The Golden Spaniard (1938)

At ten to six his great silver Hispano-Suiza was waiting at the street door. The chauffeur and footman were clad in grey liveries and wore tall, wide-topped grey Persian lamb pepenkas at a rakish angle on their heads. Many people often turned to stare with interest or admiration at such an unusual display of personality when the Duke drove about London and some of the nouveau riche among his neighbours who could, if they had wished, have afforded a precisely similar turn-out but lacked the courage to appease their envy, spoke of it as the most vulgar ostentation. 
It is quite true that de Richleau possessed a flamboyant taste in such matters, but that anyone should dream of questioning his indulgence of it never even crossed his mind. If he ever thought of the matter at all it was only to reflect upon the sadly degenerate age into which he had been born; an age in which he must content himslef with a mere couple of men seated in front of him in a motor-car, whereas many of his ancestors had usually driven through the streets with sixteen outriders preceding them. Completely oblivious of the looks of admiration or envy which were cast at his equipage, he was conveyed smoothly through Hyde Park to Knightsbridge, remarking only, in the light of the early July evening, how lovely the flowers were looking in the beds...

Is it possible for a Democrat voter and a Republican voter to be friends in the age of Hillary and Trump? Can a Brexiteer and a Remainer pull up a bar stool and talk about football? Would a Tory and a Corbynite knowingly sit next to each other on the bus?
If you fear the answer is no, take heart from The Golden Spaniard, in which the four inseparable 'Modern Musketeers' (they being, if you need reminding, which you don't, the Duc de Richleau, Simon Aron, Rex van Ryn and Richard Eaton, our pals from The Forbidden Territory and The Devil Rides Out) find themselves split into warring pairs during the Spanish Civil War.
As the story progresses, they impede, betray and conspire against each other, to the extent of frequently bringing each other to the brink of mortal peril. Further, they find themselves in opposite camps not through accident of nationality or circumstance but because of ideological conviction, with Simon and Rex siding with the Communists and the Duke and Richard with the Fascists. (They were always an odd assortment in any event: the Duke seemingly a connoisseur of anything cultivated and an authority on everything else, Simon hot-headed and impulsive, Rex strong, loyal and with the intellect of a prize ox, and Richard the totally dependable but none too imaginative backbone of England: "I never did like Trotsky," he volunteers at one point. "A vile fellow and a windbag to boot.")
Yet for all the figurative and near-literal backstabbing to which they relentlessly subject each other through the course of the novel, not for a moment do they renounce their friendship, or entertain serious doubt that sooner or later they'll be back in civilised England together, sharing a brace of partridge and something special from the Duke's cellar. That Wheatley somehow manages to make us believe this nonsense is just one of many balancing acts he pulls off in the course of this fabulously energised novel.

It has been said that the reason Ernest Hemingway's work declined in quality was not because he lost his talent, but because the world ran out of subjects worthy of it, condemning him to repetition and self-pastiche. As a popular genre writer, that was obviously never going to be a comparable problem for Dennis Wheatley. If the well of contemporary thrills seemed in danger of drying he could switch course and dabble in horror or fantasy or detective fiction. But there's no question that he was at his best when his imagination was ignited by the headlines, and after the slight 'conveyer belt' feeling of his last few titles, the Spanish Civil War gave him everything he needed to come back with all guns blazing.
So is The Golden Spaniard Wheatley's own For Whom the Bell Tolls? Well, no, not quite. But it is, nonetheless, an exceptionally impressive performance, filled with exciting action, rivetingly paced, and piling twist upon twist upon twist until literally the last sentence, while still finding time for all his customary diversions into politics, travelogue and history. In Drink and Ink he calls it "one of the best I have ever written." It is, I would suggest, unquestionably the most accomplished piece of work he had written thus far.

Wheatley was also disarmingly frank about its inspiration:

The main theme was a plagiarism of Alexandre Dumas's Twenty Years After, in which during the war of the Fronde, the four friends take opposite sides for political reasons; d'Artagnan and Porthos siding with the Court; Athos and Aramis with the Frondeurs.

