Wheatley had included his own overdraft in the firm’s liabilities, causing Fearon and Block to settle it for him when they took over. When this was brought to their attention by accountants they denied having agreed to it. There was about £4000 at stake – around £150,000 today – and Wheatley was afraid that he was facing prison.
Wheatley probably did think of his overdraft as part of the firm’s business; spelling out his position to Joan in November 1929, he had described himself as “virtual owner,” with “a personal credit for any reasonable amount which goes with such a position.” But now he was suspended as a director pending investigations.
It had been Wheatley’s practice to drop in on the office in the evenings to see if any cheques had arrived. Now, fearing that the locks might be changed, he made one last raid-like visit. Joan drove them over, and Wheatley rescued his love letters and personal papers.
Wheatley was still heavily in debt to tradesmen. He owed rent on Manson Mews, he had burdened himself with expensive extra cellarage, which he was finding hard to get rid of, and he had to find Nancy’s alimony. The take-over problems deepened when debts owed to Wheatley and counted as assets had subsequently failed to materialise, turning into bad debts (“the Slump had played the very Devil with everybody’s finances”). The sum in dispute was now over £6,500.
The story of how Wheatley started writing was part of his personal myth, and it became pebble smooth with telling. The idea was all Joan’s (“wonderful Joan”). “Why don’t you write a book?” she said. Wheatley didn’t think he could, but in the hope of making perhaps fifty pounds he turned his hand to a thriller.
In fact, as we have seen, he had long wanted to be a writer. He had written a novel, tried to write plays, and completed several short stories when he lived with Nancy. The new factor was that now he had time on his hands; as a still captive director of Fearon and Block, he was effectively barred from working for another firm. There was really nothing to do but write.
*
Wheatley always seems to have inspired loyalty, and before long a letter arrived from his old cellarman, Lewis. Writing from Willesden, he told Wheatley he heard he was writing a book and hoped it would be a success, adding that there were still Wheatley ghosts in the cellar; “I don’t like the outsiders coming and upsetting them.”
Within a few years Lewis will figure in Wheatley’s fiction. For now, however, he sat down to write ‘Who Killed Her Ladyship?’ The title is an uninspired juxtaposition of pure genre with snobbery, but the answer is interesting. Wheatley had come to resent and even hate his mother and Sir Louis Newton for not helping him, and Her Ladyship, Lady Elinor, is based on Wheatley’s mother. She has remarried to Sir Gideon Shoesmith, a man not unlike Sir Louis. Her son from her first marriage, Richard Eaton, is a bibliophile facing bankruptcy, who runs a small press like the Golden Cockerel (Wheatley collected Golden Cockerel books). He has doubled his business but is undercapitalised and gets caught up in the Slump. He receives no help from his mother, who is under the malevolent influence of Sir Gideon.
After repeated blows to the base of the skull with a blunt instrument, the unconscious Lady Elinor is drowned in the bath. Sir Gideon hangs for her murder, and in due course Eaton inherits a fortune. In a striking instance of the pleasures of authorship, it is clearly the wishful writer who “dunnit.”
The book is largely of interest as the first meeting of the four friends who figure in Wheatley’s fiction: along with Richard Eaton, who faces prison and even spends time on remand, we meet his loyal friend Simon Aron, who has a “pronounced Semitic nose, a pendulous lower lip and very quick, black eyes.” Meeting for the first time on the night of the murder, and initially regarding Simon Aron as a suspect, are the Duke de Richleau and Rex Van Ryn.
Richard and Simon are based on Wheatley and Meryvn Baron, but the Duke and Rex are ideal creatures of his imagination, representing all that Wheatley thought was best about the Old and New Worlds. Rex Van Ryn is a hulking American aviator – combining very Thirties preoccupations with flying and physical stature – and entirely modern; he even surfs. On the evening of the murder he is missing the new Noel Coward revue because his father has urged him to have dinner with the old Duke: “We people spend a lot of time seeing the Pyramids, and Notre Dame, and Stratford, and places – well, the Duke, to my mind, is all these in one, he’ll give you the idea what Europe really stands for.”
