Along with The Devil Rides Out, Wheatley wrote a short anti-war polemic entitled ‘Pills of Honour’. King Alexander of Yugoslavia had been assassinated at Marseilles in October, reminding Wheatley of Sarajevo, and a plebiscite for the Saar – part of Germany given to France after the First War – was coming in January.
Hitler will be a ruined man if he fails to secure the return of the Saar as an integral portion of the Reich. France, armed to the teeth, is determined to act if he tries to force the issue. A few shots fired by either side and we are liable under the pact which our government has made to enter into a war …
Wheatley recommended the novels of Sir Philip Gibbs; “should be compulsory reading in every school”. Together with a “truly patriotic” section of the press, such books fostered “the growing opinion that Great Britain should stand out in splendid isolation, refusing absolutely to be involved in any further continental squabbles”; “no matter how many bullies may wave their swords on the continent, nothing but the defence of our Empire and our homes can possibly justify our taking up arms again.”
The alternative, if Britain felt obliged to honour “criminal pacts” made by old gentlemen in pleasant spots such as Locarno, would be apocalyptic. At least in the First War the nation had time to adjust to war conditions “before the bulk of us went down into the maelstrom that cost the nation a million lives and the accumulated treasure of three generations”, but next time would be different, due to bombing. “If war were declared tonight, large areas of London and many of our other provincial cities would be laid waste before the dawn.”
Wheatley’s evocation of the bombing and the horrors of war – dwelt on at some length – is very much of its time, but his emphasis on curtailed freedom and the onset of wartime bureaucracy is more distinctively his own: “those of us who survive the first aerial attack will collect our ration cards from the local authorities in the morning.”
Every soul in the country will find himself in the grip of those relentless ordinances which did not quite smother personal liberty in the last war until 1917. The steel shutters of the war machine will have closed down upon every form of protest and argument.
As for the war itself, and the enormous sacrifice of youth ordered by a few old men, Wheatley had a suggestion. To show they were really sincere, the Cabinet should make an honourable example and commit suicide en masse: “If Mr Macdonald is so anxious that Britain should lead the world to a permanent peace, let him cease reducing our armaments to below safety level and instead give this example.”
“The frontier of Britain lies upon the Rhine,” declared Mr Baldwin loudly.
“Quite,” murmured the chief official of the government laboratories. “And tomorrow, all of us who still remain alive will know you have died with that conviction. Would you now kindly take a pill please.”
“By honouring our obligations we set an example to the wo-r-r-ld,” announced Mr Ramsay MacDonald dreamily.
“Exactly, Sir, and the remnants of the British nation will honour the memory of your cabinet which so unhesitatingly sacrificed itself to the spirit of true leadership.”
The chief official of the government laboratory again held out his box. “Would you also kindly take a pill. Their action is rapid and quite painless, Sir.”
*
The Devil Rides Out was launched with a party at the Prince of Wales Hotel in De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where Harry Preston laid on a three-round boxing match as part of the night’s entertainment. The party doubled as the launch for the first of Joan’s six novels, No Ordinary Virgin, written under the pseudonym of Eve Chaucer (others included Better to Marry, It is Easier for a Camel, and Silk Sheets and Breadcrumbs). These were quite racy, perhaps not unlike the novel that bookshop assistant Gordon Comstock urges on a customer in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying: “Something modern? Something by Barbara Bedworthy for instance? Have you read Almost A Virgin?”
The Paternoster machinery rolled into action behind The Devil Rides Out and The Crime Book Society (publishers of The Crime Book Magazine, from Paternoster House) made it their January Choice. Reviews were good: Wheatley’s friend James Hilton, writing in the Telegraph, described it as “the best thing of its kind since Dracula.”
There was a dissenting voice in Time and Tide, where “Roderick Random” attacked Wheatley as a symptom of declining standards. “There is at present, particularly in England and America, a very widespread movement to degrade contemporary standards and values,” he said, and Wheatley (“merely a dummy figure, a target selected by chance for the arrow of attack”) was a case in point, although unaware of what he was doing and “unimportant except as one example of a vicious tendency.”
