A craze for crime fiction gripped the Thirties. Auden and Eliot suggested the detective story was ultimately religious, like a quest for the Grail, while Wyndham Lewis compared it to the situation in Europe. What with Italy and Germany, he said, and terror in Russia, and the Stavisky scandal in France, Europe had “gone Crime Club”: “how like a shilling shocker continental politics have become.”
One night over dinner, Joe Links suggested to Wheatley that he should write an illustrated murder story with real evidence. Crime fiction had too much narrative: “Why can’t we just have the facts and the clues?” At first Wheatley didn’t see what Links was getting at, but then he became excited by the idea and the two of them produced their first ‘Crime Dossier’, Murder off Miami, in which British financier Bolitho Blane is found dead on board his yacht. The cast includes the Bishop of Bude, Miss Ferri Rocksavage, Count Posodini and others, but they are upstaged by some hair in a cellophane envelope, a photo of some cigarette stubs, and a spent match from a hotel.
There was little enthusiasm in the trade. WH Smith’s railway station managers gave it a unanimous thumbs down (“Words fail me,” said a Mr Iron at Liverpool Street). Hutchinson pointed out that it would have no library sales, being fragile and only usable once, so he could only charge 3/6d, of which Wheatley and Links could only have a royalty of one penny (£8 and 20p). Wheatley and Links persisted.
Gordon Selfridge was one of the few to see the book had potential, taking a thousand copies and throwing a launch party at the store. Hatchards only took six copies, but Queen Mary came in on the day of publication and bought them all. Suddenly the book took off: its gimmickry made it a journalistic novelty, and it was the subject of a Times editorial.
“The contents of the book include human hair, bloodstained chintz, a letter in Japanese, blueprints of a yacht, match-ends, and finger prints,” reported the Times. Where would it end? A small phial of perfume “will convey the devastating qualities of the heroine’s perfume far more vividly than her creator ever could.” Once books contained real substances, critics would be reduced to saying “the hay in Mr Blank’s pastoral scenes is definitely the best he has given us yet” or “Miss Dash’s picture of nursery life is marred by an unimaginative use of tapioca.” On the facing page from all this cosy footling, meanwhile, was news from Spain: churches were being burned, and some priests and army officers who had tried to defend one were shot after they came out under a white flag.
Before long Wheatley was caught up in the Thirties crime craze like everyone else, and he even took young Anthony to see what he hoped was TS Eliot’s new murder mystery on stage, Murder in the Cathedral. They left at the interval.
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Murder off Miami was a sensation at the 68th Foyle’s Literary Luncheon, July 1936, upstaging the book for which the Luncheon was given, Six Against The Yard. Very much of its time, this featured Dorothy Sayers, Ronald Knox, Margery Allingham, Freeman Wills Crofts and others pitting their wits against a real policeman, Ex-Superintendent Cornish of the CID. No less of its time was the party given by Wheatley’s friend Lord Donegall, where he invited a number of writers and challenged them to find the safe: Peter Cheyney was the winner.
In a similar spirit, the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke thought he had discovered something unknown about a murder case, and he felt it would make a viable book if some detective writers could be persuaded to solve the crime. After Murder off Miami, he felt Wheatley was the man to advise him, and one evening he went round to see him. Wheatley was interested but unsure, and wanted the advice of a third party, whom he telephoned.
Unfortunately the man he called wasn’t nice Mr Links but nasty Mr Cheyney. He arrived, immediately striking Croft-Cooke as “a cad and a potential con man,” and began to give him the third degree. What was the clue? How did Croft-Cooke expect him to judge the book without knowing the clue? Didn’t he know how serious this was? If he really knew something unreported and withheld it, he could go to prison. How could he drag other people into this situation? So what was the clue? Did he really have one – or was he just bluffing? He was just trying to get publicity out of Wheatley, wasn’t he?
Croft-Cooke felt all this must have made Wheatley (“a man of breeding and principle”) very uncomfortable, and that it was only Wheatley’s presence that stopped Cheyney from using violent methods of interrogation. He vowed never to speak to this “overbearing cheapjack” again.
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There was no stopping the Dossiers now. Murder off Miami had shifted around 200,000 copies1, and Wheatley and Links started on a second one, Who Killed Robert Prentice? This was another cache of facsimiles including a torn up blackmail photograph featuring a naked woman, a Belgian stamp, a railway ticket and a letter in an envelope: at one stage Hutchinson’s had forty girls in Watford putting stamps in cellophane packets and tearing up photographs.