A less dramatic cover than the above, with a somewhat Grace Kelly-ish Lucretia-José

Given that Wheatley's own leanings should be in no doubt (Franco "had my vote every time," he writes in Drink and Ink, adding that he considered it "inconceivable that any sane person would wish to see Spain in the hands of the Communists"), the book somewhat belies his popular image by giving a remarkably fair hearing to both sides, as well as shying from neither side's faults or injustices. Indeed, more or less the entirety of Chapter 4 is given over to a patient and sincere explication of the Socialist position, with Wheatley saving the opposing case for Chapter 5 ("The Other Side of the Picture").
There is much comparison with the fascisms of Italy and Germany, with Simon and his "unquestionably Semitic nose" especially attuned to the plight of Germany's Jews: a phenomenon which one could still, if one so chose, get away with underestimating in 1938. Wheatley gives Simon and de Richleau this exchange:

"... Look what's happened in Italy and Germany. No one can call their souls their own. D'you think I want to see Spain go the same way?"
"Never mind Spain. How about this country? If you had to choose would you rather live under a Fascist or Communist Dictatorship?"
"Communist, every time."
"But, my dear Simon, you're a capitalist - and a darned rich one. They'd not only take part of your money as the Fascists might, but the lot, and put you up against a brick wall in addition."
"They might rob me of my money and, because of it, of my life, but at least my people would not be persecuted on account of their race."
De Richleau sighed. "I'm sorry, Simon. I appreciate your feelings, but it never occurred to me that you would associate the Spanish Conservatives with the Nazis. Actually, of course, they are poles apart."
"Don't you believe it," Simon flared. "When the Spanish Right was in power its methods were identical with those of these German bullies - moral and physical torture applied to anyone who opposed them. Besides, if the Communists are going to try to get control of the country the anti-Communists have got to line up with the Fascists - haven't they? It's their only chance."

And this between de Richleau and Rex:

"... Like myself, of course, you are a diehard anti-Communist."
"Sure, but I'm a diehard anti-Nazi too for that matter. The things those skunks have done to the poor wretched Jews in Germany just don't bear thinking about."
"Thanks." In one of his elegant, slender hands which, on occasion, could so unexpectedly exert a grip of steel, de Richleau took the froth-topped glass that Rex proffered him. "Naturally we all deplore these senseless excesses against an unfortunate minority, but they are incomparably less terrible than the wholesale slaughter of an entire property-owning class, as has happened in Russia. 
"However," he added with a fatherly twinkle in his eye, "international politics have never been your strong suit, Rex, and I'm confident you value my judgement sufficiently to leave that part of it to me."

The implication is not so much that their friendship had hitherto been strong enough to transcend political difference so much as that politics had not been felt sufficiently important to test it; Wheatley elsewhere notes de Richleau's bewilderment that this should be about to change:

A worried frown creased the Duke's broad forehead. Apart from the fact that they had risked their lives for each other in the past his friendship with Simon was based on their mutual love of beautiful things. When they met they rarely talked politics but discussed their latest discoveries in the world of art, and both of them could linger lovingly over a jade carving or a page of prose.

Indeed, when hosting the socialists at his house, Simon is still canny enough to serve "a drinkable but inexpensive" sherry: "Simon was one of the most generous men in London but he was far too sensible to waste fine liquor on people who did not understand it."
These passages, in which the Duke minimises the Nazi pogroms as regrettable but of little ultimate consequence ("German Jew-baiting is horrible, I know," he says in still another exchange, "but it isn't wholesale murder"), presumably qualify as text-book examples of the kind of thing that Wheatley's present day editor Miranda Vaughan Jones (see here) describes as "a faithful representation of how people spoke at that time", and therefore protected speech, rather than what she characterised, and pruned, as "authorial intervention". The trouble with Wheatley, though, is that he so often blurs the lines between the two, and especially so in this novel, so it would be interesting to see how much of this one in particular escaped her scissors.

"The Duke got a Union Jack out of one of his suitcases, they ran it up on a short flagstaff over the office block, and there was nothing more they could do." - The Golden Spaniard, end of Chapter XVII

The title character herself, who we first meet imploring the Duke to enter the fray on the Fascists' behalf, is the luminous Lucretia-José de Cordoba y Coralles, whose "golden hair combined with markedly Spanish features gave her a most unusual type of beauty." When we next encounter her, however, she is attending Simon's socialist soiree, and under the new identity of the Golden Spaniard. Working undercover, we learn that she has risen high among the ranks of the Spanish revolutionaries, and as the novel progresses we discover her to be exceptionally resourceful, cunning and intelligent. Wheatley's heroines are often made of fairly plucky stuff, but Lucretia-José is also ruthless and an expert tactician. "What a man that girl would have made," ruminates the Duke, presumably paying her his ultimate compliment. Wheatley even adds a dash of Romeo and Juliet as she falls for the sincere revolutionary Cristoval Ventura. To say that this outcome troubles her is to put it mildly:

It seemed inconceivable to her that she had fallen for a Red. It was one thing to consort with them for her own purposes and while doing so to forget, at times, the great gulf fixed; but quite another to admit for a second that she could really care for one of these warped, atheistic monsters who were out to destroy all that was best and finest in her dearly loved Spain.

