Wheatley remained on warm terms with his RAF friend Freddy, the Duke of Richmond, and around 1951 it was Freddy who introduced him to the subject of flying saucers. This led to one of Wheatley’s worst books, Star of Ill Omen.
Published in 1952, Star of Ill Omen is an early manifestation of the flying saucer craze, which became part of the Fifties zeitgeist. Despite RAF sightings going back to 1943, it really took off in post-war America and came to Britain in 1950 with newspaper serialisations of American books. The Sunday Dispatch ran a splurge in October 1950 headed “The Story That May Be Bigger Even Than The Atom Bomb Wars.” Mountbatten took an interest and Lord Dowding, head of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, went on record as a strong believer.
It is against this background that British agent Kem Lincoln finds himself thinking about flying saucers. He is on a mission to investigate Argentina’s nuclear capabilities, because this might affect Britain’s ability to fight for the Falklands.
In a counterpart to the ‘suspension of disbelief ’ spiel in Wheatley’s occult novels, Wheatley runs through several UFO cases and reviews the data, including the appearance of what Aldous Huxley’s friend Gerald Heard termed “Thinking Lights”, in his 1950 book The Riddle of the Flying Saucers, which Wheatley used for research.
After this careful beginning, Kem is rolling around on a bed with the lovely Carmen when her husband Colonel Escobar bursts in. Kem finally subdues Escobar in the fight that follows, but he has barely regained his breath when a gigantic hand reaches in through the window and picks Carmen up.
The great hand belongs to an alien, and Kem, Carmen and Escobar soon find themselves abducted on a spaceship heading for Mars. The aliens seem to be lumbering brutes (shaped like “homo sapiens, only of the most primitive type”) so Wheatley’s assumption is that there must be a more intelligent race controlling them. This proves to be a breed of hyper-intelligent insects who buzz around like bees and give telepathic orders.
Time goes slowly on their journey, living on water and nutritious beans, although Escobar provides some swathes of popular science about space. The three of them manage to get along surprisingly well in the circumstances, although “Kem would have given a great deal to be able to bestow Anglo-Saxon mentalities on his two companions.” In particular, he wishes the Catholic and guilty Carmen could develop a more pragmatic attitude to having sex with him, especially since her husband gives them his blessing to get on with it (‘ “Thanks,” said Kem, a little awkwardly. “That’s damn’ decent of you.” ’)
There are three other humans already on Mars, who turn out to be Russians. There is political fanatic Zadovitch; Anna, whose no-nonsense Slavic brutishness grants Kem the sex that he is unable to have with Carmen; and Harsbach, a former Nazi who is now a Communist, and who harbours a fanatical hatred of the British that goes back to the Boer War.
The humans cause mutiny on Mars among the “loutish lower-race people” and succeed in flying a spaceship all the way back to earth. By now they are split into two polarised camps of good and bad, living on opposite sides of the ship.
Harsbach has the upper hand, and he plans to drop an atomic bomb into the Thames, causing a vast cloud of radioactive steam, before flying on to Russia. Escobar having been murdered by the Russians, Kem and Carmen manage to swap themselves for the explosive in the bomb, and are dropped to land in the river near Tower Bridge, no more than bruised and shaken. Harsbach is then blown up by the real bomb.
Star of Ill Omen is an extraordinary performance, with its characteristically fraught and tender Wheatley love story (quite unlike James Bond and his girls) embedded in a mind-bogglingly improbable Cold War potboiler. Realistic details are combined with a larger naivety about space that wouldn’t be out of place in Dan Dare, and there are moments whose sheer weirdness compares with the work of proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel; when, for example, the insects show them black and white films of great moments in human history, and
the bee-beetles who controlled the machine again pressed the lever; again the machine whirred and the words came, “Music while you work,” followed by the rumba.
Wheatley never attempted science fiction again.
*
In contrast to his tribulations with the RSL, Wheatley had a smoother time with the Royal Society of Arts (more fully the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; a title appropriate to Wheatley’s industrial output). They made him a Fellow in January 1948.
Wheatley was invited by the RSA to deliver the first of three Cantor Lectures, on the subject of ‘The Novel’, followed by lectures from a publisher and bookseller. Wheatley was regarded in many quarters as a successful hack (a superior Fifties newspaper interviewer referred snidely to his difficulties in getting into the RSL, “whose acid test is whether a writer has produced literature of value”) but the RSA were treating him with respect, and he responded with a carefully prepared April 1953 lecture ‘The Novelist’s Task’, which gives a number of insights into his own work.
