For some time now, Wheatley had been putting his characters to bed. As we have seen, the elderly Duke de Richleau had died of a heart attack at the end of Dangerous Inheritance, exhausted after springing his friends from a foreign jail. Having resurrected Eric as Gregory, and kept up an unusual author-character relationship with him throughout the books, it seems Wheatley couldn’t bear to see him die a second time. The White Witch of the South Seas ends “So our hero and heroine, once more united, lived happily ever after” – surely one of the few books for adults to close with those words.
In 1974 Wheatley finally killed off Roger Brook, the character with whom he had most identified. In Desperate Measures Roger and Georgina, his teenage first love and occasional partner throughout the series, are together at last when a dam bursts. “We are about to die! This is the end!” cries Georgina. Direct speech had never been Wheatley’s strong suit, and as a fifty foot wall of water comes roaring down on them Roger answers “Nay, dear heart. ‘Tis no more than a passing to a new beginning.” Some readers took this as a hint that they might survive, Holmes and Moriarty style, but this was not Wheatley’s intention. The new beginning was death.
Hutchinson gave Wheatley a party to celebrate the last of the Roger Brook series. It was held at Locket’s, a now vanished restaurant in Marsham Street, Westminster, popular with Members of the nearby Houses of Parliament; it had its own “division bell” to call them in to vote. Locket’s was long established (Vanbrugh mentions it in his 1696 play, The Relapse), and by the Seventies its theme had come to be Olde Englishnesse. Wheatley drank Imperial Tokay and ate “Sea Bass Lymington”, made with herbs grown at Grove Place. It must have had a rather nostalgic flavour.
With Roger dead, Wheatley decided that his career in fiction had come to an end. He knew his time was limited, and he devoted himself to finishing his memoirs in what was left. For some time people had told Wheatley that he looked young for his age, but now his cirrhosis, diabetes and bronchial trouble were really beginning to bite.
Wheatley was shepherding his health as carefully as he could. In what had now become a regular pattern, he was laid up in bed with bronchitis through the autumn and winter, and went to the South of France in the Spring; their days of travelling further afield were over. Life was increasingly curtailed.
Age was taking more of a toll on Joan (“Mentally, she is as brisk as ever, but unfortunately her body is in very bad shape”) and she suffered a series of falls. Going out and giving dinner parties were things of the past: Joan found them too exhausting, and entertaining was now limited to having a couple of friends over for a drink in the early evening. They were vexed when a fraudulent Swedish fan arrived and took up their time with a supposed plan to film Wheatley’s books.
Hedman had meanwhile completed Fyra Decennier med Dennis Wheatley (Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley), and sent Wheatley a copy. He also sent presentation copies for Her Majesty the Queen, and the British Prime Minister of the day, Edward Heath. Wheatley was able to tell him that they had both accepted, the Queen’s Secretary writing a gracious acknowledgement: “Her Majesty has asked me to say that she is delighted to accept the book for the Royal Library and much appreciated your kind thought in sending it.”
Hedman asked if Wheatley often sent his books to the Queen. No, said Wheatley, because although he had been King George VI’s favourite author
… our present Queen is not, I think, much interested in books but mainly in dogs and horses. And although I have been presented to her I have never sent her a book before.
Hedman also wanted know if Wheatley was in line for a knighthood or other honour; in fact, he probably wondered why he didn’t have one already. Wheatley pointed out that this was the gift of the Prime Minister and not the Queen, and that “although my sales are said to be larger than any other author in Britain I doubt whether I would receive a Knighthood, as when they are given it is to poets like Betjeman, or someone who qualifies very highly in writing beautiful English.”
Wheatley and Hedman had now known each for around fifteen years, but Hedman still had ‘more English than the English’ qualms about addressing Wheatley as Dennis. In February 1976 Wheatley reassured him: “Please do not hesitate to address me by my Christian name. I appreciate your reasoning but we have known each other for many years and so I am very happy that you should write to me in this way.”
*
Arrow books, Hutchinson’s paperback subsidiary, had now singled out Wheatley’s eight black magic books for special treatment. After numerous cover designs over the years they hit on the covers that many people remember as the definitive Wheatley, each one having the words ‘A Black Magic Story’ in white across the top of a predominantly black cover. A naked woman, perhaps dancing, raises her hands behind a splurge of flame on each book, while the occult props in the foreground vary: there was a black candle on a skull, a horned goats head, an old leather-bound tome, an incense burner, a strange dagger, a tribal mask, a crystal ball, and so on; all the decor of the arts of darkness. Arrow brought out two boxed sets for Christmas 1974, contemporary with a well-known chocolate advert of the time that asked “Who knows the secret of the Black Magic box?”
