Writing in an early Sixties number of the glossy magazine Queen, Quentin Crewe mounted a pseudo-anthropological study of the British upper classes. When it came to friendship, “Membership of the group entitles the member to about five thousand friends.”
By this arrangement it is possible for the group to meet anyone of importance and to save hotel bills abroad. In far countries the group will ask anyone to stay who is a bona fide member. The term friend is more loosely, but more usefully used than in other classes. There is no need to like a friend, but the duties owed to him are clear.
Despite its satirical exaggeration this bears a distinct resemblance to the way Wheatley travelled. He sometimes stayed in hotels, but he was more often entertained by a large network of old Service friends and friends-of-friends, particularly British diplomats (and in later life he felt he would like to have been a diplomat). He once complained that it was “hard work being entertained straight off the plane by ambassadors and tycoons.”
In 1963 Wheatley and Joan embarked on a round the world trip, flying out to Ceylon, followed by Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Manila, Honolulu, and America. Hong Kong also furnished Wheatley with the background for a subsequent book, Bill For The Use of a Body.
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Writing a perceptive profile of Wheatley in the Times, a columnist noted that although Wheatley travelled, his books didn’t, and added “He is British. His hazel eyes moisten at the compliment.”
Even more specifically, Wheatley was English, and his whole character embodies the archetypal traits of the twentieth-century middle-class Englishman. He believed in an orderly, cohesive and benevolently hierarchical society (notably in the mixed blessing of the class system); he had a grain of eccentricity, or at least individuality; a code of good form, allied to a sense of fairness; a sense of voluntary service; a respect for amateurism; and a lasting boyishness, with his stamps, his paper stars, and his cut-out fish1.
Wheatley always liked joining things, and in 1963 he became a member of the Royal Society of St.George. Patriotism has become rather compromised, but the Society of St.George is an entirely respectable organisation with the Queen as its Patron, and it exists to celebrate Englishness and English values (“freedom, gentility and human decency”).
Wheatley was introduced into the Society by a friend named Hugh Smyth, who also knew Odette Hallowes, the French-born British agent who had been tortured by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. She still walked with a slight limp after having her toenails pulled, and – within the large ‘small world’ that Wheatley moved in – she was married to a director of Justerini and Brooks. She was another member of the Society of St George. Wheatley’s membership conferred on him a lapel decoration and a tie, which he evidently liked; he can be seen wearing it in several photographs.
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For much of 1963 Wheatley was working on a new Sallust thriller, provisionally entitled The Devil’s Disciple and later published as They Used Dark Forces. It is set in the final days of the Third Reich, where Gregory is now in league with a Jewish Satanist and astrologer named Malacou. Gregory finally insinuates himself into the bunker with Hitler, where he advises the Fuhrer on astrology and reincarnation, and possibly hastens his suicide by assuring him he will be reincarnated as a warlord on Mars.
It is an impressive performance, particularly in the way that Wheatley inserts Gregory – like Woody Allen’s Zelig – into historical situations, carefully keeping him within an accurate chronology. The book reads like an insiderish, Procopius-style ‘secret history’ of Hitler’s court, as he records the very different characters involved, with their dissents and rivalries.
As if to underline a virtuoso performance, Wheatley gives himself a cameo role. Various friends and associates are written in, including Jack Slessor, Colin Gubbins, Richard Gale and Sir Richard Peck, and Gregory lunches with an unnamed friend who “had been a Cadet with him in H.M.S. Worcester and, since 1941, had worked in the Deception Section of the Joint Planning Staff.”
Within Wheatley’s story, the “They” who use dark forces refers to Gregory and Malacou, but even on the cover and blurb, the emphasis has slipped to the Nazis and their involvement with the occult. There was considerable interest among senior Nazis in paganism and occultism, and they also claimed to believe in cosmological theories such as the ‘frozen world’ and ‘hollow earth’. Hess, Himmler and certain factions in the SS had occult interests, and during his rise to power Hitler seems to have been influenced by a Jewish astrologer named Erik Jan Hanussen, and later by another astrologer, Karl Ernest Krafft.
British Intelligence went as far as to keep an astrologer on the payroll – a man called Louis de Wohl, whom Wheatley knew, and who gave Wheatley a copy of his novel, Introducing Doctor Zodiac – not because they believed in astrology themselves but because they wanted to work out what the Nazis might be thinking. De Wohl was employed by the SOE, who later found a more active role for him in developing astrological propaganda.
