The cinemas show "none of the productions of Hollywood or Elstree, only the propaganda films, in which the heroine was a strapping peasant wench or factory girl", and when naive Simon briefly considers remaining in Russia and marrying a Communist actress, he speaks for the useful idiots as he explains his thinking to Richard Eaton:

"Well - er - as a matter of fact, I'm not coming back to England, you see it's this way - Valeria Petrovna takes the New Russia very seriously. She simply wouldn't hear of coming to England - talked about her art - that it belonged to the Russian people. Besides, she really believes that the Communists are going to make a better world for everybody, and that Russia's the one place to live. I'll tell you - I think there's a lot in what she says."
"Simon, you're talking rot, and you know it. But seriously, are you really prepared to give up everything and live in a pigsty like this?"

And as for the constant loudspeakers:

"What's it all about?" asked Simon. "Loud-speakers never seem to stop here! I noticed them all morning, and again this afternoon - can't be news all the time, can it?"
"It is the Five Year Plan, my friend," the Duke shrugged. "Never for one second are the masses allowed to forget it. Those megaphones relate what is being done all the time - how many tractors have been turned out in Stalingrad today - how many new teachers graduated with honours from the University of Karkov last week - how many tons of ore have been taken from the great Kuznetsky basin, which they are now beginning to exploit - how the branch of the young Communist party in Nijni-Novgorod has passed a resolution giving up their fifth day holiday, for a year, in order that The Plan may be completed the quicker - and every five minutes the announcer says: 'You who hear this - what are you doing for the Five Year Plan? - what are you dong that the Five Year Plan shall be completed in Four?'" He shuddered.
"There is something terrible about it, my son. These fanatics will yet eat us alive."

Fittingly, somehow, the novel ends happily with the cold-blooded killing of the foursome's nemesis, Kommissar Leshkin, and the promise of more adventures for our heroes.

It is in the course of this adventure, incidentally, that Richard Eaton meets and marries the Princess Marie Lou, who becomes a decidedly unaristocratic Englishwoman - and he Paul Eddington, what's more - in the Hammer film of The Devil Rides Out...

De Reichleau raised one slanting eyebrow meditatively. Sly dog, that Richard; what a thing it was to be young and in Vienna, city of dreams. How fond he was of them all, and how fortunate he was - that, at his age, all these young people seemed to take such pleasure in his company. Life was a pleasant thing indeed. He drew thoughtfully on his cigar, and quietly strolled down the corridor.

Introducing the Dennis Wheatley Project

2009-06-02T09:09:00.001-07:00

When I was growing up in the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, every house had a bookcase, and every bookcase had at least one copy of a novel by Alistair Maclean.
At least, that's how it seemed to me. God knows how many copies he sold, but back in those days when even corner grocery shops sold paperbacks he was ubiquitous indeed.
Now, it is not simply that he is no longer widely read. I wonder if anyone of a generation younger than mine could even hazard a guess as to who he might be.
Are any of his titles still in print? I suspect not.
I do not absolve myself from this apathy and ignorance. I have never read an Alistair Maclean novel in my life.

But a part of me has always been drawn to forgotten popular novelists, and I love rediscovering them.
Their works are hidden, secret worlds; islands, almost, cut off from the mainland, where life continues as it has always done, untouched by change of any kind.
It is in their pages, in the words of these who wrote not for posterity but for an eager and receptive audience of contemporaries, and not to inform or impress but merely to divert, that we can most vividly see the exact mood and flavour of the past pass as if living before us.
Works of historical recreation may or may not do a good job of mimicking this immediacy, but in Wheatley we see decades past actually staggering to their feet and returning to life.

Dennis Wheatley, like Maclean, was one of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, and an equally ubiquitous figure in the bookshelves of generations older than my own.
His first novel was published in the thirties, his last in the seventies, and throughout that period he maintained a phenomenal rate of output in a series of bestselling thrillers, ranging in theme from historical to political to supernatural.
For most of my life, one could find him in any jumble sale, any charity shop. In this way he remained a living presence, even among the increasing majority that never read him.
The first Wheatley paperback I ever saw was at my grandparents' house. It was definitely a black magic title, almost certainly The Haunting of Toby Jugg, and in the Arrow paperback series featuring a topless blonde woman on the cover. (This 'tits edition', as the series is known to connoisseurs, is among the most iconic and evocative of all Wheatley jacket designs; a number of people to whom I have mentioned this project have instantly cited it as their first, abiding and in some cases only memory of Wheatley as a 'live' literary presence.) Now, he is slowly beginning to disappear.

Gina Wisker wrote in Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: the Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley (in Clive Bloom [ed]: Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century [1993]):

Most of the bookshops I have visited in an attempt to get hold of Wheatley's novels have declared him out of print, but he isn't... W. H. Smith, bastion of popular fiction, couldn't trace his work on their shelves in Cambridge, and returned my downpayment for those supposedly in print, declaring them no longer so. One Cambridge bookshop specialising in ordinary secondhand books said were they offered any they wouldn't touch them.

Though his supernatural novels represent a tiny fraction of his output, it is now thanks solely to them, and in particular to The Devil Rides Out, made into a successful Hammer Horror film, that his name endures to the extent that it does.
It is not, however, a respected name. Even in his heyday, higher literary critics scoffed at the perceived defects in his literary style, though his habit of cheerfully agreeing with them rather than taking up cudgels blunted their assaults somewhat.
Today, he is invariably dismissed, partly for this reason and partly for the crusty traditionalist politics that even the most fantastic of his novels usually find time to put the narrative on hold for, and have his characters espouse on his behalf.

