Herewith the Clues (1939)

Who killed Serge Orloff, Trotskyite enabler of the Irish Republican Army, dope-peddler and West-End club owner?

Herewith the Clues is the fourth and last of the crime dossiers Wheatley created in collaboration with J.G. Links. The series was already in decline but this is by some measure the weakest and least interesting: its original readers seem to have concluded that the idea had definitely run its course, and it's hard not to agree with them. (I have the advantage over them, of course, in knowing that it actually had.)

It's by far the most linear and  least convoluted; it makes less of an effort than ever to make the tangibility of its assembled evidence relevant to the solution, and there are no surprises at all. There's only one killing, and we arrive at the solution by examining the testimony of a series of interchangeable suspects, a fact which the authors make clear at the end by providing (for the first time) readers' score sheets, which explicitly tell them to list the suspects and their reasons for exonerating or continuing to suspect them. (The latter, one suspects, are as much a means of filling up space in the book as in offering help to the sleuths at home.)
It begins as a series of letters describing the events - this could easily be third person prose and would lose nothing - we then get a look at the bits of evidence, then see photos and descriptions of all the suspects, and that's that: we jump straight to the solution. It's all very mechanical, and I read the lot in half an hour. The cover boasted that it contained "five times as many clues as any of the previous dossiers", which may be true in a strictly numerical sense, but the amount of informed guessing the reader is able to do is virtually nil.
Wheatley, who had some frosty words of criticism for its predecessor, The Malinsay Massacre, betrays no feelings of disenchantment or disappointment with the present venture in Drink and Ink, stressing that the run of the series was curtailed only by the cost of producing them, which became prohibitive in wartime. Phil Baker is more blunt: "It flopped."

The photographs of the suspects makes for the strangest and most interesting element.  They are all impersonated by Wheatley and his friends, but while the basic idea is in keeping with the playfulness of the series up to this point, the joke dies in execution, since the book itself explains the real identities of the stand-ins under the character names. This robs the exercise of the verisimilitude that was its original selling point, and replaces it with a weak in-joke that is liable to freeze the smile on the reader's face, not least because for the most part the assembled cast are not terribly notable cronies of the author's. Among the more interesting are Wheatley's wife Eve Chaucer, fellow author Peter Cheyney (already lavishly name-checked in The Golden Spaniard), and Val Gielgud as the corpse. Also in the cast is Wheatley's step-daughter Diana Younger, to whom he dedicated The Golden Spaniard with the most fulsome of praise, but who was proving an increasing trial behind the scenes, given to excesses of frivolity and sexually provocative behaviour, to say nothing of the disinclination to shrug off a soft spot for Nazism she had acquired on a recent trip to Germany.  Wheatley and Links themselves appear as small time crooks 'Scab' Wilson and 'Mugs' Masters.

Wheatley and Links as a couple of lowlife villains

Wheatley seems to suggest in Drink and Ink that these photos were taken at a party in his house, which had been decorated to resemble the nightclub in which the events take place, and for which performer Ruby Miller, an old friend of Wheatley's, doubled-up as both real and fictional main attraction. However, he also says that the party was intended to celebrate the book's publication, rather than its conception, so I'm not sure how the two tie up.

The Crime Dossiers were only ever diversions, delightful interludes between Wheatley's more substantial works of fiction, but the first two, for my money, maintain their charm and fascination, especially if you are able to get an edition that duplicates the actual physical pieces of evidence rather than, as in later reprints, merely photographs of them. Nonetheless, by the time of The Malinsay Massacre it was obvious that the series was coming to an end. Herewith the Clues sounded the death knell; all too clearly the authors had run out of energy, enthusiasm and imagination. There is a desultory, perfunctory feel to the whole thing. The party's over.

The Malinsay Massacre (1938)

The third of the crime dossiers is something of an oddity.
On the one hand, it offers clear indications that the authors are tiring of their innovation, and are no longer willing to put in the degree of effort and ingenuity necessary to justify the format. There are hardly any of the variety of inserts and variant perspectives that made reading the first installment, in particular, a genuine exercise in detection.
Here we have a few photographs, newspaper cuttings which (with one exception only) tell us nothing of which we were not already aware, and one poisoned pill from which (we are assured) all trace of poison has been successfully removed!
The latter is fun, but no substitute for the wide variety of physical material included in Murder Off Miami and, in any event, is not any kind of clue. Indeed, there are only two decidedly obscure clues to be found in the enclosures, one by incredibly close study of the castle floor plan combined with impossibly close study of one of the photographs; the second is in a later photograph, but its relevance cannot be guessed until the moment it is explained.
The bulk of the book takes the form of typed correspondence between the same two characters, allowing us no chance to be directly misled by the words of any of the other characters. (As such, when a handwritten letter from one of them does suddenly appear it has the effect of leaping at the reader, who would be right to smell a rat.) A further symptom of the authors' weariness is a degree of overkill with regards the crimes themselves: as the title indicates, a steady succession of corpses pile up as the narrative unfolds, each leading to a different red herring suspect, while the police inspector we never encounter except in the third person stands impotently by.
The meta-textual humour that had distinguished the earlier volumes is also ramped up, at times to the point of parody. The book opens with a letter from Wheatley to Police Lieutenant Schwab, asking for more real-life cases to satisfy the demand of clamouring fans of the first two books. Schwab, however, declares himself empty-handed:

It would be a pleasure to help you further and I have been wondering how best to do so. I have been on a queer case recently that started with no more than a broken finger nail but so many of the leading figures of our public life are now involved in this scandalous business that it would be highly indiscreet to give the facts to the world at the present time. Another of my cases was solved after months of fruitless investigation by my studying a chair for twenty four hours on end... but unfortunately it now reposes in the Police Museum of this City and even if I could ship it to you, it could hardly be reproduced by the thousand for sale in bookshops all over the world.

Wheatley himself was less enamored of this than its predecessors, though for a rather different reason, and for which he blamed his co-author J.G. Links. As he writes in Drink and Ink:

I had written the story before leaving England but had had to leave the photographs to be taken in my absence. When I saw them I was livid with rage. The script was about mass murder in an ancient castle in Scotland. Joe had allowed the photographs of the characters and bodies to be taken in the Carlton Hotel, and the backgrounds could not have been less suitable. 

On the other hand, however, the actual mystery itself is rather a clever one, and most interestingly, relies upon the means in which it is presented in order to work. In other words, Wheatley and Links have reached a point where the content is dictated by the format, and what began as a cute gimmick is now integral to its structural efficiency. Indeed, if it had been offered as a straight novel written in epistolary form, it might have found a reputation as one of the classic English whodunits of its decade.

The first victim!

As always with Wheatley, it is the incidentals that provide the keenest amusement, especially when the correspondents break away from the matter in hand to briefly address other issues of the day, among them the Boer War ("It may cost us a few score lives but it will be a month's good exercise for our troops to teach these people a sharp lesson, and then we can settle down to run the country properly"), the erosion of class boundaries ("For a woman of title to have an affair with her groom is an appalling error of taste in any circumstances, but we must endeavour to be broadminded") and certain regrettable developments in politics:

McGregor is a more intellectual type than the majority of the Islanders and apparently has become interested in this newfangled nonsense called Socialism; which seems to be spreading through the writings of some crazy German called Marx. I know little about it, except that these people would like to turn the world upside down and ruin us all...

For all its pleasures, though, this is plainly the work of a Wheatley treading water and playing for time. But he would soon return to his best form: world events were again helpfully handing him exactly the kind of inspiration he most relished, and the stage was set for the return of de Richleau and the Modern Musketeers.

Who Killed Robert Prentice? (1937)

The second of Wheatley's delightful 'Crime Dossiers', and I don't mind telling you, I was determined I was going to beat this one, having failed so miserably to solve the first one, Murder Off Miami.

In the event, actually, I did guess whodunnit, but 'guess' is the operative word: I guessed straight away in fact, and it was purely a hunch, based on a familiarity with a further eighty years of murder mystery plots. I didn't actually spot any of the clues.
(That said, one of them, involving perfume, is surely unfair, since ingenious though the original dossiers were - and sadly this time round I was using a 1980s reissue with most of the bits of evidence merely reproduced on the page rather than inserted for real - I very much doubt whether Hutchinson was up to including scented pages.)
As it turns out, though, whodunnit is not as important as it first seems, since Wheatley and Links have pulled off a clever double twist that already - two books in - plays for its effect on the convention of the sealed endsection they themselves had only just established.

Actually, when I say I didn't solve Murder Off Miami, that's not strictly true. I did come up with a solution, and rather  a good one I thought, that certainly seemed to hold water... but thst just so happened not to be the correct one.
In my defence, it was my first encounter with a crime dossier, and I didn't know how fairly they played, or how minutely we were supposed to scan the material for submerged hints and revelations. It turned out that it played entirely fair: there really were clues to be spotted, and I didn't spot them.
So this time I was doubly determined to solve it all, and further galvanised by the fact that the sealed section in the edition I was reading was still sealed, and had never been read by anybody.
Sadly, though the mystery itself is ingenious, it's much more linear than Miami, and there simply aren't that many clues to spot - only two, really - though a few others dotted about may help to eliminate a couple of red herrings.