First of all, the writer must choose their public (“He, or she, can aim to wring the factory girl’s heart”). Wheatley attributed what he liked to think was his crossover public, from thriller readers to serious readers, to his thorough research. Some people might say his books were only thrillers, “But I like to flatter myself they are not altogether a valueless contribution to our literature, if only from their educative aspect.”
Serious psychological novelists, says Wheatley, build up their characters from birth to the moment where the story starts: “by visualizing the childhood, school-days and early adult life of his characters the author comes to know them as real people”, even though “the greater part of this material never appears in the book.” For the action novelist, in contrast, the priority is strong plotting, and the middle of the book consists of a series of episodes. Here – like Toby’s hopes in Jugg – “the more it resembles a game of snakes and ladders the more likely it is to hold the reader’s interest.”
Determined to give his lecture audience good value, Wheatley tells them of a poll he once conducted among booksellers to find the outstanding books of the century. The results now give a strong sense of the ephemerality of literary success. Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas and Samuel Butler occupy the first three positions, and then (along with Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf) come works by C.E. Montague, William McFee, George Douglas, and Gilbert Frankau, with his famous novel Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant.
With hindsight, one of the most salient points in Wheatley’s lecture comes early, when he considers the purpose of the novel. The novel entertains; it can also be written to edify; and then, “the novel is often used as a vehicle for propaganda.”
Star of Ill-Omen was no qualification to pontificate about the writing of novels, but Wheatley followed it, three months before his lecture, with an incomparably stronger performance. It might almost be the work of a different man, right from its elegant title, like a parody of a birth announcement in the Times: To The Devil – A Daughter.
*
To The Devil – A Daughter is the story of Christine, who becomes possessed by Satanic forces every night after darkness falls. It had its distant inspiration in the Essex woman who had written to Wheatley after The Devil Rides Out, and who had told him that her father had sold her to the Devil as a child, but it has even closer affinities with the literature of multiple personality disorder, a subject which was rising in the Fifties.
Christina is no doubt named after Christ, but she has an ancestor in Christine Beauchamp, the girl in Morton Prince’s 1906 case history, The Dissociation of a Personality. Prince’s Christine had a “bad” self and told him she was sometimes possessed by a devil. As a critic has written of her case, “what is now called dissociated personality would not long ago have been described as demonic possession.”
The subject reached best-seller status in the Fifties with the Three Faces of Eve in 1957 (a book Wheatley later refers to in The Satanist), in which a woman has her good self, “Eve White”, and her bad self, “Eve Black”. It is strange to think this ever passed for the cutting edge of psychiatry, when it now looks more like a moment in popular culture.
Christina’s dual personality gave this book an extra frisson, especially to female readers; the message was, as it were, that you could be a good girl but sometimes you could be a bad girl too. I remember talking to a woman at a party who told me how exciting she and her adolescent girl friends found this particular book in the early Seventies, and the critic Lorna Sage has written
I’d read and reread Dennis Wheatley’s To The Devil A Daughter (a 1950s best-seller and another of Uncle Bill’s anthropology books), all about how the baser forms of eroticism threaten the very fabric of Western civilisation. The heroine is nice in the daytime, but when dusk falls she dresses up, drinks, gambles, kisses men with her mouth open and shows signs of being able to look after herself… .
*
Middle-aged female thriller-writer Molly Fountain is writing at her modest villa in the South of France when she becomes fascinated by her new neighbour, a girl. Molly is a widow who worked for British intelligence during the war, and she is a friend of Colonel Verney, or “Conky Bill” (“C.B.”), who has a nose like Maxwell Knight. Together with Molly’s son John, who falls in love with Christine, these three form Wheatley’s familiar small band of friends who combat the powers of evil.
Christine has been pledged to the Devil by her father, a businessman who turned to Satanism for material success. Worse than that, she is now going to be sacrificed by the Satanic priest Canon Copely-Syle, who is going to sacrifice her so her virgin blood can give life to the homunculus he is creating. Copely-Syle is based very recognisably – with his silvery locks, antiquated ecclesiastical garb, silver-buckled shoes and general appearance of a “Georgian parson” – on Montague Summers, safely dead for the past four years. Wheatley was not a literary writer but the name “Copely” is inspired, and conjures up something grotesquely ecclesiastical with the word “cope”, a High Church vestment, as in Andrew Marvell: “Under this antic cope I move / Like some great prelate of the grove.”
To The Devil – A Daughter includes some memorable set pieces, including another pentagram fortress. Beddowes has become terrified of Satanic forces, and he is living on biscuits and bottled water up in an attic, inside a pentangle made of neon tubes.