Also in the dock was reviewer Mr Ralph Straus, guilty of claiming he could not remember “a more vivid or more cunningly told story”. There were only three possible explanations for this: either Straus’s memory was bad, his reading was very limited, or he really did take Wheatley’s work seriously, in which case “he is to be pitied”. (Random overlooked a fourth explanation, that he was a friend, which was in fact the case).
Singing from the same sheet as the Leavises, with their attack on “cheap and easy” reading pleasure in Fiction and the Reading Public, Random dissected Wheatley’s “insidious and dangerous” work, which amounted to “the crudest forms of sensationalism plus a style that makes one wince.” Wheatley’s reader survey at the back of the book was further evidence against him: it was just a way of saying “Am I supplying you with the right kind of dope? Let me know if I’m not and I’ll do better next time.”
Wheatley wrote back. He could appreciate Mr.Random’s point of view, he said, because he read serious modern fiction such as Huxley, Waugh, Norman Douglas, Radclyffe Hall, James Hilton, and Baron Corvo. Unfortunately appreciating literature and being able to write it were two different things, and Wheatley stressed that thriller writers like himself had “no pretensions to literary merit”; in fact, he was “perhaps better aware than most of my short-comings where fine English is concerned.”
Wheatley’s defence was that in “these days of uncertainty and general trouble” people needed exciting books to distract them from their worries, and they were too tired after work to read “the finest type of English novel”. If it wasn’t for work like Wheatley’s, “the great bulk of the present reading public would give up reading books altogether and turn for their relaxation to the cinema instead” – a prospect to fill a Thirties Leavisite with dread.
*
That Spring the Wheatleys went to Rome; it was Wheatley’s first visit. Wheatley greatly admired the ancient Romans and the civilising effects of their empire: “The benefits they conferred upon the people they ruled were inestimable … With the fall of Rome in AD 410 the light of Western civilisation went out …”
Wheatley was fascinated to walk in the old Forum, which had been a slum until Mussolini cleared and restored it, and to see the floor of the Senate House where Caesar died, which had just been cleared of 1500 years worth of accumulated rubbish. Wheatley was a great admirer of Mussolini. “Mussolini made Italy a far more law-abiding and less smelly place than he found it, and performed that miracle without, apparently, interfering very much with the happiness of the average Italian.”
Wheatley’s enthusiasm for Mussolini may seem naive now, or worse, but it was widespread. Back in the Twenties, Lord Rothermere had written an article in his Sunday Pictorial entitled ‘Mussolini: What Europe owes to him.’ Readers were told “He did much more than save Italy, for he really saved the whole Western world.” Macdonald, Chamberlain and Churchill1 all saw him in positive terms, and J.C.Squire saw him as “a nice Napoleon, with less education, an equally strong historical sense, and more compassion.” In February 1934 the Saturday Review ran a full page picture captioned “Mussolini: the World’s Most Benevolent Ruler”: “He has dragged Italy out of the mire of Socialism and in a few years has made it the most successful and prosperous country in Europe.” Better yet, “he sets an example of kindness to animals and birds.”
Despite all that, there were fears that Britain would go to war with Italy over the invasion of Abyssinia, and Wheatley had a contingency plan to escape to France if this happened while he and Joan were in Rome, so they could avoid being interned as enemy aliens.
Wheatley and Joan had dinner with the British Counsellor in Rome, Sir Noel Charles, and Sir Noel produced some Hoyo de Monterrey cigars: he had got them especially, because the Duke de Richleau smokes them. Like Wheatley, Sir Noel had been through the First War – he had won the MC – and he didn’t want to see another. As they went to get their coats before going to a night club, Sir Noel assured Wheatley there would be no war, and they did a little dance together in the hall.
*
Back home, the Wheatleys were doing a lot of entertaining at their newly rented house in St.John’s Wood, and when Wheatley published a book they would give a champagne supper party for about a hundred people. Along with old friends like Links, Eastaugh and Baron, Wheatley’s newer and more writerly friends at this period included Gilbert Frankau, James Hilton, Howard Spring, Pamela Frankau, and Michael Arlen, and he also knew a motley bunch of right-wing extremists, anti-Semites, and cranks.