By far the most charming bit of evidence this time around is a folded copy of the South Sussex Chronicle, containing a complete and very helpful account of the inquest into Robert Prentice's murder.
But as it is an entire facsimile newspaper, that's not all! The illusion of authenticity is further sustained by genuine advertisements: a typically canny Wheatley innovation, the revenue from which off-set some of the unusually high printing costs that the Crime Dossiers accrued. (Baker, p. 359)
And what a peculiar assortment they are! We have 'Mackeson's Milk Stout ("the original and genuine milk stout, first brewed thirty years ago at Hythe"), and 'Sherley's Remedies', a complete range of canine health preparations, including shampoo, tonic and condition powders and worm capsules, advertised as being particularly useful for police dogs (who "have to be perfectly fit in all ways before they can give of their best and co-operate with their human colleagues in fighting crime.")
Elsewhere a smiling C.P. Miller of Bournemouth assures us "My Rupture never worries me Now!", not since he discovered the Brooks Appliance. (He can now lift any weight, and even move pianos.) And of course, there is an advert for Hutchinson books, displaying some of the best-selling authors they publish, among them one Eve Chaucer, whose latest (It Is Easier For a Camel), it helpfully informs us, is published October 8th. And then there's some fellow called Wheatley "whose work is published in sixteen languages."
And there's a separate ad for "The Ideal Present": Murder Off Miami, of course. "Post a copy to your friend abroad," it advises.

Oddly, this Wheatley chap turns up in three separate contexts in this one issue of the Chronicle. 
As well as the adverts for his books, we see him listed (in the other front page story, beside the murder) as one of the attendees at a meeting to form the committee of the Harry Preston Memorial Fund. This, too, was genuine, and its inclusion intended to drum up further contributions to the fund. Preston was a boxing promoter, hotelier and well-known society figure, as well as a close friend of Wheatley's who, according to his recollection in Drink and Ink, "had not deserted me during the time I was almost penniless." Wheatley later recalls that he supplied "two well-known pugilists" for a three-round contest in a ring specially erected at the Prince of Wales Hotel in De Vere Gardens as his own idiosyncratic contribution to the launch party for The Devil Rides Out.

But the best Wheatley cameo in the paper is his third, in a back page story entitled 'WRITER WHO MADE "MURDER FICTION" HISTORY LIVING NEAR SCENE OF CRIME', in which we discover - would you believe! - that just a short walk from the murder scene is "the country home of Mr J.G. Links, who, with Dennis Wheatley, created a new era in crime fiction a few months ago by the production of the now famous dossier, Murder Off Miami." Luckily the reporter found him at home, along with his guests, both Mr Wheatley and his wife ("also an author, who has already gained a wide public under the name of Eve Chaucer, by her two novels, No Ordinary Virgin and Better To Marry.")
The three do briefly hint at something of their guesses as to the solution of the local crime ("I shall be most interested to see how it turns out," Joan opines, "It might even have the makings of a good story.") But the bulk of the fairly lengthy article is given over to a meticulous book by book account of Wheatley's career to date (including of course, an excitement-whetting hint of what's to come, which in Wheatley's case, true to form, lines up not the next one book but the next three).
We are told, for the second time, that he has "so great a reputation that his work is published in sixteen languages, although his first book only appeared less than four years ago." The amazing success story of The Forbidden Territory is recounted  for the first time (but not by a long chalk the last). "Scene after scene" of Such Power Is Dangerous, we learn, "was so packed with excitement that the Sunday Dispatch critic wrote of it: 'Easily the best melange of thrills that I have ever read.'" This was followed by "his only serious book to date, although serious is perhaps hardly the word for his vivid and entertaining biography, Old Rowley."
And so on, and much more, in the same manner. For Wheatley to have included such puffery in one of his own productions is in itself the mark of a very particular personality, but the fact that it is actually he himself writing all this makes it something else again.
But as well as the fun of reading Wheatley praising himself to the skies, there are some interesting observations here in terms of how Wheatley perceived himself as a writer. Though They Found Atlantis is perhaps surprisingly described as "his best and favourite book" it is very intriguing to see that he has already identified The Devil Rides Out as the book "which Mr Wheatley thinks will probably outlive any of his others."
We also get a sense of just how ordered his writing life had become, even at this early stage (he explains that The Secret War "will come out in January - a bit soon after Contraband, but that can't be helped, as I always like to have one of my two annual books out early in the year"), and also how carefully he managed his career in order to achieve maximum sales potential. Describing his books as "tales of romantic adventure played out against very carefully chosen backgrounds which would provide readers with an additional interest and lend plausibility to the thrills and suspense," he continues:

Asked about his phenomenally rapid rise to the status of one of the world's best-sellers, he said that, as he never uses the same background for a story twice, the variety of his books may largely account for it. He argues that it is virtually impossible to please the whole of the thriller-reading public every time, but that each section of it may be given just the thing they want at intervals of three or four books. His mail informs him that every one of his stories proves first favourite with some readers, while the great majority, who may prefer others, still derive considerable enjoyment from the ones they do not personally consider to be his best.

Murder most foul: Prentice's body exactly as it was discovered!

So, what about this murder of Robert Prentice, then?
Well, it's a pretty racy tale, revolving around an extra-marital amour, and featuring a woman who is simultaneously enjoying the attentions of another woman's husband and her son; there's also a post-coital nude blackmail photo (included in the evidence), and free and frank discussion of abortion and promiscuity. No wonder it was banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds of inferior moral character: "created for English conditions, not German ones." (Baker, p.360)

Robert Prentice has been found dead, some time ago, from strychnine poisoning, and his widow Cicely has written to Lieutenant Schwab (famed, according to a newspaper clipping for his "brilliant feat of detection in the 'Murder Off Miami' case") to beg his assistance. The police have followed various leads and unearthed a number of suspects, but no case could be made to stick against a single one of them (not even sleazy blackmailer Nathaniel Smears, nor Suzanne L'Estrange, the dead man's gold-digging hussy of a secretary-cum-mistress, a "real 'still waters run deep', silent but very sexy man-eating type," with "that rather mincing, cat-like walk you sometimes notice in Frenchwomen").
As a result, though foul play seemed more or less certain, they have reluctantly dropped the investigation for want of evidence. Is there any chance the distinguished Lt Schwab could look into the matter afresh, and see if he can spot anything the other bloodhounds have missed?
So plaintive is her missive, so touching her concern that her husband's case be re-examined and his killer brought to justice... that I'm afraid I had her pegged as the murderess from page one.

As before, once all the various documents have been read and evidence perused, the book brings us to a sealed section and tells us not to break the seal until we are ready to identify the culprit. Having done so, we find a letter from Schwab that begins: "Dear Mrs Prentice, When you receive this you will be in gaol faacing the charge of murder..."
He then goes on to list the various bits of evidence from the previous material that pointed to her being the culprit.

But Wheatley and Links have another surprise up their sleeve.
We next jump to an account of the woman's trial, where one of the key pieces of evidence that Schwab had spotted is unexpectedly - and conclusively - demolished by a fresh revelation. It can only mean that Schwab was, in fact, wrong, and Mrs Prentice is actually innocent.
The case against her collapses, she is acquitted, and the book brings us delightfully back to square one with a second sealed section and a fresh injunction to "make up your mind who really did the murder"!
What we then learn (after a full-page ad for Wheatley's Secret War) is that, of course, Cicely Prentice was the murderess after all, but an uncommonly cunning and thorough one, who wrote to Schwab, and deliberately, as if unknowingly, supplied him with faked self-incriminating evidence, with the express aim of his alighting on her as the culprit and the case going to trial. Then, as planned, she produced the spectacular new evidence that undermined the case against her, and was set free.
The reason? To safeguard her future, since she had discovered that she had accidentally become pregnant by her husband the last time they met, the night before his murder. She had deliberately set up fake alibis, and created the impression that she had been miles away in Bath at the time, but since it was known and certain fact that they had not been in each other's company at all for the previous three months, the birth of his child could only mean that she had not been where she said she was at the most crucial time; indeed that she had gone to some effort to falsely establish otherwise. (She further decides that, given her notoriety as a result of the case, to flee or to attempt to secure an abortion would be equally as hazardous as having the child which, even before DNA testing, represents too great a risk, as her husband was hare-lipped.)
And so, she arranged for the phony evidence and the failed trial, because under English law, no person can be tried twice for the same crime, and no matter what evidence came to light from then on, she would be safe.

All very clever, all very satisfying. And now of course, this clever and satisfying final twist no longer works, since this bedrock safeguard against malicious prosecution, the enshrined right of every free citizen under English law since the Norman Conquest, was very kindly abolished on our behalf by Tony Blair in 2003.
What - if he could have even imagined such a thing coming to pass - would the Wheatley of A Letter To Posterity have made of that, I wonder?

Contraband (1936)

"... 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)

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.