The Duke de Richleau is a distinguished, delicate-looking man with “devil’s eyebrows.” He is living in exile from his beloved France, after his role in a plot to restore the French monarchy, but fortunately he is a keen Anglophile. He has great respect for the British sense of individual liberty and “sporting fairmindedness” along with their breakfasts; he doesn’t want kidneys and kedgeree himself, but he is glad to know they are there.
The Duke has a flat full of old treasures in the same building as the sterile, nouveau riche flat of Eaton’s mother, but he first entertains Rex at his club, the Mausoleum Club, “behind closed doors through which the word socialism has never penetrated.” The Duke is, as he explains, somewhat “out of tune” with modern democracy.
Almost from the start of his career Wheatley was labelled as a distinctly reactionary writer, but it is worth noticing that his first novel refuses the anti-Semitism of the period. In lower genres such as the thriller, particularly in the hands of once popular writers such as Sidney Horler, remarks about oily Jews and “Levantines” are routine. The work of Graham Greene had to be tactfully edited after the Second World War to remove anti-Semitic passages, and there are flashes of anti-Semitism in writers as respectable as Isherwood and even the early Orwell (“it would have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew’s nose,” he writes of a genuinely loathsome individual in Down and Out in Paris and London).
Anti-Semitism was sweeping the planet: a Japanese acquaintance explained to Harold Acton that the Chinese were vile because they thought of nothing but money; “they are the Jews of Asia”. In London the celebrated black American musicians Layton and Johnstone, who played at society parties, also performed at the Café de Paris. On a quiet night around 1930 Johnston looked at the sparse audience and went back to his dressing room shouting “They’re Jews! I’m not going to sing to such a small crowd of terrible people.”
London hostess Emerald Cunard was giving a party for the Prince of Wales, and when it was going sluggishly she exclaimed that she hated all Jews. Immediately the party seemed to spring to life. “Not that I really hate them,” she explained next day, “but I wanted my party to be a success.”
We might have to look more closely at Wheatley’s peculiar consciousness of Jews later, but for now we can give him a clean bill of health. In fact, by the grotesque standards of the day, Wheatley’s creation of a steadfast band of loyal chums, one of whom is thoroughly Jewish and plays an admirable central role, is almost heroically not anti-Semitic. (“I tell you, Van Ryn,” says the Duke about Aron; “I like this young man”)
The larger model for the chums is the Three Musketeers: De Richleau is Athos, Rex is the good natured giant Porthos, Simon is the clever and subtle Aramis, and Richard Eaton is the character Wheatley had always identified with: “a more restrained, English version of the inimitable D’Artagnan.” It was to be several years before Wheatley’s novel was published, and then under the title of Three Inquisitive People, but there was no stopping Wheatley now that he had taken up writing. Before finding a publisher, he was already sending the friends off on a new adventure, this time deep into Bolshevik Russia.
Spending his days at home, Wheatley was seeing more of Joan’s children and taking an interest in their education. History was always his subject, and to bring home the reality of time he made a “history kite” with string. This showed that if six thousand years was ten feet, then the French Revolution was only three inches behind 1932.
Wheatley was still working hard on short stories but he had little luck with them, and eventually gave up on short fiction altogether. Whatever makes Wheatley’s novels viable is largely absent from his short stories. Several read like the work of an early twentieth-century English schoolboy: Wheatley prints his first story, written at the age of fourteen, in Meditteranean Nights, and it is no worse than some of the others.
Wheatley was dining one night with Alan Sainsbury – later Lord Sainsbury – and his wife Doreen at their house in Chelsea when Doreen drawled, “I thought of the most lovely title for a story the other day. I am sure it has enormous possibilities, though I can’t think what they are. Dennis, do write a story called ‘Orchids on Monday’.”