Wheatley had become very chummy with Peter Cheyney, “Prince of Hokum”. Cheyney wrote endless crime fictions in the American ‘hard-boiled’ style – Dames Don’t Care, Can Ladies Kill?, Dangerous Curves, Don’t Get Me Wrong, I’ll Say She Does (as in “Does she go?”) – and he was the creator of “Lemmy Caution”, “Alonzo MacTavish”, “Abie Hymie Finkelstein”, English private detective “Slim Callaghan” and many others. Cheyney ran his own private investigation agency, and the boundaries between fact and fiction in his own life were distinctly blurred.
Originally known as Reg, Cheyney had been born in the East End, where his cockney father worked at Billingsgate fish market. Cheyney tried out various names including Evelyn and Everard, and was at one stage Peter du Sautoy Cheyney, before settling on the story that he was descended from the ancient Irish family of du Cheyney. Wheatley believed his real name was Leper, and that he had at one stage been a barrow boy.
Like Wheatley, Cheyney’s big break came when he became an officer in the First War. His Who’s Who entry mentions being “seriously wounded” and for a while he managed to claim a pension, which was stopped when his wound turned out to be a nick to one ear. Cheyney took an active role against the 1926 General Strike, where he made important contacts in the intelligence and police communities, and in 1931 he joined Oswald Mosley’s New Party – a forerunner of the British Union of Fascists, funded by the car manufacturer Lord Nuffield – where he was head of the thug section, Mosley’s so-called “Biff Boys.”
Cheyney was a big man who boxed and fenced, and he affected a cloak and a gold monocle. When Wheatley first knew him he was still working as a writer-cum-private-detective-cum-journalist (he was news editor of the Sunday Graphic), but he concentrated on fiction after his 1936 bestseller This Man is Dangerous, and in 1937 Wheatley wrote a warm introduction to You Can’t Hit A Woman and Other Stories, detailing the heroic and extraordinary life of ‘The Remarkable Peter (“Ten Thousand Smackers”) Cheyney.’ Entering into the Americanised spirit of Cheyney’s work, Wheatley told readers he was confident that “I am putting them on to a real good thing.”
Wheatley remembered Cheyney as a tremendous liar but “great fun.” When he stayed with the Wheatleys during the War, he arrived bearing a case of Kummel and a case of whisky: “It was enormous fun to watch this great, big, bald tough, whisky glass in hand, striding up and down our drawing-room telling the most extraordinary tales about his exploits” (“desperate encounters from which he always emerged with flying colours”). Evidently Cheyney was another “good fellow,” and that excused any faults he might have had.
*
Although he had been in the New Party, Cheyney didn’t follow Mosley into the BUF. Another of Wheatley’s friends, William Tayleur – soon to be prominent in the new trade of “publicity” and PR – was more in touch with the evolving progress of British Fascism. “I knew Tayleur to be in sympathy with the Fascists” writes Wheatley in his autobiography, “but I thought no worse of him for that as I also inclined towards them”.
Tayleur corrected Wheatley’s proofs, a demanding job made worse by what Tayleur believed was Hutchinson’s use of cheap unskilled labour. The texts of Wheatley’s books are abysmal (The Devil Rides Out includes “aesthetic” for “ascetic” and “Stravinsky” for “Stavisky”) and Tayleur now battled with “the worst galleys I have ever seen” thanks to Hutchinson’s “inserted errors” and “blithering ineptitude.”
It was through Tayleur that William Joyce came to one of Wheatley’s parties. Joyce – later to achieve notoriety as “Lord Haw-Haw” for his propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany – was a hardened Fascist whose face had been razor-slashed from mouth to ear when fighting broke out on stage at a 1924 meeting against the Communist MP Saklatvala (and not, as he liked to claim, when he was attacked by a gang of Jews in the street)2. Ironically Joyce was intensely patriotic, in his fashion, but early exposure to the violence of Southern Ireland – where his family were ‘ethnically cleansed’ by the Catholic majority and forced to flee – made him extreme and unstable. Distantly related to James Joyce, he had a first-class degree in English and earned his living as a private tutor while working as a Director of Propaganda for the BUF.
By the time he met Wheatley, Joyce had split with Mosley and founded his own party, the more extreme and anti-Semitic National Socialist League. He outlined his ideas in National Socialism Now, a book Wheatley owned, with a preface by his sidekick John Beckett.