… the thing that first sprang to the eye was a great five-pointed star. It was formed of long glass tubes, all connected together in the same manner as strip-lighting designed to show the name over a shop; and through their whole length glowed electric wires that gave off the cold blue light. Five tall white candles were placed in the points of the star; but these were unlit, so evidently there only against an emergency failure of the electric current … More faintly seen were two thick circles that had been drawn in chalk on the floor … Between the two were chalked a number of cabalistic formulae …
Like the pentangle in The Devil Rides Out, this has its prototype in William Hope Hodgson, with Carnacki’s “Electric Pentacle” in Carnacki The Ghost Finder.
Posing as a Magister Templi, a magical grade borrowed from the Golden Dawn system, C.B. talks to Copely-Syle, who is himself an Ipsissimus. The two of them go over the hoary old Crowley story from Driberg, and the circumstances of The Devil Rides Out, with Mocata and the house in “Medina Place”.
Copely-Syle then shows C.B. over his chapel in the crypt, which doubles as alchemist’s laboratory and satanic temple, where he is producing homunculi in large glass jars. There is a horrible moment when C.B. finds that Copely-Syle’s work is underpinned by vivisection; there are animals in the laboratory, “crouching or lying in unnatural positions with their limbs pinioned … Many had had their genitals removed, some had had legs amputated, others lacked eyes or had had their claws cut out. From the bandages of several of them small bottles and test tubes protruded, into which was draining the fluid from their wounds.” With these “small martyrs to Evil” Wheatley has been unusually successful in finding an image of Satanic horror which is free from being kitsch, camp or salacious.
The homunculi theme is lifted from Somerset Maugham’s novel The Magician, in which the protagonist is based on Crowley. Cutting-and-pasting at speed, Wheatley makes little effort to cover his sources: Maugham’s Oliver Haddo talks of a book which
… contained the most extraordinary account … of certain spirits generated by Johann-Ferdinand, Count von Kuffstein, in the Tyrol, in 1775. … There were ten homunculi … kept in strong bottles … and these were filled with water. They were made … by the Count von Kuffstein and an Italian. … the Abbe Geloni …
[…] Once a week the bottles were emptied and filled again with pure rain-water … at certain intervals blood was poured into the water …
Compare To The Devil – A Daughter:
Among those who had trafficked in these forbidden mysteries was a Count von Kuffstein, and C.B. remembered reading in an old book of the experiments he had carried out in the year 1775 at his castle in the Tyrol. With the aid of an Italian Abbé called Geloni, the Count had succeeded in producing ten living creatures, who resembled small men and women … and had to be kept in large strong glass jars that were filled with liquid. Once a week the jars were emptied and refilled with pure rain water … and human blood on which the homunculi fed.
Along with toads, bats, voodoo drums, two love stories, the Soviet menace and an evil French count, To The Devil – A Daughter has plenty of “snakes and ladders”-style thrills. “You’re mad!” says C.B., “You can’t do this!” “Oh, but I can …” says Copely-Syle. “It is only a little after half past ten, so there is plenty of time to put you on the line before the train passes”
It all builds to a climax in the Cave of Bats at Nice, just as Christina is about to be sacrificed. As before, the denouement invokes the power of love, and features a decisive female role; this time, following Fleur’s mother and mad Aunt Sarah, it is Molly Fountain who finishes the Satanists off with an old wartime Mills bomb, justifying the slaughter with a definitive Wheatley line: “They were all horrors and menaces to everything decent in life.”
*
The appeal of “black magic” in popular culture was ultimately erotic, and this is especially true of Wheatley. David Langford has noted that the charm of his Black Magic books was “a spice of wickedness that particularly appealed to adolescents.” Professor John Sutherland, when he was asked to name the most erotic book he had ever read, confessed “I don’t find them erotic anymore. When I was an adolescent, however, Dennis Wheatley could always make me lively around the groin.” The writer Matthew Parris, when asked the same question, said “I used to find Dennis Wheatley’s satanic stuff very exciting.”
Wheatley-style Satanism tends to involve an atmosphere of impending group sex, and the perverse nature of the weird crew attracted is often mentioned: “They get hold of pederasts, lesbians and over-sexed people of all ages”, C.B. explains in To The Devil – A Daughter, “and provide them with the chance to indulge their secret vices.”