Wheatley had spotted a further potential of the genre, and the fictitious newspaper enclosed, the South Sussex Chronicle, contained extensive publicity for the Sir Harry Preston Memorial Fund and Wheatley’s other books, along with some real advertising which netted Wheatley £300. Again, almost everyone was thrilled, although the Times Literary Supplement complained (as they had with Murder off Miami) that it was too bulky to read comfortably in bed.
There was a stronger complaint from Germany, where the book was unexpectedly banned due to the loose life of the dead man’s secretary, Miss Suzanne L’Estrange, and particularly the torn-up nude photograph. “Its moral character must be designated more than inferior,” said the censor, “created for English conditions, not German ones.”
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Meanwhile Wheatley published another conventional thriller, Contraband. This featured our old friend Gregory Sallust, “a cynical but brainy devil” with a “Mephistophelean appearance”, while the villain was the twisted, malcontented, power-mad Adlerian dwarf Lord Gavin Fortescue, from Such Power is Dangerous. This time Fortescue is smuggling foreign agitators into Britain. They are going to spread discontent, followed by “illicit arms … bombs, and poison gas and every sort of foulness to desecrate England’s green and pleasant land”. As Gregory explains, “These birds are out to wreck the old firm of J.Bull, Home, Dominions and Colonial.”
1936 was a bad year for the old firm of J.Bull, with worrying international news, a royal death, and an abdication. Dying of cancer, George V had whispered “Is all well with the Empire?” – although his last words were more popularly ‘known’ to have been “Bugger Bognor”, as he dismissed any hope of convalescing there – and been killed with a lethal injection, so that his death would catch the next morning’s Times instead of dragging on to break in “less appropriate” evening papers.
He was succeeded by Prince Edward, a democratic and popular figure with a slight Cockney accent (picked up from his nurse) and a real concern for issues such as unemployment: his accompanying Nazi sympathies were not widely known at the time. He had hardly become Edward VIII when he was forced to abdicate over his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, despite the fact that the majority of his people supported him. Wheatley was among them, and he felt so strongly that he sent the King a telegram. Beseeching Edward not to give up the crown, he wrote “If only you would rely on the love, sympathy and understanding of the masses, your will would be done.”
It was not to be: despite overwhelming popular sympathy, the King was forced out by a petit bourgeois moral elite led by Stanley Baldwin, the Times, and the Church. He was succeeded by King George VI, and when Cavalcade magazine wrote to Wheatley the following year, asking his opinion on “The Man of The Year”, he chose the new King, “who probably worked longer hours than any of his subjects during the terrific strain of the Coronation Season and sustained the ordeal with a dignity and affability which must be the admiration of us all; thus success in his particular task of stabilising the Throne after the unparalleled crisis which shook it to its foundations last year.” The old firm was still in business.
The new King was present at the 1937 Coronation Derby, during a day of perfect summer weather. Wheatley was there too, and he put an each-way bet on Le Grand Duc, thinking of the Duke de Richleau. It was an exceptionally exciting race, with Le Grand Duc in the lead at one stage, and Wheatley was still pleased when he came in third at 100–9.
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Abroad, meanwhile, the Spanish Civil War had broken out in July 1936, the month that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia – effectively the end of the League of Nations as a force with any power for peace – reached Addis Ababa, and Germany breached the Locarno Pact by remilitarizing in the Rhineland. Germany was now ready to press territorial claims against France, a country Britain was pledged to defend.
This particularly worried Wheatley, as we have seen in ‘Pills of Honour’, and the Wheatleys stayed in the British isles for their summer 1936 holiday. Wheatley took them to the Isle of Mull. Ever careful, no doubt remembering what had happened to him in France after the Navy mutinied, he took £50 worth of silver coin – in those days made of precious metal – in case there was trouble and a paper money crisis.
The situation blew over, and that autumn Dennis and Joan let Diana stay with a family in Munich to learn German. Like Angus Wilson’s character Elspeth Bungle, Diana loved Germany and came back full of enthusiasm for its new way of life (“Elspeth Bungle used to attend ALL the Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s, but that was when we only knew the GOOD side of Hitler!”).
Even after the War broke out, Wheatley had trouble getting her to take an interest in the Allied cause.
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Wheatley was now working on The Secret War, a bit of peace-mongering that tried to put Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in an understandable and sympathetic light: the TLS noted the book’s impartiality. The Secret War is being waged between international financiers who want to turn the Abyssinian conflict into a profitable world war, while another secret organisation trying to stop them. Wheatley even manages to write his unpublished ‘Pills of Honour’ into the book, attributing it to the hero.