Joyce knew Wheatley’s Duke de Richleau books, and probably enjoyed The Devil Rides Out. Along with an early interest in hypnotism, one of Joyce’s personal quirks was the constant doodling of a Devil’s head with a crown on it, to such an extent that MI5 noted in his file: “one curious point that might interest a psychologist … he could never come within reach of a pencil and paper without drawing a coronated Devil’s head.” Perhaps these doodlings could have been used to trace him across the wastepaper baskets of the Reich; at any rate, it is a neat instance of the links between Satanic imagery, violent disaffection and unmerited elitism. Joyce was also devoted to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (he had it with him when he was captured) to such an extent that when his Nazi boss and mentor, Dietz, gave him a Punch cartoon of himself he signed it “from Mephistopheles to Faust.”
Joyce told Wheatley it was a great pity that the Duke de Richleau books could not be published in Germany, because Simon Aron was Jewish. Nevertheless, he said Goering read all Wheatley’s books and was a great fan, and he urged Wheatley to come over to Germany with him and meet the Nazi leaders.
Given Joyce’s personal intensity – which grew worse with drink – his remarkable razor-slashed face, and the even more remarkable news that Goering was a Wheatley fan, you might think that having met him wouldn’t easily slip Wheatley’s mind. This is just what it seemed to do, however, as we shall see.
*
It is unlikely Joyce would have found much to talk about with Louis Golding, another of Wheatley’s friends. Golding was a gay Jewish novelist who enjoyed the company of children (he put “cherub collecting” as a hobby in Who’s Who) and did a great deal of work for charities and Boys’ Clubs. Legendarily tight-fisted (he once gave a two-and-sixpenny edition of one of his own books as a wedding present) Golding was also vain and insecure, and worried that his books were not taken seriously by other writers, laughing at him behind his back. In this respect he was safe with Wheatley, who was no enemy of the second-rater. Golding used to give Wheatley lifts in his car, and Wheatley described him as “the wittiest man I know.” Judging by the ponderous and fussily well-turned inscriptions in the books he gave Wheatley, this was generous.
It is even harder to believe Golding would have got along with Graham Seton-Hutchison, another cordial acquaintance of Wheatley. Lieutenant-Colonel Seton-Hutchison had won the DSO and MC in the First War, been wounded three times, and developed a sentimental fondness for ordinary working-class soldiers. This was expressed in his Biography of a Batman (an officer’s soldier-servant) the story of an orphan, Piper Peter McClintock, “who now sleeps, forever young” in a military cemetery in France.
Seton-Hutchison wrote popular thrillers – The Viper of Luxor, Eye for an Eye, Scar 77, The K Code Plan and others – under the name of Graham Hutchison, combining these with non-fiction under his full name such as Footslogger and Arya: The Call of the Future (1934), which Wheatley owned. In 1933 he founded the tiny fringe Fascist party the National Workers Movement, which in 1936 became the no larger National Workers Party. Seton-Hutchison seems to have been the only member.
Seton-Hutchison was also a member of the Nordic League, along with Captain Archibald Ramsay (who led the Right Club, a coalition of extremists), William Joyce, and Crowley’s old disciple Major-General J.F.C.Fuller. Originally called “The Hooded Men” or “The White Knights of Britain” the Nordic League was set up by Germans and was effectively the Nazi Party in Britain, actively dedicated to the German cause: for this reason MI5 considered Joyce, Fuller and Seton-Hutchison to be German agents.
Seton-Hutchison believed the Franco-Soviet Pact was “an armed alliance, not between nations, but between the criminals, all of whom are Grand Orient Freemasons or Jews.” Interestingly enough Wheatley blamed Grand Orient Masonry for the decline of France in his Fifties newspaper articles, and he even attacks it in The Devil and All His Works, in the Seventies.
Seton-Hutchison was a decent man and he even had a sense of humour, drawing a caricature of himself in one of the inscribed books he gave to Wheatley. At the same time he was insanely anti-Semitic. He not only authored the pamphlet Don’t Send Your Son to the Shambles of a Jew-Made War but he was far more extreme than Mosley, and it is clear in his case that anti-Semitism at this level is not some kind of moral failing but a mental illness: Seton-Hutchison distrusted Mosley because he thought he was controlled by Jews.