Thanks to Wheatley’s unfailingly useful idea of what a Black Mass might involve, the promised orgy has for its central focus the impending violation and degradation of a woman, often on an altar. In They Used Dark Forces, Malacou has his own daughter on an altar after they have stripped off their zodiac robes; in Toby Jugg, Sally is to be spreadeagled on a bed of nettles before the Devil’s altar and violated by Helmuth; in Gateway to Hell, Miranda is to be gang raped in a “Satanic marriage”, and something similar awaits Mary Morden in The Satanist, where the head Satanist slowly licks his lips as he explains
Later I intend to perform a ceremony of initiation. The neophyte Circe [Mary] is to be received among us as a Sister. She is of unusual beauty; so no doubt most of you will wish to perform with her the Sacred Rite of Creation when she offers herself for Temple Service.
And in To The Devil – A Daughter:
… instead of removing her clothes garment by garment they tore them from her body shred by shred, till she stood swaying among them stark naked except for her shoes and stockings … Christina, still struggling was forced back upon the altar and stretched out on it. John could see her long, silk-stockinged legs dangling over the right-hand end of the altar …
In this instance the sacrifice is not directly sexual – it is her blood that Copely-Syle is after, not her body – but the ambience is almost indistinguishable: “Really!”, says the cynical Frenchman Jules, when the nature of the impending crisis is explained to him, “That sounds very intriguing. Ellen, or Christina, or whatever you like to call her, would look pretty good stretched out naked on an altar.”
The climactic double-bind of Wheatley’s plots is that the dreadful ravishment and fate-worse-than-death can never be allowed to happen: like Pearl White tied to the railway line, the girl must be saved, and she is. The result is almost family reading, even if it does appeal to adolescents. One of my paperback copies of this book is inscribed in a young, girlish hand “To Gill, Happy Birthday Love Beth xxxxx PS Lynne said it was good so don’t blame me if it’s not!”
The last word on Wheatley, sex and magic should go to Timothy d’Arch Smith.
Wheatley actually did the occult a great disservice in that he reduced hermetic science to the rogering of virgins on altar-tops, but goodness what fun the books were.
*
Molly Fountain’s bedtime reading in To The Devil – A Daughter is a “a new William Mole thriller”. Mole was the pseudonym of William Younger, now a career MI5 officer, who had published his first thriller, Trample an Empire, in 1952.
“Mole” followed Trample an Empire with The Lobster Guerrillas and Goodbye Is Not Worthwhile, before writing his masterpiece, The Hammersmith Maggot, which features an amateur detective (he is really a wine merchant) named Casson Duker, who is at home in clubland: he is a member of “Canes”, and has friends in White’s. The maggot of the title is a blackmailer, John Perry, a cold little man who has acquired a connoisseurial taste for classical antiquities and antique furniture, although he remains “common”.
The book is interesting as a study of class; Duker despises Perry for his naive snobbery, yet at the same time he looks down on him for being common. Perry dreams of being upper-middle class, and before he is hanged he says “Cane’s, St.James Street. I should like to have gone into a club before I died.”
There is little sympathy for the maggot, although his passion for collecting is beautifully described, with his George II candlesticks and Bristol blue glass goblets. In a museum he sees a case of exquisite old watches, all stopped: “He had felt that both he and the watches had escaped the dull, daily round into a timeless universe of jewellery and enamel and figured silver.”
Mole is a considerably better writer than Wheatley, who writes of Molly Fountain, “As a writer she could not help being envious of the way in which Mr.Mole used his fine command of English to create striking imagery … .”
Bill had married Nancy Leslie, a young war widow, and they lived in Knightsbridge. Nancy was always known as Poo, and Wheatley dedicated The Shadow of Tyburn Tree to her: “For the Life and Soul of the Party: The Incomparable Poo.” Bill was similarly celebrated as a ‘life and soul’ type, whether he was at a carnival in the West Indies or doing his impression of a chorus girl.
Wheatley’s industrial output continued, and in 1953 he managed two books, the second of them the Cold War story Curtain of Fear. He also devised a new game, Alibi, a Cluedo-style whodunnit in which players travel around the towns and cities of the British Isles (learning some geography in the process) trying to deduce the killer. The victim is himself a high-class criminal, and the murder is discovered by his butler-valet, “Beals”: a name we shall encounter again.
*
Wheatley’s relationship with his mother had not been close for many years. He blamed Sir Louis Newton for turning her against him, and he had, of course, killed off the pair of them in Three Inquisitive People, which may not have helped if they read it.
Since Sir Louis had died, Wheatley’s mother had lived with Wheatley’s unmarried sister, Muriel. Muriel felt trapped, but she worried that if she moved out, their mother might leave her money to Dennis. Dennis, on the other hand, feared she might leave it to Muriel. With this in mind, when Muriel came to stay at Grove they made a pact that however their mother left her money they would split it equally.