These books were ubiquitous in their day, but Wheatley’s popularity would barely outlive him (the Sixties had really lasted until around 1974, and around 1977 a very different cultural wave would come in with punk, making the supernatural look about as relevant as flared trousers). Wheatley had enormously influenced the popular image of the occult, but he paid the price in consequent disparagement and ridicule, albeit fairly affectionate.
“I’m damned if I’m memorizing any Black Paternosters backwards or any of that rot,” says a character in Kyril Bonfiglioli’s novel, Something Nasty In The Woodshed.
“Black Paternosters?” I asked. “Have you been studying the subject a bit, George?”
“We’ve all read our Dennis Wheatley at some time or another, Charlie,” said Sam.
“Speak for yourself! ” I said sharply.
A humorous column in the occult journal Aquarian Arrow purported to be written by one Hugo L’Estrange (“Minister of Moral Decline and grand old man of British Satanism”). Hugo is a port-sodden fogey who lives at Hellgate Hall, in a world of Louis Roederer champagne, Hispano Suiza cars, and Monte Satano cigars from a tobacconist in St.James. Gentlemen in smoking jackets retire to the library with smoked salmon sandwiches and hock, and goats’ blood is drunk from 22 carat gold.
An unamused New Age reader wrote in to complain, and accused the column of perpetuating “the very lowest image of Dennis Wheatley type occultism.” “– How nice to know that at least one reader fully understood me and what I stood for!” replied L’Estrange. “When occultism dissociated itself from the worst excesses of Dennis Wheatley, it castrated itself; for the worst excesses of Dennis Wheatley are where it’s at.”
*
Wheatley and George Rainbird, who had produced The Devil and All His Works, put together a final scheme for capitalising on Wheatley’s name with the 1974 launch of ‘The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult’, an inexpensive series of reprints with short and undemanding introductions by Wheatley. Rainbird was now the chairman of Sphere, a mass market paperback house. Wheatley lunched with Rainbird in his chambers at Albany, and it was there that Rainbird asked Wheatley to do the Library. Rainbird’s apartment, K1, had previously belonged to Wheatley’s friend Edward Lydell, and long before that it belonged to the Gothic novelist M.G. “Monk” Lewis, whose novel The Monk became part of Wheatley’s series.
The Library was launched with a party at Brown’s Hotel, hung with nylon cobwebs and lit by black candles. Wheatley was on good form and the Evening Standard described him as “the doyen of magic” and “the sprightliest 77-year-old in the book world”.
The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult was the last Wheatley venture for the mass market, and it ran for the last three years of his life. Originally planned to include hundreds of titles, it finally ran to forty five, with classics like Dracula and Frankenstein alongside less well known books like Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch Queen, William Hope Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates, R.H.Benson’s The Necromancers, and A.E.W.Mason’s The Prisoner in the Opal. Some turn up quite often, but others are so fabulously rare that even in the charity shop of your dreams you might never find them.
*
Horror films had changed after The Exorcist, which appeared in Britain in1974, and To The Devil – A Daughter appeared from Hammer (it was their last major film) in 1976, with Christopher Lee and Nastassia Kinski. It had been drastically adapted and bore little relation to Wheatley’s book, or to the feel of the Hammer Devil Rides Out. Where The Devil Rides Out had a fruitcake richness, To The Devil – A Daughter is an ugly film, verging on medical horror, with a chilly mid-Seventies air blowing through it. Wheatley hated it.
The whole face of horror was changing. James Herbert’s first novel The Rats appeared in 1974, and represented a downward shift in popular writing. Set in the East End, it included a scene with a baby eaten alive by rodents. Herbert prides himself on having wrested horror from the likes of Wheatley: “Horror novels were written by upper-middle class writers like Dennis Wheatley. I made horror accessible by writing about working class characters”.
The liberal media and the BBC were never really out to bait Wheatley in the way that they had baited Evelyn Waugh, but Wheatley had sometimes been written up a little snidely by interviewers during the long years of his success, often on a wavelength he was probably unable to detect.
Wheatley’s 75th Birthday booklet, 1972.