A good deal of more mundane Thirties anti-Semitism had a left-wing, anti-capitalist quality (an old French description calls anti-Semitism “socialism for fools”) but it is the paranoid and irrationally totalising quality of this really full-blown anti-Semitism that led Orwell to isolate it as something distinct from xenophobia, amounting to “an essentially magical doctrine.”
Crankier still, but harmless, were the British Israelites. A well known piece of doggerel from the period ran “How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews”, and it might seem eccentric of Him until one realises that references to Jews in the Bible should actually be read to mean “the British”, specifically those of Anglo-Saxon descent, who are therefore “God’s Chosen People.” This radically changes our understanding of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament.
The word “Saxon” itself is derived from “Isaac’s Sons”, and “British” from the Hebrew “Berith” (covenant) and “Ish” (man) so the British are strictly The Men of the Covenant. The Oxford English Dictionary seems completely unaware of this and is little help to the British Israelite cause, which also argues that the prophet Jeremiah was born on an island off the coast of Scotland and that Jerusalem was actually Edinburgh.
Regarding the Anglo-Saxons as a Lost Tribe of Israel did not entail anti-Semitism, and most British Israelites regarded ‘real’ Jews as kindred rather than impostors, although later American developments of British Israelitism have been more morbid, and at least one believer has been shot dead by the FBI.
The British Israelites were very interested in Pyramidology, which may be how Wheatley encountered them: he owned a number of books on this, but he also owned books about British Israelitism itself, and books by prominent British Israelites on other subjects, suggesting he may have known them socially. It seems unlikely that Wheatley believed in British Israelitism, although he may have found it intellectually entertaining. The belief that the Anglo-Saxons were God’s Chosen People was not taken lightly, however. It was less about superiority than duty, and a special responsibility to guide and even save the world: this would certainly have struck a chord with Wheatley, and with many others of his generation.
*
One night the Wheatleys went to a party at a flat in Hallam Street, given by the socialite and horror writer Sir Charles Birkin. The young crowd were mainly debutantes and Dennis and Joan felt like “fish out of water” until they met a more serious guest, a tall man in his mid-thirties with immense charm and a striking Wellingtonian nose. This was Maxwell Knight, a very queer fish indeed, who was a key player in MI5 and became an inspiration for Ian Fleming’s spymaster ‘M’.
Like Wheatley, Knight had been on the Worcester, he was a great fan of John Buchan, and he was interested in the occult. The Wheatleys invited him over for drinks at St.John’s Wood and gradually got to know this strange man, whose great passions were jazz – he played the clarinet and drums – and animals. He generally had something living in his pockets, and visitors to his flat might encounter grass snakes, a parrot, a couple of ferrets, some salamanders, a giant toad, or a bush baby. It was this side of his life that later made him a popular children’s naturalist and broadcaster, ‘Uncle Max’, author of books such as How To Keep an Elephant, Be A Nature Detective, and Reptiles in Britain.
Knight dabbled in crime fiction and was a member of the Paternoster Club: the Paternoster file simply lists his profession as “Author”. He had published a thriller, Crime Cargo, and as their friendship grew, he dedicated his second book, Gunman’s Holiday (1935) to the Wheatleys. Like Wheatley, he had combated the General Strike and had been involved in the murky overlap between the State and private intelligence, where merging and interdependent far-Right organisations such as the “Industrial Intelligence Bureau” and Admiral Sir Reginald “Blinker” Hall’s “National Propaganda” and “The Economic League” all flourished.
Knight had worked for the Industrial Intelligence Bureau and been a member of the early British Fascists (or Fascisti, in the Italian style, led by a remarkable woman named Rotha Linton-Orman, not to be confused with the later British Union of Fascists). He was their Director of Intelligence from 1924–27. On leaving, he published a letter in their paper, The British Lion, assuring his comrades that he had not been dismissed for stealing the office dog’s milk and he had not joined the Communist Party, but “I am going where I can still keep an eye (or even two) on any undesirables, inside or outside the movement, who may seek to make trouble for us.”
Knight’s fiction shows the casual prejudices of its period, and in person he loathed not only foreigners and Communists but Jews and homosexuals. Knight had three unconsummated marriages, and is now generally believed to have been homosexual himself. The period he met the Wheatleys was an unhappy one because his first wife had committed suicide: at the time this was rumoured to be due to Crowley’s influence, but it was due to marital difficulties. In retrospect, a former MI5 colleague thought “his flair for espionage was all of a piece with his feeling for the occult and his clandestine sexual leanings.”