In 1949 Wheatley had at last dedicated a book to his mother: “with love and in grateful memory of my first visits with her to Paris, Versailles and Fontainebleu.” It is a charming dedication, although it was his thirty-ninth book. Previous dedicatees had included his Aunt Nell, his secretary, his cousin Laurie, his publisher, his agent, and Bino Johnstone.
In 1954 she died. It turned out that she had left two thirds of her money to Muriel and one third to Dennis, but since he was now a comparatively rich man he didn’t hold Muriel to their bargain. Money-minded as ever, he was struck that he only received about £12,000 (two hundred thousand today), out of the quarter of a million that his grandfather had left (ten million today).
*
In the autumn Wheatley published his new book, The Island Where Time Stands Still. It begins with a letter from Gregory Sallust to his author, like Tombe back from the grave:
I am all the more touched to hear that still, after all this time, a week seldom passes without some of your readers writing to ask what has happened to me …
P.S. I still have a little of the Pol Roger ’28 you sent me in return for my last batch of notes, and it is now so good I’m keeping it for very special occasions …
P.P.S. I am hoping to be back in England shortly, and that will definitely be an occasion for us to knock off a bottle or two of the ’28.
The book opens with a shipwreck in which Gregory is washed up on a Chinese island, appearing on nautical charts only as “Leper Settlement Number Six”. Here a group of enlightened Chinese are keeping the old Imperial civilisation alive, and Gregory goes with them to San Francisco’s Chinatown to find their new monarch, a missing princess. There is good local colour throughout and it is a rattling yarn in the usual Wheatley fashion.
The theme of saving a threatened monarch was close to Wheatley’s heart, and the time theme remained central to the conservative aesthetic of his fiction. Wheatley described the book as involving “the old China of dignity and beauty” as opposed to “the new Communist China of today”. A very few things have changed (Wheatley has improved the condition of women), but otherwise, with their wisdom, the high-caste Chinese have achieved “the carefully planned salvaging of their ancient civilisation”.
They have no ambitions, as a Mandarin explains:
Only to live graciously, and to perpetuate a way of life that long experience has shown leads to the well-being of the spirit. In that we are successful, while the outer world is disrupted by irresponsible men seeking power through innovations. Here we live like a placid stream – ever unruffled yet ever renewed. We have learned the wisdom of making Time stand still.
“Please allow me to offer my congratulations, Excellency”, says Gregory:
In this age of instability and disillusion it is a remarkable achievement to have created a Utopian state. I could almost believe that I have arrived in Shangri-La.
At first the Mandarin doesn’t understand Gregory’s reference to the Thirties classic, Lost Horizon, “Mr James Hilton’s beautiful book.”
Time was not standing still in the larger world. In 1949 China had become the Communist Republic under Mao-Tse Tung, and there had been a Communist purge in Hungary with the use of torture and show-trials, while in 1950 the Korean War began, there were riots in South Africa, and Wheatley’s old hero Voroshilov announced that Russia now had the Bomb.
At home the iron and steel industries had been nationalised, and taxation was reaching undreamed of heights. Wheatley might not have gone as far as Evelyn Waugh’s complaint that “The trouble with the Conservative Party is that it has not turned the clock back a single second”, but he would have found some common ground with the man who complained “Reform, reform – aren’t things bad enough already?”
Time was also spreading its depredations with suburban sprawl, the ruin of the countryside, population growth, and tourism: all those phenomena which have made “unspoilt” a key word for understanding the twentieth century. A few years later, a friend wrote to Wheatley about the Algarve in the spring. “Beautifully green, lots of mimosa and quite good wild flowers of which the best were narcissi and little dwarf iris. What was even more interesting was to see the way in which the English proletariat has taken over there. The whole coast was crammed with them …”
Bill and Poo had left Knightsbridge and bought a house called Pelling, near Windsor (Wheatley was amused when Poo told him about the woman she bought fish from in Windsor town, who had said “It’s only you, mu’m, and them up at the castle what really appreciates a bit of good fish”). But the charm of Pelling was blighted when the adjacent fields were turned into a housing estate, and the Youngers moved back to London.
Wheatley would take this theme up in his next novel, where Gifford Hillary comes back from the dead to see his house under threat (“The idea of its being turned over to demolition squads in order that rows of jerry built bungalows might be built on the site made me see red”). This was going to strike a lot closer to home than he could have foreseen: time still had some unpleasant tricks up its sleeve for Wheatley.