Nazi occultism has become part of twentieth-century mythology and spawned a heap of trashy – almost definitively trashy – books, symptoms of a public appetite for morbid kitsch and Nazi trivia, as well as the overlap between the esoteric and ultra-right sensibilities. Wheatley’s 1964 novel was one of the first books to broach the subject, and helped launch it into the popular consciousness. Air Marshal Dowding is on record as saying that Hitler was a black magician, in terms which echo Wheatley. There’s no doubt about it, he said (circa 1970): “he used dark forces.”
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Wheatley was invited to give a talk in the book department at Harrods, his subject being ‘Magic and the Supernatural’. It was very well attended, and among the people in the audience was Christopher Lee. Lee went up to Wheatley afterwards, and introduced himself as a fan. They talked for a while, and Lee remembers Wheatley’s friendly manner as “graciousness itself.”
Wheatley was still assiduously collecting books. Before the War he had bought many of them from Percy Muir, a major figure in the London book trade (it was Muir that Wheatley had recommended to the hard-up Crowley, when he wanted to sell some manuscripts) but now he was buying them mostly from Sam Joseph on the Charing Cross Road, and Harold Mortlake, who had a small dark emporium nearby on Cecil Court.
Mortlake specialised in nineteenth-century books, with a sprinkling of the sensational and esoteric. Montague Summers had been a customer, and Mortlake had the uncanny experience of receiving a cheque from him seemingly written and dated a week after his death. “It could have been postdated, of course,” concedes one of Summers’ chroniclers, “but one wonders.”
Mortlake kept a stock of Wheatley first editions, and Wheatley knew him well enough to haggle, and even to try for a reduction on books already ordered; not a practice to be recommended. Wheatley was in cahoots with Mortlake when it came to providing signed copies of his books, which he may have done for credit or discount. It was Wheatley’s usual practice to inscribe his books to people rather than simply sign them (which most collectors would prefer, but almost all ‘signed’ Wheatleys are ‘inscribed’) so when he signed books for Mortlake, he put fake inscriptions in them. He writes to Mortlake:
I sent off the 60 copies of my own books to you this morning in four parcels by rail. It took me quite a time to autograph them as I tried to make the inscriptions as varied as possible.
This might explain why – along with all the Wheatley books signed to people with quite ordinary names, often bookshop managers or bona fide fans – many of them are signed to slightly peculiar names such Mr Jaz, Harry Hardon, Constance Tofts and Lily Palmay.
The lovely Constance Tofts was surely an actress – you can almost see the cigarette card – while Lily Palmay sounds like a music hall star. Of course, all these names could be absolutely genuine, but one wonders, especially knowing that ‘Palmay London’ was the cable address of Mortlake’s shop.
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In May 1964 Wheatley catalogued his library, a task he probably enjoyed. He had around 4,000 books, including a signed first edition of Ulysses, and books by Evelyn Waugh, Sax Rohmer, and Zola. The purpose was to sell the library to Dennis Wheatley Ltd.
Wheatley’s cataloguing offers a revealing breakdown of his interests. Categories include “Baconia” (i.e “Bacon was Shakespeare”), “Books” (i.e. publishing and book collecting), “Character” (how to read character, including faces, phrenology, and handwriting), “Egypt”, “Erotica”, “Greece”, “History” (the largest category, with seven subsections), “Islam”, “Memoirs”, “Mysticism”, “Napoleon”, “Occultism”, “Psychology”, “Palmistry”, “Religions”, “Rome”, “Sexual psychology”, “Space”, “World War 1”, “World War II”, “Wine and Food”, and “Wheatley, Dennis”
The Wheatley section includes a full set of his own books, bound in blue morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe; the Arabic edition of Vice and Virtue; his ‘Mystery Rooms’ pamphlet from the Ideal Homes exhibition; an inventory of the contents of his childhood house, Clinton; and a number of manuscripts including ‘Julie’s Lovers’, ‘The Trees in the Garden’, notes on the Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzoui; ‘Scenes and Portraits’, comprising over a hundred pages of historical notes on his stamps; and two handwritten exercise books devoted to ‘Books I have Read, and Opinions Thereon.’
Wheatley’s distinction between ‘Occultism’ and ‘Mysticism’ is not based on the usual definition of mysticism as the direct apprehension of God. Instead he tends to file his more serious occult books under ‘occultism’, while ‘mysticism’ tends towards mumbo-jumbo and crankery. ‘British-Israel’ theories are prominent, along with pyramidology, dubious Biblical exegesis, and even a book combining Horbiger (the Nazi ‘frozen world’ man, with his doctrine of eternal ice) and Madame Blavatsky. Entitled Blavatsky and Horbiger: Reconciliation, it is surely a reconciliation the world could live without.