Wheatley had never been to Ethiopia but he had an impression of it as hopelessly backward after reading Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) and Waugh In Abyssinia (1936; published in the Daily Mail as despatches in 1935). “In common humanity it was high time that white men took over the administration”, wrote Wheatley, and the Italians would “make life safe, human and decent for the people of the country.” There had been outrage in the civilised world over the news that Mussolini was using poison gas against primitive tribesmen, the Danakil, who were themselves notorious for their atrocities against anyone they captured. Wheatley felt they were savages and that their atrocities merited gas as the safest way to deal with them – this was also Churchill’s opinion – and at the end of the book his protagonists are rescued from the Danakil by Italian airmen. After the War Jack Younger married an Italian princess, Marcella Granito, the Princess Pignatelli Di Belmonte, and Wheatley inscribed a copy of The Secret War for her: “We weren’t all pro-Abyssinian.”
Wheatley was sincere about the benefits of Empire. Visiting pre-war Eastern Europe, Wheatley and Joan found Vienna delightful, Prague dull, and Budapest especially enchanting, particularly for its food and cafés: “Budapest had lain within the Roman Empire so for many centuries its people had inherited a civilised mentality.” Wheatley returned from Budapest laden with foie gras, and in December 1937 he wrote a piece for the Mail entitled ‘We Don’t Eat Enough at Christmas.’
The blackmail photograph, before being torn to pieces in Who Killed Robert Prentice? (1937).
A new sport: “balloon hopping.”
Strange Conflict (1941), with a jacket by Frank C. Pape.
Total War (1941).
Writing as “thriller novelist and student of gastronomy” Wheatley extolled the virtues of English gluttony, beginning sentimentally with Bob Cratchit’s goose and moving greedily on to old royal feasts of sturgeon, swans, peacocks, and wild boar. Then he found space for oysters, turkey, and Joan’s Christmas pudding recipe, all washed down with a variety of drink including mediaeval garhioflac (white wine with cloves); Burgundy with the bird (“say Chambertin or Richebourg 1923”); and Bismarck’s favourite “black velvet” of champagne and stout. This is a favourite drink in Wheatley’s novels, and he recommended it for the “morning-after”: “there is no finer pick-me-up”.
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Who Killed Robert Prentice? came out that summer, but Wheatley’s next major book was Red Eagle, showing broader political sympathies than one might expect. Marshal Tukachevsky and other high ranking officers had been shot in the Russian purges, and Wheatley had started to wonder about the man who came out on top, Marshal Voroshilov, as a subject for a biography. As usual it was researched with the help of “top boys”, notably Sir Vernon Kell, who had founded MI5.
Red Eagle became the story of the Russian revolution, with Voroshilov in the central role. As Wheatley told the British Russia Club, when he lectured to them, “Conditions for Russian working men were very bad; there were no unions to protect them … They were absolutely in the clutches of the capitalist.” He made the ruthless Voroshilov a sympathetic figure, and having been an army officer himself, he admired not only Voroshilov’s tactical flair but his devotion to his troops, teaching them to read. More than that, Wheatley’s Voroshilov is a “good fellow”, fond of wine, women and song, and his origins – born to a peasant and a servant girl, begging in the street as a child – have elements of the Victorian-style ‘poor boy made good’ narrative; that always appealed to Wheatley.
Wheatley had picked a winner with Voroshilov, whom Queen Elizabeth later had to address as “my good friend”, despite his having slaughtered eleven thousand White Russian officers who should have been treated as prisoners of war.
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Wheatley’s next book, Uncharted Seas, was one of his more bizarre offerings. Ethnic conflict is a central theme, after the Swedish ship Gafelborg runs into serious trouble at sea. Along with the admirable Swedes (“first-class sailors. The Viking blood you know; we’ve got a dash of it ourselves”) the passengers include Unity, a sturdy flower of English womanhood, a lecherous Venezuelan, and a sympathetic Frenchman with a “D’Artagnan moustache” who admires the English and is given to musing on national characteristics.
The danger comes from sixteen-stone black stoker Harlem Joe, a convicted murderer who sees his chances when civilisation breaks down in the shipwreck: “Harlem Joe said nothing, but the half sly, half arrogant, smile which he gave his coloured companions as they moved forward held a world of meaning.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the party also face Sargasso weed, a monster octopus and some giant crabs straight out of Rider Haggard. Coming close to land, they are surprised to see strange spider-like creatures with round bodies above four stilt like legs; one of these creatures is being chased by a pack of others. As they watch, they realise these creatures are people with balloons on their backs, propelling themselves across the surface of the weed with leg stilts and hand sticks, like ski-sticks, which all have smaller feet-like balloons at their ends.