Although his own feelings were for the Right, Knight was in charge of MI5’s department B5(b), which scrupulously monitored and infiltrated both left and right-wing extremists. Despite personal tragedy, professionally he was coming into his prime: over the next few years, the period of his closest friendship with Dennis and Joan, he broke the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring (pro-Russian), wound up Captain Ramsay’s Right Club (pro-German), had Mosley interned, and thwarted a plot which came frighteningly close to keeping America out of the war. It was only when he hounded a harmless pacifist named Ben Greene on suspicion of being a Nazi agent, forging a letter to frame him, that he was felt to have overstepped the mark and his star began to wane.
*
The Wheatleys came to call Knight “Uncle”, and he became a pivotal figure in Wheatley’s life. He was a ruthless and manipulative man, making use of associates as varied as Tom Driberg and William Joyce, and Wheatley himself seems to have been a victim of his deviousness.
For now, Knight wanted to know what was going on at Oxford University. In February 1933 the Oxford Union had passed a motion, proposed by Professor Joad, “That this house will in no circumstances fight for its King and country.” This was widely reported and Hitler took it as an encouraging sign, easing the world further down the path to war. Many undergraduates and bien pensant young people, like the Auden gang, were also attracted to Communism; one of them later remembered singing songs “of unbelievable absurdity,” like the one about the Soviet Air Force with the chorus “And every propeller is whirring “Red Front” / Defending the USSR!”
Bill Younger was now an undergraduate at Christ Church, and Knight asked Wheatley if he could have a word with him; he wanted Bill to keep an eye on the student body. This was the beginning of Bill’s career in MI5, and he soon learnt that his history tutor, J.C.Masterman, was also an MI5 man.
*
Along with extremists of the Left and Right, Knight seems to have thought occultists needed watching, perhaps because of their potential for Masonic-style networking. One of his early employers, Sir George Makgill of the British Empire Union and the Industrial Intelligence Bureau, was concerned to monitor “all forms of subversion including Communism … the international traffic in drugs and the traffic in women and children … [and] unmasking the cult of evil of which Aleister Crowley, alias the Beast, was the centre.”
Aside from his professional interest, Knight was fascinated by Crowley. If Knight felt himself deviant in any way, then Crowley’s outré reputation would probably have appealed to him, and he was also philosophically interested in the occult for its own sake (“always searching for other meanings to life, other reasons for being, and he used to discuss them … avidly”).
Wheatley is sometimes said to have introduced Crowley to Knight. Knight told his young nephew Harry that he and Wheatley both went along to Crowley’s “occult ceremonies” (and that “They jointly applied to Crowley as novices and he accepted them as pupils”) but this seems like one of Knight’s lies. Crowley wasn’t conducting ceremonies at this period; he wasn’t likely to initiate anyone into much more than the mysteries of a good lunch, and then only if they were paying; and as we have seen, Wheatley was hardly in a pupil or novice relationship with him. But it was a good story for a nephew, especially given Wheatley’s public image as the author of The Devil Rides Out. As Knight used to tell his agents, “If you are going to tell a lie, tell a good one and stick to it.”
*
The Devil Rides Out was still Wheatley’s only occult book, and the Orientalist streak in his psyche was just as strong. During the filming of The Forbidden Territory Wheatley had met George Hill, a flamboyant, swordstick-touting former British agent in Bolshevik Russia. Among his many stories, he had apparently brought the Tsarist crown jewels out of Russia. Hill also had experience in Turkey, and now Wheatley drew on this to write his seventh novel, The Eunuch of Stamboul.
Set in a Turkey which, “despite its surface modernity, still held all the beauty, cruelty, romance and intrigue of the timeless East,” Eunuch features a conspiracy to overthrow Kemal Ataturk’s recent modernisation and start an Islamic Jihad, which could spread from Turkey to the Balkans and beyond. The action begins in London, where Captain Swithin Destime saves Diana, an English woman, from being sexually assaulted by an arrogant foreigner, Prince Ali, socking him on the jaw. Before long Destime finds himself in “that cruel city of the Sultans” face to face with the grotesquely obese eunuch, Kazdim; police chief, monster of elaborate cruelty, and “completely Oriental – subtle, shrewd, sadistic.” The British Embassy represents a haven of decency.