But again, once Wheatley burns himself out on hyperbole, he relaxes enough to permit an even-handedness that we might not have expected of him:

At first she had loathed the people with whom she had to mix. Their whole outlook was so utterly at variance with her own passionate belief in the fitness of a Catholic and Monarchist Spain that it proved an almost unendurable strain to refrain from screaming at the blasphemies they uttered. Only the fact that she knew their jargon backwards and the story that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Catholic priest, which they swallowed greedily enough, gave her sufficient cover to remain unsuspected when she turned white from sheer horror at finding herself alone among these ghouls who thirsted for the blood of her friends and her class. In those early days the very smell of the unwashed crowds who gathered in the dreary meeting-halls had filled her with such nausea that it had been a struggle to prevent herself being physically sick. She felt that she would never be clean again from mental and bodily contamination but, as the months passed, familiarity with such surroundings brought a subtle change in her attitude. 
She had begun to look with new eyes upon these denizens of a strange, squalid, twilight world. Some she recognized as professional trouble-makers who scraped a living from the meagre collections obtained after addressing meetings, but most were honest people made bitter by the injustices of fate. Once she had grasped the appalling conditions under which many of them were born and died, the ignorance that condemned them to slavery all their lives and how a whim of fashion or the ill-timed increase of a tax could rob hundreds of them of the bare pittance on which they lived, a new horror gripped her. 
(...)
Before long realization had come to her that in their private lives most of them could be as gentle, as kind, as courteous and much more generous, within their limited means, than the people amongst whom she had been brought up. She found that they possessed abundant humour too and an almost unbelievable fortitude when fate dealt harshly with them.

There's a touch of Mae West to this one

Wheatley's keen (but usually fleeting) eye for sadism is here given freer reign than customary, prompted by extended scenes of mob violence. (The tyranny of the mob has been a feature of much of his previous work, in both fiction and non-fiction.):

The pavements were still hot from the long day of blazing sunshine, the air was stifling and the hooligans, male and female, only wore a minimum of garments. Led by criminal and sadistic lunatics, who for once were able to glut their revolting secret appetites without fear of being caled to account, thousands of normally decent workpeople - their better instincts drowned in looted alcohol - ran laughing and cursing about the airless half-lit streets. What did it matter that the red blood of life flowed in the gutters, that young girls were being violated until they died of exhaustion, and that strong men, fiendishly castrated, screamed like women in childbirth? It was only the putting into practice of the doctrine by which the mobs had been taught they would achieve riches and contentment.

Elsewhere the Duke himself kills an avaricious mayor by forcing "a large knife through his liver with as little compunction as one kills a rat", Simon deals a woman "a back-handed blow from his fist which sent half her teeth down her throat", and de Richleau and Richard are forced to stand by impotently as a group of nuns are soaked in petrol and burned alive.
Wheatley clearly feels he has special license to depict such atrocities because he is passing judgement on events that are not only real but also contemporary. It is important to remember that the outcome of the conflict was still to be decided when the book was published, which makes his now customary interweaving of fact and fiction all the more impressive here. Rather than beginning with an episode from a history book and then conceiving of a fictional narrative that would fit its contours, he has here begun with a fictional premise and laced into it real life personages and detailed accounts of the war's course not as window dressing but as integral elements - a considerable feat when one realises that Wheatley is taking his material straight from the morning headlines. For all his bombast, he has again thoroughly researched his subject: readers presuming he will be painting with only the broadest of strokes might be surprised, for instance, by passages which note (and derive narrative capital from) the differences between the F.A.I., the C.N.T., the U.G.T and the P.O.U.M.

Our heroine re-imagined for the Heron edition, apparently on the end of a piece of unraveling string

Preliminaries sorted, we then come to the adventure and the intrigue, and here Wheatley is absolutely in his element. His reputation for following one action sequence with another, giving the reader no time to catch their breath after deliberately making them think they would be allowed to, and topping a plot twist with a further surprise was already well-earned, but he surpasses himself here. Not for nothing is a chapter entitled 'Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire' followed immediately by another called 'Out of the Fire into the Boiling Oil'. For most of the book's second half the reader is kept constantly on the back foot as it twists first in this direction and then the other, and the final chapters have virtually a surprise on every page. In particular, he stages a twist in the climax so beautiful that it sends one flicking furiously back through earlier pages, trying to find and re-read passages where vital information might have been slipped past without awareness.