Always keen to fit in and be fun, Wheatley promptly rushed off and did just that (“That’s them – orkidds they is. I never did ’old wiv ’is way of doin’ things.”) There are more ghastly working class types in ‘The Deserving Poor’, from the same period. This is a tale about the dangers encountered when giving money to down and outs (“Gawd bless yer, Lidy”). Aside from the usual obsession with money and a keen mistrust of the lower classes, it is notable for two things: firstly, the observation that a heightened emotional state – in this case being in love – can prevent one from becoming drunk, an observation that recurs several times in Wheatley and wouldn’t be out of place in a better writer. Secondly, the mention of a master villain called The Limper (“strewth! You won’t ’arf cop it when the Limper ’ears.”) He is an ex-officer wounded in the First War – hence the limp – who has turned to crime. We have met him before, or someone very like him.
Wheatley leaves no cliché unturned when it comes to foreigners. Chinese villainy was such a stereotype that Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments for Crime Fiction1 decreed “No Chinamen must figure in the story.” No surprise that Wheatley’s story ‘In the Underground’ reminds us “the Chinese are queer people,” and hinges on “subtle oriental poison” in a curio box; “one of those Chinese puzzle boxes.”
Worst of all, however, was Wheatley’s attempt to write in what he hoped was the manner of P.G.Wodehouse, about which no more needs to be said.
*
Among the many friends of Bino was Gerald Fairlie, the man who continued the Bulldog Drummond stories after the original ‘Sapper’ left him the character in his will. Joan had Bino round to lunch with Fairlie and Fairlie’s literary agent – Bill Watt, of A.P.Watt – and the upshot was that Watt took ‘Who Killed Her Ladyship?’ away with him.
Wheatley went to see Dewhirst the seer shortly after this, and Dewhirst at once said “You’ve written a book!” (it is likely Wheatley had confided on a previous visit that he hoped to write). Again and again, Wheatley would tell the story of how Dewhirst predicted good news on the 22nd of the month – in some versions with a publisher beginning with H – and how it all came true: Watt sold his book to the firm of Hutchinson.
Wheatley wrote a number of short stories featuring Neils Orsen, a supernatural investigator inspired partly by Dewhirst and partly by William Hope Hodgson’s character Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Like the Carnacki stories, their central idea is that the anomalous events are sometimes truly supernatural and sometimes the work of earthly trickery.
Wheatley hoped Dewhirst would advise him about his business troubles, but around this time he seems to have had a stroke of luck. Among his papers he was able to produce a carbon copy, albeit typed by himself, of the list of liabilities he had given to Fearon and Block for the take-over. It included his personal overdraft. At the same time Sir Louis Newton – perhaps not as malevolent as Sir Gideon Shoesmith after all – persuaded Wheatley’s mother to pay Fearon and Block the disputed sum on Wheatley’s behalf in a £5000 settlement.
It may be that Wheatley was less vindicated than he would like readers of his autobiography to believe. His account is not entirely consistent: he claims his innocence was proved, and yet the £5000 was still paid back, and his mother long resented it.
Whatever the finer legal points, Wheatley was now free to reclaim his valuable furniture from the office, resign, and offer his services elsewhere. He went to Justerini and Brooks, and kept up a lifelong friendly relationship with the new firm.
Wheatley had now finished The Forbidden Territory, which Hutchinson felt was a better book than ‘Who Killed Her Ladyship?’; the latter was held over indefinitely, and The Forbidden Territory scheduled for January 1933. Meanwhile Wheatley had his first short story accepted for publication.
Inspired by a walking stick owned by a friend, Colonel Roland Lawrence, ‘The Snake’ features an African witch-doctor whose cane turns into a black mamba. Left on someone else’s premises, it can kill in the night and be innocently collected next morning. A similar item had already figured in Sax Rohmer’s The Devil Doctor, with a more this-worldly Holmesian emphasis, but Wheatley’s story concerns “Black Magic” and “the Black Art.” Like the shape-shifting Malagasy in The Devil Rides Out, who turns into the Goat of Mendes, the witch doctor himself somehow becomes the snake.
‘The Snake’ displays a brisk knowledge of dodgy foreign types (“he looked a good half-dago himself, for all his English name, and dagoes always believe in that sort of thing”) and, like many of Wheatley’s short stories, it suffers from a gimmicky twist-in-the-tail ending of the sort then admired.