Britain’s occult uncle: Wheatley at his desk in Cadogan Square.
The Devil and All His Works (1971).
Shortly before Wheatley’s eightieth birthday, Robert Robinson interviewed him for the Book Programme on BBC2, and kicked off by reminding viewers what Wheatley’s books were like: they combined “the improbabilities of Batman with the style of Daisy Ashford”, Miss Ashford being the Victorian infant prodigy who wrote The Young Visiters [sic].
“Some of the critics have said your style isn’t so hot …” suggested Robinson, and Wheatley agreed cheerfully:
“It isn’t, by Jove, it isn’t. I think it may be better than it was, but it certainly never has been all that.”
Seemingly unruffled, Wheatley explained some tricks of his trade: the chapter ends must break in the middle of a situation, ‘cliff-hanger’ style; the scenes of crisis must be very long, and the whole thing had to build up to a “smashing end … I build the thing up so that when I get to the last chapter it’s like going round Tattenham Corner.”1
And then Robinson stepped up the attack. Weren’t Wheatley’s heroes “rather snooty and right wingy [sic] and so forth. Is that anything like you?”
It may be, yes, I suppose so. I’m certainly not left-wing, oh no. I worked for years from ten o’clock in the morning till midnight and sometimes till two in the morning, and Saturday I treated as an ordinary day. So I consider I’ve earned my drink and my food, my books and china and so on.
Privately, Wheatley seems to have been hurt by Robinson’s attitude, as he told J.G.Links. “I believe you are rather right-wing, Mr Wheatley”, was how Links remembered it: “There was a clear hint that [Robinson] had a Bulldog Drummond incarnate before him, if not an out-and-out fascist.” Wheatley was “irritated and puzzled,” says Links: “You didn’t have to be a fascist to know the difference between Good and Evil.”
*
January 8th 1977 was Wheatley’s eightieth birthday, with a week of public and private celebrations. Foremost among these was the grand party on the night of Tuesday 4th, for which Wheatley hired Vintners’ Hall, in Upper Thames Street, with its panelled Court Room and seventeenth-century staircase. Around three hundred guests were treated to a buffet dinner, including Game Pie and “Tartlet Crystalysée Dennis.” Drink included “Black Velvet a la Bismarck”, the champagne and Guinness mixture drunk in Wheatley’s books: Hendrik G. Washington, the devil-worshipping U.S. Airforce Colonel, is among those partial to it.
Wheatley wore a powder blue smoking jacket (seemingly the same one he is wearing on the back cover of the early Seventies Arrow paperbacks) with a white orchid pinned to its midnight blue lapel. It has been said that if you only live long enough in England everybody will love you in the end, and the reportage of his birthday was indulgent. Under the heading ‘Satanic’, the Times Diary noted “an appropriate whiff of historical romance, and some suitably Satanic black velvet”, with the author himself “stunningly clad” in his blue jacket and orchid.
The ‘Living Portrait’ film of Wheatley’s life was shown three times, and Wheatley exerted himself to make a speech, telling his guests that Vintner’s Hall was the only building of its type to have survived both the Great Fire of London and the German Blitz, and that it was on this very same ground that the first Master of Vintners had entertained no less than five kings to dinner in one night.
Joan had to remain seated for the evening, and Wheatley himself was seated while he posed for photographs. Guests queued up to shake his hand, and next day he wrote thank-you letters for all his presents. Wheatley later said he was “utterly exhausted” by the week of partying, and looked forward to going to the South of France, hoping “at last to get a really good rest”.
Wheatley and Joan spent three “quiet but pleasant” weeks in the south of France in April, returning on the 26th, and after dinner that evening Wheatley had an attack of breathing difficulties. He had already had several of these over the last few months, but this was the worst yet. He had to be carried to bed. He put a good face on it (“Happily … I am in no pain”) and in early May wrote to Hedman that he was “well on the mend”, but the decline that Mary Lutyens described – “he subsided gently, and quite quickly, into death at the age of eighty” – was now under way.
Wheatley was continuing to deal with an immense postbag (“You can have no idea of the size of the post with which I have to deal every morning”). The consolidation of his occult image – with the Arrow editions, the Library of the Occult, and The Devil and All His Works – was bringing him a higher proportion of young and unstable correspondents. He batted their letters back as best he could, as ever telling them not to dabble, and to consult a priest if they were troubled.