Wheatley’s library also included a number of books by Thirties far-Rightists. His idea of political wrongdoing included both the far-Left and far-Right, and he had a number of extremist tracts catalogued together as “Pamphlets, A Collection of several subversive, some under the guise of patriotism and others on wild-cat economic policies.”
Wheatley had a good number of books in his ‘Erotica’ collection, with more in ‘Psychology’, such as Phallism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni in Various Parts of the World, and In Different Ages, With an Account of Ancient and Modern Crosses, Particularly of the Crux Ansata and Other Symbols Connected With the Mysteries of Sex Worship (n.d., circa1890). Wheatley’s bookplate figures the crux ansata in the shape of a tree.
Wheatley’s erotica collection also included Aubrey Beardsley prints, erotic Japanese paintings on silk, nearly a hundred etchings illustrating the adventures of Casanova, and even twelve ivory carvings of “La Vie Privée du Chine”, all duly catalogued. The man who catalogues not just his dirty pictures but his filthy carvings as part of his library is a true bookman, at least of a sort.
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They Used Dark Forces was Wheatley’s fiftieth book, so it was an occasion for more celebrations. There was a drinks party, complete with raffle, at Justerini’s, but the great event was a more select dinner at the Garrick Club on the night of November 20th 1964. On the menu were Crab Eggs Gregory Sallust, Homard Princess Marie-Lou, Stuffed Chicken Roger Brook, Canard Duc de Richleau, Frucht Salat Erika Von Epp, and English Christmas Cake Georgina.
Thirty-odd male guests (no women were allowed in the Garrick) included chief deception planner Johnny Bevan, Eric Goudie, Eddie Combe, Hugh Astor, Joe Links, Anthony Wheatley, Derrick Morley, Bill Elliott, and the Duke of Richmond. Wheatley made a well prepared and entertaining speech, recounting the story of his life so as to focus on the guests around the table. Between them they included a duke, a marquess, a bishop, two lords, a director of Hambro’s Bank and the Chairman of the Stock Exchange.
“This is certainly one of the happiest moments of my life,” said Wheatley, and went on to say how proud he was to be the centre of such a distinguished gathering. Just before finishing his speech, he praised his publishers: “I have always met with kindness and consideration from every member of the firm”, he said: “Hutchinson’s have done a wonderful job for me over thirty years and no author could have had a better publisher.” This was a generous assessment, but Wheatley knew what the moment demanded.
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Around this time Wheatley was grossing over half a million pounds a year for Hutchinson, about a seventh of their entire turnover. He had fifty-five books in print, with a print-run of 30,000 copies for a new hardback, while Arrow, Hutchinson’s paperback subsidiary, was shifting 1,150,000 Wheatleys a year, or around a quarter of its total sales. When The Wanton Princess came out in 1966, Wheatley could dedicate it – with characteristically self-regarding gratitude – to “the Sales Representatives of the Hutchinson Group in appreciation of their having sold 20,000,000 copies of my books.”
Wheatley was flying high. In July 1965 Queen published an ‘In’ and ‘Out’ list reflecting “new social attitudes.” Along with “Art Galleries to be seen in” (Robert Fraser) and “Comic Strips” (Modesty Blaise and Flook, yes; Rip Kirby and The Gambols, no) we find “Authors to read.” It’s thumbs down for Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, and thumbs up for Iris Murdoch, Malcolm Lowry and Dennis Wheatley.
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Not everyone liked Wheatley, however, nor would he always meet with kindness and consideration from every member of the firm of Hutchinson. A bright young man named Giles Gordon had just moved from Secker and Warburg to “the middle-brow mediocrity of Hutchinson”, famously bankrolled not just by Wheatley but by the hardly less profitable Barbara Cartland.
Like the trouper that he was, Wheatley turned up in person to deliver his latest manuscript. Wheatley tended to see a different editor each time he went in, which can’t have impressed him. The reason for this, unknown to Wheatley, was that the most junior editor was always given the job of processing his books, and as soon they were promoted, they could pass Wheatley on to their successor.
There seems to have been nothing about Wheatley that Gordon liked. He didn’t like his centre-parting, which he thought was a sign of right-wing leanings (“always a give away as to lack of liberal stance and even, in my experience, latent fascism in the wearer”); he didn’t like his raincoat (“of the kind labelled ‘dirty’ ”); and he certainly didn’t like his books, not least because he never deigned to read them.