Wheatley was as pleased as Punch with ‘The Snake’ and its acceptance. It was simultaneously published in the January 1933 issue of Nash’s magazine and Cosmopolitan in the States, and Wheatley sent copies out in December as Christmas greetings, writing “First blood!” on them.
*
The Forbidden Territory was published on the 3rd January 1933. This time Rex is in trouble, jailed in Russia, and the other three rescue him: “Together they had learned the dangerous secret of ‘The Forbidden Territory’ and travelled many thousand verts pursued by the merciless agents of the OGPU.”
Just ahead of publication, Wheatley wrote letters to almost everyone he knew: “Dear Colonel”; “Dear Maundy Gregory”; “Dear Scholte” (his tailor). He sent them to ambassadors, lords, opticians, owners of West Country cider firms and debt collectors. He even managed to send one to Buckingham Palace, thinly disguised as an apology for the non-appearance of that year’s Wheatley and Son diary.
Recipients were urged to ask for the book at their library, and recommend it to their friends. Some of them were quite distant acquaintances (“I fear you will hardly remember my name …”) but people Wheatley knew better were asked to “scatter” the leaflets enclosed, and doctors were requested to put them into the magazines in their waiting rooms. “It does not pretend to be a great literary achievement,” Wheatley wrote, but “with such thousands of books coming out every year, it is exceedingly difficult for a new author to get his work before the public”; “I should be most awfully grateful …”
Wheatley paid for 2,000 promotional postcards, featuring the map from the book’s pictorial endpapers. Again, these bore a request that people should ask for it at their library, and friends were often sent a dozen more to pass onto their friends in turn. This seemed to pay dividends, so Hutchinson printed a further 15,000.
The book was launched with a party in Justerini’s cellars, underneath the arches at Charing Cross. There were plenty of journalists and a few celebrities including Harry Preston, who made a speech and proposed a toast – these old Edwardians loved their puns – to “the two best sellers”. A couple of days later Dennis and Joan threw a smaller party at No.8. Guests played a quiz game about Russia and the book (‘ “Crossing the Forbidden Territory”, with Mr and Mrs Dennis Wheatley’) and copies of the book were given as prizes.
It took off almost at once. The first printing was 1500 copies, but orders came in so fast that there was only time to put the pictorial endpapers into the first batch; the rest had to go out plain. Wheatley told Hutchinson’s to plough his royalties back into further advertising, and the book reprinted seven times in seven weeks.
Wheatley’s self-promotion was unrelenting; he went round the bookshops and bookstalls asking if they stocked his book, and took the manager of the W.H.Smith’s at King’s Cross station for a drink, after which King’s Cross sold seven hundred copies. Wheatley was not only good at writing books, after a fashion, but he was extremely good at selling them.
Westerners were interested in Russia. Not only was the New Statesman predictably full of adverts for trips to the Soviet Union, books from the Russia Today Book Club, and Soviet periodicals in English, but Herge’s first published book – like Wheatley’s – was set there, with Bolshevik agents pursuing its hero in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. The Forbidden Territory became even more topical shortly after publication, when six British engineers were arrested by the OGPU and subjected to a show-trial that Ian Fleming covered for Reuters.
Hutchinson’s described The Forbidden Territory as “a novel of Russia as she is today”, but a sharp reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement suggested Wheatley might have done better to set it in Ruritania, for it was “essentially Ruritanian and good of its kind.”
Many books are “good of their kind,” but Wheatley’s career never looked back. Before long he was ‘Public Thriller Writer No.1’ and ‘Prince of Thriller Writers’, and as late as 1966 one of his books would shift 100,000 copies in ten days. Within a few years The Forbidden Territory had been translated into fourteen languages, and a mid-Thirties jingle ran:
Patagonia to Alaska, Iceland, East to Mandalay
Wheatley thrills his thousands every hour of every day
What was the secret of Wheatley’s success? He was a notoriously bad prose stylist, but this is not to say he was a bad popular writer. His writing is clichéd but rhetorically fluent, and it has a powerful sense of narrative: moments of crisis, relief, and further crisis are alternated relentlessly (in what Wheatley came to think of as “snakes and ladders”). Scenes of crisis and action are extended in prolonged accounts, never thrown away in brief summary, and the narrative is broken at critical moments – often chapter breaks – like the old “cliff-hanging” breaks of Chums-style adventure serials.