Writing to a more mature female fan of his Roger Brook novels in July, Wheatley is polite but firm. First of all, he apologises for taking so long to reply – three weeks – “but I have been ill in bed”. Then he gets down to business: “Your bookseller is quite wrong about the Roger Brook series” (he had probably told her that the “new beginning” ending paved the way for more). Wheatley reiterates that Desperate Measures brings Roger’s and Georgina’s stories to an end, and that he is writing no more fiction, ending “With many thanks for your kind interest”. Wheatley ministered carefully to his public, and the tone here is a combination of noblesse oblige and first rate after-sales service.
The first volume of Wheatley’s autobiography, The Young Man Said, had been published in January – the Vintner’s Hall birthday party doubled as its launch – and Wheatley continued drafting the others for posthumous publication: he originally intended there would be five. He finally stopped writing on the day before Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee. Wheatley was very aware that he had been born in the year of another Jubilee, Queen Victoria’s, and he considered this was a fitting time to end.
Wheatley was a keen monarchist, but there is a further dimension to his royal dates. Although he disliked organised occultism and dabbling (“very bad thing”, he told Robinson) he loved the supernatural, and he took an interest in the influence of the planets and the power of numbers.
In The Devil and All His Works, for example, he had looked back on the milestones of his life in the light of the number eight, to which his name adds up numerologically. He was sent to boarding school aged eight; he received his commission at the age of seventeen (1+7 = 8); he was sent to the Western Front on the eighth day of eighth month, 1917; and so on. He also says he was first married in June 1924 at the age of 26 (2+6 …), although in fact he was married in June 1922 at the age of 25 (he’d have done better to point out that it was the 17th June; numerology is nothing if not adaptable). But the overall drift is clear.
Wheatley wanted to live in a world of pattern and order. Gifford Hillary marvels gratefully at the ways of Providence (“There was, then, a pattern in things after all”) and in an interview Wheatley compares the modern world unfavourably with the Regency, complaining “the sense of order has gone”. Satanism was a menace to “everything that went to make a well-ordered world”, which is why the Powers of Darkness had to be stopped from dragging the world into a new Dark Ages: “It is the duty of every responsible person who values a life of order, stability and decency to do his utmost to prevent this from happening.”
As for astrology, Plato said the stars are “the moving image of eternity”. Wheatley would have agreed with that. His love of the maps he collected was another aspect of this ideal orderliness (Jonathan Meades, in an essay entitled ‘I Like Maps’, has written “The covert, non-utile function of a map is to order what is actually very messy, to make a dictionary of the land, to mediate between man and the physical world, to give shape to the strange”). It has been famously said that “the map is not the territory”, and that the ideal is not the real. In Platonism and occultism, however, it is.
*
Looking back, there were three books Wheatley felt he would rather have written than any of his own: The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Prisoner of Zenda, and The Three Musketeers. Wheatley particularly admired them because, as he saw it, they had each added a word to the language – Pimpernel, Ruritania, and Musketeers – and each word, “without requiring any context instantly conjures up a complete mental picture.” This, thought, Wheatley, was true fame.
Wheatley added no words to the language in this sense, except the words “Dennis Wheatley” themselves; they immediately conjure up a certain ambience, and a place where fine wines, smoking jackets and country-house libraries meet the Powers of Darkness.
Wheatley not only wrote the twentieth-century’s great occult novel, but he was arguably twentieth-century Britain’s greatest non-literary writer. His rivals are Agatha Christie – a better writer, certainly, but much more limited in genre – and Edgar Wallace. Wallace could knock off a best-seller in a weekend, and he wrote everything from King Kong to Sanders of the River, along with writing film scripts and a racing column, editing a newspaper, and standing for parliament. But whether his name evokes very much is debatable, unlike the words “Ruritania” or “Dennis Wheatley.”
*
It has been said that to study Wheatley is to study twentieth-century popular taste, and to understand his work is to understand the dreams and nightmares of twentieth-century Britain. But Wheatley was not content just to reflect those dreams; he tried to shape them, and he had ambitions to be more than an entertainer, without wanting to be a fine writer. Like one of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators”, Wheatley was a propaganda artist and a covert Platonic shaper of his people’s consciousness. He was what some people today would call a “meme engineer,” and he seems to have written his books as a mixture of potboiling and public service, at least according to his own values.