Wheatley didn’t attempt any small talk with Gordon, nor did he smile. He may have sensed that Gordon didn’t like him; or, in a changing world, he may have sensed that Gordon was the type who didn’t like him. Gordon went back to his office carrying a great slab of typescript. He didn’t remember the title (“if indeed I ever noticed it”), but it was probably Dangerous Inheritance, the book in which Wheatley sends the Duke de Richleau on his last mission.
Wheatley liked to say that his books were written to teach young people the virtues of courage and absolute fidelity to one’s friends, and Dangerous Inheritance is no exception. The now elderly Duke de Richleau blames himself for getting his friends incarcerated in a foreign prison, and he feels it his responsibility to get them out again, which he does by threatening to set off some plastic explosive taped to a wooden handle. After his friends are released, the explosive is revealed to have been no more than a bar of soap, with a battery and some wires. But the strain has been too much for the old Duke, and as he is flying back towards England together with his friends, he suffers a heart attack and dies.
Poor old Wheatley’s musketeering nonsense was no match for the serious literary fiction that Gordon preferred. Gordon had, in fact, recently made the great discovery of Barry Unsworth’s first book, The Partnership, a “novel … about two homosexuals making plaster gnomes in a cottage in Cornwall.”
Gordon had a wicked idea for Wheatley’s manuscript. He sent it to one of Hutchinson’s ‘readers’ for a report, deliberately selecting “the most acerbic and intolerant”, and concealing Wheatley’s identity by losing the title page. In due course the report came back.
This author can tell a decent, if irretrievably old-fashioned story, and his (it must be a he) plotting is sound. The book is terribly hackneyed, and it is hard to imagine that it would appeal to readers today. Above all, he cannot write. Regretfully decline.
Gordon was “more pleased with myself than I can say” about this, because “I resented having to soil my brain cells with the likes of Wheatley.”
Gordon requested a meeting with Bob Lusty to tell him the good news about his best-selling author. As a Scot, Gordon was lucky enough to be outside the English class system, whereas Wheatley and Lusty had had to negotiate it as best they could, and Gordon sneeringly describes Lusty as “the one-time Kent Messenger-boy trying to rise to the ranks of the country’s rulers.” He blames this for his “curiously strangulated voice … which made it difficult for him to speak loudly, let alone shout.” Nevertheless, when Lusty learned what Gordon had done he shrieked at the top of his voice: “Mr Wheatley’s books are not to be read; they’re sent straight to the printer!”
Somehow, says Gordon, “in spite of my best efforts Dennis Wheatley continued to prosper.”
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Another Hutchinson employee of the period, Nigel Fountain, remembers Wheatley would occasionally be seen in the firm’s corridors. He regarded him as something of a joke, and “an anachronism, as if Edgar Wallace had turned up.” He looked “like a bookie” in his double-breasted brown suit; like “a Thirties chancer”, and “an ageing flash Harry.” Fountain particularly despised Wheatley for his dated class pretensions: he was “one of those people who tried to pretend the world was still the way it was”.
Wheatley’s agent of the period, Michael Horniman of A.P.Watt, once spotted him crossing Waterloo Station wearing a morning coat and a top hat, “an extraordinary sight.” But despite that, for the most part he cut an undistinguished figure, like “a publican who’d been hitting his own stock”.
Drink had certainly affected Wheatley’s appearance. His face was distinctly florid, with a reddened and enlarged nose. He was, of course, a heavy drinker, although he tried to keep to liqueurs in the week and a bottle of champagne on Saturdays (this was his evening drinking, presumably in addition to wine with dinner). If he felt thirsty in the night, when most of us might have a glass of water, he was quite capable of taking the corkscrew to a bottle of something, probably something white and sweet. He might also nip at a bottle of liqueur while he wrote, in addition to chain smoking.
Inevitably this regime – heavy drinking, heavy smoking, sedentary work, plenty of confectionery, plenty of old-fashioned luxury foods – affected Wheatley’s health. He was paunchy, short of breath, impotent, and he had now become diabetic, which must have been a hardship for a man with a craving for sugar. Wheatley equipped himself with several books on the subject, filed together under D, and he also took an interest in an early Sixties fad from America known as ‘The Drinking Man’s Diet’, an unhealthy precursor of the Atkins Diet.
The idea was that you could drink as much alcohol as you liked, while eating all the protein and fat you could manage, as long as you avoided carbohydrates and sugars. It was, in other words, perfectly acceptable and indeed recommended to live on buttered steak with lashings of red wine, but you had to be firm about the chips and have brandy instead of pudding.
