Red Eagle (1937)

Whatever direction you creep up on it from, Red Eagle is an oddity, and a bit of a mystery. 

It was surely what nobody expected next from Wheatley, and it seemed to come from nowhere. There's no hint of it in the phony newspaper that was one of the inserts in Robert Prentice, where Old Rowley is cited as "his only serious book to date" with no mention that another might be on the way, and Wheatley announces his forthcoming titles as Contraband and The Secret War, to be followed by "a shipwreck yarn placed in the South Atlantic, which I may call Uncharted Seas, and another definitely to be called The Golden Spaniard, where I shall bring back my old friends, De Richleau and co."

Interesting to see how far ahead his novels were planned, but in the event both of the latter had to wait, while he engaged himself instead on what would prove his last non-fiction work until The Devil and All His Works some four decades later (not counting the war memoirs with which he is connected autobiographically). Whether it was the inclination or the opportunity that presented itself unexpectedly I don't know, but the result certainly does not give the impression of having been dashed off between weightier courses: it's vastly more serious and impressive technically than Old Rowley, which was basically a sketch in watercolours, albeit a delightful one.

According to Drink & Ink, it came at the instigation of Hutchinson's: 

... my publishers had for a long time been urging me to write another biography, but I could think of no character I admired sufficiently to make a book out of his life story. Then, for what reason I have now forgotten, it occurred to me to write about a man of whom very few of the British public had ever heard. His name was Klementy Voroshilov, and I called my book Red Eagle.

 Hutchinson's may well have been keen for another non-fiction effort from Wheatley, but at the cost of him delaying his far more bankable thrillers? Hard to imagine them knowingly urging him to postpone both the return of De Richleau and "a shipwreck yarn placed in the South Atlantic" for this! Even its date of birth is ambiguous: all reliable sources place it at this point in the sequence, after Prentice and before Uncharted Seas, but my Arrow paperback edition (a revised edition prepared in 1964) claims it was first published in 1936...

It seems an unlikely proposition in other ways, too. Given De Richleau's sentiments regarding the Russian Revolution, it is surprising indeed to see Wheatley willing not only to give the matter such detailed treatment but so even-handedly too: the book, as Phil Baker notes, shows "broader political sympathies than one might expect." It helps, no doubt, that in Voroshilov, the figure upon whom he chose to focus, he found another of those sensualist, bon vivant conquerors guaranteed to capture his imagination and secure the benefit of his doubt regardless of political stamp, "fond of wine, women and song" (Baker). Nonetheless, the book is another reminder that Wheatley's polemicist tendencies disguised a far more engaged and inquiring intelligence than he was always willing to admit to.
If nothing else, the book is valuable for making the essential point that on the one hand a Russian Revolution was justified, and on the other that what emerged from it was a betrayal, indeed a perversion of its ideals. Of Stalin he writes: "Whether you regard him in the same light as the late John Dillinger, America's first Public Enemy No. 1, or place him in the same category as our national hero Robin Hood, depends entirely on your point of view," and he takes care to remind us that the tragedy of the Revolution was that it only incrementally succumbed to Bolshevism, and was initially conceived and managed in a genuinely beneficent spirit.
Wheatley's concerns are consistent, as are the freedoms he supports and the evils he decries. If you believe in freedom of speech and assembly and the right to dissent, it is only reasonable to despise the Czar and Lenin alike. Yet still it seems odd, somehow, to hear Wheatley banging the revolutionary drum so overtly. (His much- and willingly-misunderstood Letter To Posterity is concerned with exactly the same rights, and likewise counsels revolution as the right means of regaining them.)

The Revolution was hailed with joy throughout the whole of Russia... For a dozen years past various measures had been forced on the Czar from time to time which had foreshadowed some degree of liberty, but in every case the apparent step towards freedom had proved to be an illusion... Now at last the tyrant was gone.