Julian Symons in Bloody Murder, a guide to crime fiction, speaks for the consensus, more or less, in declaring that Wheatley's works "indicate how low is one literary level of popular success" and defining his style as "chunks of pre-digested history served up in a form which may appeal to readers with a mental age of twelve."
Critics invariably take him to task for what Wisker calls "all sorts of social stereotypes, as well as glaring and quite irritating (or satisfyingly predictable) examples of the ideology of the British people at a particular time" and "a fascinating perspective on the cultural norms of the time and the ideological implications of all the forces which stress the normative and reinforce the status quo." (In other words: for accurately reflecting the temper of his time and the mood of his readers: now as then the only safe way of selling books.)
Wisker writes disapprovingly of the fact that "Wheatley delivers an ultimately rational and controllable horror to a readership who desire flights of the imagination but wish to have their values reinforced at the end", and endorses a review of the film version of The Devil Rides Out that condemns the manner in which "the fatal attractiveness of evil is inevitably undermined... by (the) insistence on punishing the seductive." (In other words: the fact that the baddies lose.)
The villains, these people always point out, are "visibly so, usually deformed, not British" (Wisker again) and, most of all, physically ugly. (But, as we shall see, a surprising number of Wheatley's heroes are also explicitly described as ugly, Rex Van Ryn and Gregory Sallust among them. Wheatley, in fact, has a peculiar quirk of describing just about all of his characters, male and female, hero and villain, in terms of their physical flaws and imperfections.)

A recent BBC documentary, Dennis Wheatley: A Letter To Posterity, made for a particularly chilling warning of what may happen to his remaining reputation if this process is left unchecked.
In it, a selection of literary dilettantes pontificate on his writing in general and especially on A Letter To Posterity, a work that, as its title suggests, was written not for publication, and intended not for his popular readership but as a legacy to the future.
It is a tract in which Wheatley envisages a future Britain enslaved to leftist totalitarianism, and urges action to stop this process in its tracks. Just the kind of thing they love at the BBC and the London Review of Books. Needless to say, this is is tackled with all the open-mindedness you'd expect, while selectively misleading extracts from the letter are read by an actor doing a barking Blimp voice.
One of the panel complains that the Letter "advocates meeting in secret societies to cook up a coup or plot, rather than advocating open, lively discussion"; another says that "the call to arms grates somewhat." Indeed it does - so long as both programme and panelists remain determined to obscure the fact that the work is a prediction, in which Wheatley is imagining a future of totalitarian subjugation, wherein armed resistance would be entirely reasonable, and open, lively discussion impossible. The way the programme slants it, it's as if he is advocating the assassination of Attlee's post-war government. (I will give a sober hearing to the Letter To Posterity in a forthcoming post.)

Wheatley was phenomenally popular, a fact that should warrant our serious attention in itself. He was read avidly by all classes of society (up to and very much including royalty) and his sheer longevity as an author means that we are able, if we are so inclined, to read his books chronologically and watch a century pass living and breathing as we go.
I am not sure that anybody since his contemporaries, who read each new book as it appeared, have felt so inclined, however, and even they, of course, would not have had the historical perspective to really see this process in action.This is where the Dennis Wheatley Project comes in.

Simply stated, the project is this: I am going to read all of Wheatley's books in order.
The majority of these posts, therefore, will document my reactions to each of Wheatley's books as I read them. I will also post on general topics pertaining to Wheatley's life, career and legacy, his outlook, his contemporaries and such ephemera as the film adaptations of his books.
What little socio-historical value there may be in this will, I suspect, be found in the fact that Wheatley does not merely reflect the temper of his age but actively engages with it (that he does so from a now unfashionable perspective is a detail you are at liberty to find dislikeable if you are so inclined, but which in no way invalidates or renders less worthy the task of analysing the process) and because, though his work has been more or less forgotten, I have yet to pick up a Wheatley book I have not enjoyed.
Many have surprised me, however, in what they reveal about the range of their author's interests, his literary inspirations and references, his knowledge and his unerring sense of what his readers will want of him. Even feeling I knew him as well as I did, I was quite unprepared for the actual content of such striking and bizarre works as Such Power Is Dangerous, Black August and The Ka of Gifford Hillary to name just three.

I must also come clean about one other thing here at the outset. I have the nagging feeling that those who snidely dismiss Wheatley's works as reactionary juvenilia are not just priggish bores but also very wrong: what Wheatley I have read (a lot, but a tiny percentage of the whole) points me strongly towards the conclusion that he was, no is - for books, unlike authors, do not die - a fine writer.
He is also an eccentric writer; that is to say a supremely individualist one: it is very hard to mistake his work for anyone elses. This surely calls into question the extent to which it can be waved away as formula writing. Perhaps his technique was naive and often imprecise, but in his marshaling of his materials and narrative style, his imagination, and above all his use of popular narrative formulae to articulate a consistent worldview and speak in a clear and unwavering authorial voice, he was by no means a negligible craftsman. Even his sternest critics concede that he could tell a tale, and that his dexterous blending of fact and fiction was innovative and influential.

I think his reputation suffers partly on account of his politics, and partly from the automatic tendency of one generation to look down on the frivolous diversions of the generation that preceded it. But there is such a thing as qualitative judgement in popular culture, and if the aim of this site is in part to examine Wheatley's work from that perspective, I make no bones of the fact that the likely outcome of that enquiry is predetermined, and I will be surprised indeed if I am given cause to moderate it.
I love the books of Dennis Wheatley. And as much as it is concerned with analysis, this site will be concerned with paying tribute to one of the most charming, cranky and enjoyable writers of the last hundred years.