In 1965 Justerini’s published an updated edition of Wheatley’s history, The Seven Ages of Justerini’s, now entitled The Eight Ages. Like its predecessor, this kept a keen eye on world history as well as drink. Wheatley noted that the Russian Revolution had burnt itself out, but foresaw a menace in China.
Meanwhile the British Empire had vanished. “For over a hundred and fifty years we maintained peace, justice and toleration over one-fifth of the world’s land surface”. Now, with the end of the Pax Britannica, like the end of the Pax Romana before it, the world was fallen into bloodshed. But meanwhile there were staggering scientific advances: hovercraft, nuclear energy, a rocket to the moon, and perhaps even a man on Mars in our lifetime.
On the other hand, there was also the possibility that “some lunatic will set off a matchbox full of anti-matter.” It is a particularly period vision that this futuristic substance might be in a matchbox, of all things; one almost wonders that Wheatley didn’t postulate a piece no bigger than a conker.
“So”, says Wheatley, “let us eat, drink (Justerini’s will be happy to advise) and be merry while we may.”
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Wheatley had a less Devil-may-care attitude where the writing business was concerned, and he was becoming annoyed with both his publisher and his agent. For all Wheatley’s after-dinner good cheer, the firm of Hutchinson had not been what it was for a long time, perhaps not since Walter Hutchinson had killed himself in 1950.
It was a vexation for Wheatley that he never really cracked the American market, for which he blamed his agents. Bill Watt, the founder, had retired, and his son Peter had taken on Wheatley’s affairs. Peter was a jolly extrovert and Wheatley got on well with him, but he died. Michael Horniman then took Wheatley over in the mid-Sixties, and although they got on civilly enough – Horniman would take Wheatley to lunch at the Savoy Grill – Horniman found Wheatley to be “a pain in the neck.”
“Can’t you do something about America?” Wheatley would ask, blaming Horniman for his failure there. Wheatley suffered more disappointment from the American market in 1965, when he and Joan had to abandon their holidays for a proposed television series. Early in 1965 they set off for a second round the world trip, but a contract materialised for twenty-six episodes “in colour” featuring Gregory Sallust, so after only three weeks in Mexico they had to return home. Wheatley sketched out plots for all 26 episodes and the series was budgeted for around £750,000, a great deal of money in those days.
The money was half British and half American, but when the American side saw Wheatley’s script for a pilot episode, they backed out. Part of the problem was that the Americans asked Wheatley to modernise Gregory, and this was unsuccessful. A very contrite English colleague writes to Wheatley “It is really heart-breaking … Hindsight makes it obvious that we would all have been better to follow Henry’s very strong feelings that Gregory Sallust should be presented as written, and the stories set in the war period. I blame myself …”
This man was no more to blame than Horniman had been. There was something inherently unsuitable for the American mass-market about Wheatley’s pukka, class-conscious, intrinsically English fictions. Anthony Powell, apropos of W.E.Johns, notes in his Journals that
In middle 1960s the Biggles books were 29th most translated literary works in the world, the top juvenile. The only country where they did not sell was the US. Interesting. The same true of the very widely translated Dennis Wheatley …
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Sales were also beginning to slip in Britain. Wheatley’s immense pre-war success as a writer of general thrillers was over, and nondescript thrillers like Unholy Crusade (1967) would never match it. Nor would the later Gregory Sallust books match Gregory’s wartime popularity. Nothing that Wheatley wrote after The Satanist in 1960 really hit the heights of Toby Jugg, To The Devil – A Daughter, or The Ka Of Gifford Hillary, but it is noticeable that Wheatley’s most successful postwar books are all occult titles.
When The Satanist went into paperback in 1966, it sold over 100,000 copies in ten days. The market for paperbacks increased in the Sixties and it was this, together with a new readership for black magic books, that would save the day for Wheatley. The occult revival was on its way.
1 Wheatley also scores highly on the schema of The British Character given by the cartoonist Pont in his 1938 book of the same name, including Importance of Breeding; Enjoyment of Club Life; Proneness to Superstition; Tendency To Think Things Not So Good As They Used To Be; Failure to Appreciate Good Music; Love of Detective Fiction; Refusal to Admit Defeat; Importance of Not Being an Alien; Love of Writing Letters to The Times; Love of Never Throwing Anything Away; Tendency to Put Things Away Safely; Tendency Not To Join The Ladies; Importance of Not Being Intellectual; Enthusiasm for Gardening, and Passion for the Antique.