Though not, perhaps, as breezily readable as Old Rowley, the book rewards the reader's attention with numerous amusing insights, both amusingly typical and amusingly untypical. He predicts that "When the history of the war finally comes to be written, perhaps a hundred years hence, it is probable that Hindenburg will be the only great general to emerge from it," and unsurprisingly (given that De Richleau had laid responsibility for the great war more or less solely at his door in The Devil Rides Out) he has a whale of a time with Rasputin:

He never bathed, he never washed, his straggly beard was matted with filth and his uncut nails were black with grime. (...) Into many of his practices Black Magic unquestionably entered and his counsels regarding State affairs were invariably evil. There have been few such monsters in the historic records of the world.

And as so often with Wheatley there are odd cross-overs with his other books of the same period, showing what happened to be on his mind at the time: Marlene Dietrich gets an unlikely namecheck, as she will again in Uncharted Seas, and (with The Golden Spaniard already simmering on the back burner) De Richleau and Dumas are never far from his thoughts either:

Voroshilov, as quick, as gay and as dauntless as D'Artagnan, Budenny the mighty fighter, like another Porthos, while Shchadenko had just a hint of the sly, clever Aramis in his make-up. These three modern musketeers were worth an army corps.

He begins by reviewing Russia's past, and provides a potted history of the Czars that links rewardingly to his known interests in such figures as Ataturk and Mussolini. All is clearly in the established Wheatley voice, and the hand guiding the narrative along is clearly a novelist's:

During the winter there was not much work for the peasant to do, except cut a little wood, thresh his rye, or carry grain into town. Most of the time the greater part of the country is snow-bound so he lay on the top of the stove reciting or listening to tales and legends. Abysmal ignorance of the whole world outside the radius of a few versts was the rule, and superstition was rampant.

Each village had its witch, and the lazy, verminous priests did little to counteract her influence. Occasionally, if some rich Kulak's crops were blighted he got up an agitation against her, and they chucked her in the pond and prodded her all over with pins to find the devil's mark which is supposed to be painless; sometimes they killed her. Saints' days, a continuance on the same dates of ancient pagan festivals, were celebrated with much junketing and a great deal of drunkenness.

Such was the state of Russia in the year 1881 when Klementory Efremovitch Vorosilov was born.

Thus Vorosilov is cast in the role Wheatley found most agreeable in contemporary politics: that of the progressive dictator, charged with dragging a backwards population into modernity, akin to Ataturk (who "forcibly confiscated the fezzes of the Turks") and Peter the Great (who "cut off the beards of the Russians"); both of whom "abolished many senseless fasts" and "compelled their people to accept the customs of more advanced nations." (A classic Wheatley observation, that: nothing more senseless than obligatory fasting to the man who, after all, contributed an article called We Don't Eat Enough at Christmas to the Daily Mail in austerity-blighted 1947!)

It is understandably difficult, now, to find an account of the great wars of the 20th century that is not somehow informed, even unconsciously, by the tidying up of consensus. But here is Wheatley writing in an authentic, individual voice, and as always the sense of being plucked out of our own time and dropped into his is vivid and intoxicating:

For the western nations it meant the end of an era. As Sir Edward Grey said so truly on that fateful night, 'The lamps are going out all over Europe...' Such freedom of speech and action as was known then was never to be known again, even by the children of that generation, nor were they ever to know again the same comfort and security in their daily lives. The peoples were given over bound hand and foot by their national patriotism to the politicians, the swashbucklers and the profiteers... Even in Britain the old freedom is now only a myth, dozens of war measures still circumscribe our actions and our only right is to re-elect a new House of Commons every few years which may voice our grievances but it is not consulted by the little clique of Rulers in the Cabinet on a major crisis.

The right of people to move freely, without qualifications, from one country to another is now denied them. In the majority of countries they may no longer write or speak their true thoughts without risk of imprisonment and must even order their lives in accordance with the Government's will. Most tragic of all, that free intercourse between peoples of different countries and the independence of the individual, which begat mutual respect and chivalry and seemly behaviour, ceased to be when the warring nations went down into the pit.

Seriously: is this really the work of a silly, shallow, superficial, bad writer? Does this square up even vaguely to posterity's caricature of Wheatley and all his works?
It's a real pity he abandoned historical biography after this.

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.