An additional burden the book has to bear is its status as a sequel to The Devil Rides Out. Would the reader be sufficiently excited by the return of the lead characters in another strictly materialist adventure, after the extravagant supernatural fantasy of their previous encounter? Might not there be the tendency to greet each peril and near-death with a shrug of the shoulders, as one wonders why the Duke doesn't just perform some spell or incantation to bring the forces of eternal goodness to their aid? Typically, Wheatley announces rather than shies from the problem. At the beginning of the book we learn that Tanith has died in the interval between the two stories, giving birth to her and Rex's first child. Wheatley then briefly allows the Duke to ponder:

De Richleau thought again of how he and his friends had fought the Devil - fought the Devil himself - and won... Having triumphed over such mighty odds, how, when they were once reunited, could they fail in this new encounter where only the human forces of evil were arrayed against them?

It sounds unmistakably like Wheatley is issuing a challenge, both to himself and by extension to the reader, and it is a tribute to his screw-tight narrative that the issue, for this reader at least, never really announces itself again. And this despite the fact that the plot is set in motion by a more or less identical restaging of the earlier book's set-up. As before, de Richleau surprises Simon by turning up at his house in the middle of a meeting of his new friends, forcing the younger man to prevaricate and flounder as he attempts to get rid of his friend without arousing his suspicions. Of course the guests this time, "seedy-looking individuals" all, are not Satanists but Socialists, not that the reader can easily tell the difference. "Comparatively few of them," we are told, "were British in appearance," and when we learn that the women among them "were definitely dowdy" we may confidently presume we have been told all we need to know.

In this pirouetting display we get to see the best of the author's every facet. We have Wheatley the self-referencer: "Good luck to you, my dear 'Lieutenant Schwab'!" says the Duke to Simon at one point, evoking the sleuth of his crime dossiers. And we have Wheatley the referencer of friends and rivals: half a page is devoted to describing the merits of a Peter Cheyney novel that Rex is reading, with two subsequent updates. ("It was much the swiftest thing Rex had read for a long time...")
Then we have Wheatley the wine man: "Queer that the finest hocks fetch so much more than the finest clarets, isn't it?" asks Richard. The Duke replies: "Not really... It simply proves there are more rich people in the world who would rather drink this than Château Ausone, and I'm one of them."
And where would we be without Wheatley the political theorist? It is he who we shall allow the last word, speaking through the mouth of his beloved Duc de Richleau. Faithful representation, or authorial intervention? I'll leave that one up to you.

He shrugged. "Unfortunately we can't put the clock back, but a few determined statesmen might stop the rot that has permeated the world since the Great War."
"How?"
"By refusing to countenance the absurd claims of small minorities... Look at the mess there is today in Central Europe The old Austro-Hungarian Empire had no model Government but at least it was a happy country. A few fanatics made trouble from time to time because they wanted to force everyone in their districts to speak some aboriginal peasant language that no stranger could understand, but they were only locked up when they started breaking windows. Under the treaties of Versailles and Trianon statesmen who should have known better split Middle Europe up and created all sorts of new nations to quarrel with each other. Worse, the matter hasn't ended there because each of them has its minorities which want to rule themselves, and the appalling thing is that the great powers take these demands seriously. If they go on that way the only end can be Europe reduced to a patchwork quilt with frontiers every twenty-five miles and the whole place reduced to a Tower of Babel. How can there be peace and progress and the spread of culture in such a madhouse? It is the safety and welfare of the majorities that matter, and the majority of people all over the world don't want to be led into senseless squabbles by a handful of the sort of lunatics who in normal times  would be boosting nudism, nut-diets, or neo-Gaelic poetry."

The Devil Rides Out (1934)

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 disg
uising 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.
It's certainly not the case that Wheatley pits all this foreign nastiness against all-English heroes. Three of the book's five heroes are equally un-English - a Frenchman, an American and a Russian - to which Wheatley adds a Jewish fourth with admirable 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."


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:
.
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.".


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:
.
"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.".


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:.


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..


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:

"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..
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..
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:.


"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.".

Who could he have had in mind?

The Forbidden Territory (1933)

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 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.