The Eunuch of Stamboul gives the reader a Turkish travelogue (including the mysteries of the kebab, a delicacy then unknown in Britain) and an insiderishly informed insight into current affairs and recent history. All this is interwoven with Wheatley’s characteristic snakes and ladders – “Mr Dennis Wheatley is a past-master,” said the Morning Post “at getting his heroes out of one danger that looks inevitable and deadly and putting them at once into another, still more inevitable, still more deadly, and getting them out of that” – and his equally characteristic trademark love story. It climaxes with the spectre of dreadful female degradation just narrowly avoided, as Diana is told she will have to “kiss the feet of the Descendant of the Prophet” – none other than Prince Ali – “and, receiving, permission to advance, [press] her lips to each of his legs in turn, inch by inch as she crawls forward on her belly …”
The Eunuch of Stamboul sold well, and it was filmed in 1936 as The Secret of Stamboul, with James Mason. Wheatley wasted no time before embarking on his next book, the first of his ‘lost civilisation’ novels, They Found Atlantis, in Wheatley’s account a sunken land that once stood in the Atlantic, “the original Garden of Eden as far as the White Races go.” William Beebe had recently set a new record for diving in his “bathysphere” and published an account of it in his 1934 book Half Mile Down. He found more life down there than anyone expected, including unknown species at depths previously thought to be almost lifeless, and observed the phenomenon of “submarine blue”:
We were the first living men to look out at the strange illumination: and it was stranger than any imagination could have conceived. It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner … the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings … It actually seemed to me to have a brilliance and intensity which the sunshine lacked …
Wheatley was inspired by Half Mile Down, and as they submerge his argonauts find “the light had darkened to a deep violet blue and still had that eerie unearthly quality about it”. They include deep-sea explorer Herman Tisch, a young duchess named Camilla, a Russian count, and a “dago”film star, who all find themselves hijacked at sea by super-crook “Oxford Kate.”
The effetely sophisticated Kate, a man, is one of Wheatley’s oddest creations. He embodies exaggerated “Varsity” sophistication of the Brian Howard variety, but with criminal cronies whose talk recalls The Limper’s henchmen: “Oxford’s no skirt an’ he’ll make it hot fer you plenty if you don’t make it snappy”.
There is plenty of action and romance in the submarine paradise they discover, until things are ruined by the dago, who is a cad. It is one of Wheatley’s best non-supernatural thrillers and Wheatley dedicated it to Beebe, who wrote him a two page letter praising it.
It is a precarious Eden. As “small warm pagan goddess” Lulluma explains to the count as they lie down together, their cardinal rule is never even to mention Evil. In a decade that was ticking away towards war, Wheatley’s Atlantis has effectively survived outside of time and passed into “that happy state where it no longer has any history to record” (a “Happy state indeed,” says Doktor Herman Tisch, “for history is only a record of man’s brutality and folly caused by fear.”)
Along with Half Mile Down and Conan Doyle’s lost world stories, notably The Maracot Deep, there is more than a touch of Shangri-La about this beautiful Atlantean civilisation, which also happens to revere the ancient sign of the swastika:
Then she proceeded to give them both the benefit of the cumulative experience of the women of her race … When she had done she kissed them both, [and] made the sign of the Swastika on their foreheads, breasts and thighs with a curiously scented oil from a little bottle.
Despite their narrative power and their oblique engagement with current affairs, They Found Atlantis and The Eunuch are a generically backward-looking and dated style of thriller. Soon, however, Wheatley would surprise himself, and put together a book so radical it would even be mentioned in a Times editorial.
1 Churchill told Mussolini “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I would have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”
2 There is no mystery or ambiguity about this, although Joyce’s untrue story has been repeated in print. In a vivid eyewitness report, an MI5 observer saw him slashed after the meeting at Battersea turned into a general melee, with attempts to storm the stage and seize the Union Jack. Bleeding massively, his life was probably saved by a policeman who half carried him to medical help, while an associate named Webb marked his assailant and brought him down with a blow to the head from a heavy spanner. Public Records Office, file KV2 / 245.