Late in life he wrote that among the thousands of letters he received from readers, “a considerable number have been from patients in hospital who say that while reading my stories they have been able to forget their pain. That is a wonderful thing and for the gift which has enabled me to do this I am truly grateful.”
There is an element of pious self-justification here, but it would be unduly suspicious and mean-minded to suggest he didn’t receive such letters. In fact his occult books would be a particular comfort in the circumstances, since they were not only escapist page turners but contained a comforting message of mind-over-body and ideal-over-real. For many readers, in fact, Wheatley’s books contained an element of spiritual succour (or bad faith and mystic hogwash, depending on your point of view), just as his 1941 Strange Conflict was designed to prepare people to withstand wartime bereavement. The Devil and All His Works also closes with an assurance that the idea of death should hold no terror: “With this thought I leave my readers.”
*
Wheatley spent much of autumn 1977 in bed with bronchial trouble. He had a ‘bags packed’ attitude to dying, and had stuck typed labels on his possessions and even his drinks, indicating who should have what.
Many years earlier Bobby Eastaugh had given him a copy of Francis Thompson’s The Hound Of Heaven, a long poem about the pursuit of the poet by God:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
And now, in October 1977, Eastaugh himself was at Wheatley’s bedside, like the Hound, come to gather him into the fold.
Eastaugh gave Wheatley “Conditional Absolution” for his sins. It was the last time he saw him, but some days later a very scrawly letter arrived:
My dearest Bobby,
This is a very brief line to thank you for the ceremony you performed here the other day. Had it improved my condition physically that would have been more than one could expect and I should have written to you earlier …
Steeped in supernaturalism, it looks as if Wheatley still had ‘magical’, or at the very least ‘faith-healing’-type thoughts about his absolution, and to that extent he hadn’t quite grasped the point of it. But he continued:
As it is, it has renewed my faith and courage, at least sufficiently to write in my own hand, which I have not done for many months. I am most truly grateful to you for your interest and cannot thank you for it sufficiently. I do hope that you can read this [illegible] scrawl. Our friendship has been a long one but I am convinced that it will [illegible] continue eternally and that we shall meet many times elsewhere. All my love and thanks, Ever your friend,
Dennis
PS by holding this up I hoped to write a more legible version, but I find I can’t. All love
D
He subsequently wrote to Derrick Morley, told him how much he had appreciated what Eastaugh had done, and said he now felt at peace.
Wheatley died alone on the night of the 10th of November 1977. At about half past ten he got into breathing difficulties, and by the time Jack Younger came round to see how he was and sit with him for a while, it was too late. He was gone.
*
Wheatley owned a work by Camille Flammarion, Death and its Mystery in three volumes: Before Death, The Moment of Death, and After Death. This had made a particular impression on him, and must have shaped his expectations.
There is now quite an extensive literature of ‘near death experiences’ in which people who have momentarily ‘died’ and been revived describe their experiences. These testimonies often feature going towards a light, being met by helping figures, and experiencing a great sense of calm and reassurance. One of the best known examples comes from the philosopher A.J.Ayer. Shortly before his death in 1989, Ayer’s heart stopped beating for several minutes, and after doctors managed to revive him he reported having witnessed the presence of a great light which he felt (or indeed ‘knew’) was responsible for ruling the universe. His atheism was unshaken, although he did say this vision helped him to understand how others could believe in a God.
Writing about this light, the late John Michell comments that “those who have gone further speak of the beauty of that light and the warmth, understanding and forgiveness they find there. On returning to mundanity, they ask nothing more than to help their fellow-creatures to shed their fears and ambitions, urging them to accept that, in Plato’s words, ‘things are better taken care of than you can possibly imagine.’ ”
I am not suggesting there is anything supernatural in this phenomenon. Although it is well attested and has spawned a considerable literature, the most respected authority on the subject attributes it to lack of oxygen in the brain. Perhaps the mystery is why the central nervous system should provide such a beneficent illusion as it finally shuts down, since it seems too late to have any evolutionary value.
It would be pleasing to think Wheatley might have had such an experience. Nothing could have been more in tune with his beliefs than to rise up towards the radiance, and be welcomed on board by some really top chaps in the field. Then they could reassure him that the Old Firm of King and Country was going to last for ever, and that all manner of things would be well in the Kingdom, Empire and Commonwealth of Light.
1 A dangerous bend on Epsom race course, associated with the excitement of the Derby.