It is characteristic of Wheatley that these balloons were based on a real inter-wars sport, “balloon jumping”, and no less characteristic that the balloonist in front is a white woman being chased by a group of black men. Rescuing her, the Gafelborg party find that she belongs to a lost island society still living in the seventeenth century, ruled by descendants of Sir Deveril Barthorne who was marooned there in 1680. The constant danger in their lives is the nearby savage island, Satan’s Island, inhabited by marauding blacks.
The structure of Uncharted Seas splits and re-formulates with the logic of a dream, as ethnic conflict on board the ship is followed by the discovery of a black island and a white island. As we have seen, Wheatley tended to split the world into an absolutely black and white, Manichaean system of good and evil, and he was not the sort of man often likely to say there was a little bit of good and bad in everybody. So it is interesting that it should be in Uncharted Seas, of all Wheatley’s books, where Unity says to Basil Sutherland “Still, there’s some good in the worst of us and a streak of bad in the best of us, I suppose, as the old cliché has it.” It is as if the polarised structure of the novel is so overt and solid that it allows space for this repressed idea to surface, like an over-secure political party falling prey to internal dissent.
William Joyce’s friend and tutoring partner Angus Macnab spotted it was a re-hash of They Found Atlantis, as Tayleur reported in a letter. Wheatley knew this, and he felt it was not as good as the previous book. As before, Diana did the drawings for the endpapers; they are exceptionally kitsch.
*
Diana had caused the Wheatleys a lot of worry over the past year. In February 1937, returning from a ski-ing holiday with some friends of the family, she had been in a car crash near Dieppe. Another girl in the party was killed, and Diana’s head injuries left her vague and flakier than ever; the Wheatleys took to calling her “Little Woolly Head.”
It was Diana’s debutante season – she was presented that summer at Balmoral – and she recovered sufficiently for Mrs Wheatley to throw a party for her at No.8 that March: the girls wore masks, with the name badges of film stars. Morecambe Bay shrimps, truffled game pie, nectarines and Black Velvet were provided. During the same season, there was a ball at the Brazilian Embassy, and Wheatley – always alert to possible danger – became worried by the number of people standing on the staircase: fearing it might collapse at any moment, he took Diana and their party off to the Berkeley instead.
This was nothing compared to the worries they had had when Diana went out to Africa, staying with Bino and his wife Louise while the Wheatleys were in Budapest. Reports reached them that she had been playing strip poker, and getting drunk on cocktails and whisky until she couldn’t stand and had to be put to bed. The drinking seemed to start at eleven in the morning, day after day, and in one of her infrequent letters Diana had said “Bino and Lou say I am the grandest drunk they have ever met because I am so amusing when I’m tight,” adding “I’ll write again when I feel better.”
The Wheatleys were worried sick, as Dennis telegrammed a friend: “Joan so worried about Diana doctors fear complete breakdown Stop.” They got her back intact, after which Wheatley composed a double-edged thank you letter for her to copy: “I can never thank you enough for the marvellous time,” it began, continuing “It is tragic that I should have left under a cloud … It hurts me a lot to think the parties we had are not well looked on … Please believe that I enjoyed every moment of it – except the hangovers … Anyhow, in spite of these rotten stories that are going around, I do thank you …”
Wheatley’s own thoughts were not so nicely couched: “Lou ought to be in an asylum,” and Bino was a liar, thief, fraud, and “a queer bird and not quite normal,” so no wonder he could “sink to such depravity.” When Diana returned, Wheatley wrote her a long letter in the form of a present-tense diary from December 2nd to February 21st entitled “All That I Knew Of What Was Going On,” so she would know how he had felt.
The crux of the matter was the fear of female degradation, on which Wheatley’s books often pivot. “Stripped naked and put to bed”, Wheatley thought. And Lou and Bino thought it was amusing to see her “wild eyed and excited; just as we used to think it funny to get the Regimental Goat drunk.”
“The thought of her as she may be tonight (New Year’s Eve) dishevelled, blear-eyed, sodden with drink, makes me almost physically sick. It is like spitting on an altar for these people to spoil her loveliness …”
1 According to the jacket. Reg Gadney says 80,000 copies in 18 months.