Wheatley’s fictions also have a strong romantic interest. They are love stories: in Three Inquisitive People, Rex has a tragically sentimental love affair, and in The Forbidden Territory Richard Eaton meets the woman he is to marry, Princess Marie-Lou, and brings her back from Russia. This enlarged Wheatley’s appeal and market, and his books were read by women as well as men. He was even commissioned to write a straight love story for Woman’s Own.
Wheatley would further explain that he always wrote two books for one and laboriously dovetailed them together: firstly there was the story, “boy jumps into bed with girl” as he summarised it, and secondly there was the research. Wheatley’s books were nothing if not educational, whether it was geography, history, or occultism. And when there were foreign locations, Wheatley’s books were a holiday abroad in the days when ordinary readers didn’t travel.
“People who live in miserable rows of grim little houses,” Wheatley said, “don’t want to read about other people who live in miserable rows of houses.” Wheatley’s books were the absolute incarnation of what a reviewer nicely called “the luxury traditions of the cheap novel.” Wheatley’s own persona became inseparable from this, as he settled into the role of the smoking jacketed gentleman with a splendid library and a fine cellar.
The Duke de Richleau’s Curzon Street flat is furnished with his treasures:
A Tibetan Buddha seated upon the Lotus; bronze figurines from Ancient Greece. Beautifully chased rapiers of Toledo steel and Moorish pistols inlaid with turquoise and gold, Ikons from Holy Russia set with semi-precious stones and curiously carved ivories from the East. The walls were lined shoulder high with books, but above them hung lovely old colour prints, and a number of priceless historical documents and maps.
From Ouida to Thomas Harris, an air of kitschily exaggerated and sometimes woefully inaccurate2 connoisseurship has often been part of popular fiction. But in Wheatley, particularly where food and drink are concerned, it is well informed. Before Ian Fleming, Wheatley was probably the first writer to use real brand names, along with real shops, restaurants and hotels, sometimes with an element of what would now be called ‘product placement.’ The Duke and his friends not only enjoy Hoyo de Monterreys and Imperial Tokay, but also go to the Hungaria, buy drink from Justerini’s, and smoke Rashid cigarettes : “I think they’re the best in London,” says Simon Aron.
With their attention to drink and food (“the bécasse is a bird for which I have a quite exceptional partiality”), their old English values, and the manifest decency of their leading characters, the luxury of the Duke de Richleau books has an almost Christmassy warmth about it, but it is not Dickensian; it is an aristocratic warmth, or an idealised suburban fantasy of it.
As Wheatley explained to an interviewer, the people in those grim little rows of houses wanted to read about “dream lives.” Looking back on his life, he put his success down to hard work, telling a good story, “and never mentioning the kitchen sink.”
*
Wheatley had heard that Edgar Wallace could write a book in a week, and he wanted to try, so he borrowed a cottage from Joe Links and scribbled out Such Power is Dangerous. It took seventeen days.
The power in question is media power, and the book features an attempt to form a world monopoly of film companies (“Combination and Amalgamation are the business watchwords of this era”) masterminded by Lord Gavin Fortescue, a criminal dwarf. Along with the usual love story and plenty of ethnic stereotyping, it shows an acutely Thirties awareness of what literary critic I.A.Richards called “the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loudspeaker.” In the opening chapter, ‘A Plot to Dominate the World’, Lord Gavin explains that through a film monopoly they could not only achieve limitless wealth but
… our sphere of influence would be unbounded. By the type of film which we chose to produce we could influence the mass psychology of nations. Fashions, morals, customs, could be propagated by our will – we should even be able if it suited us to fill a whole people with a mad desire to make war on their neighbour… We should have power to do endless good or boundless evil. No king or emperor would ever have had such power in the world before!
“You’re right,” says his colleague, an American gangster, “– the President of the United States himself would be small fry compared to us – I guess it’s dangerous to think how precisely powerful we’d be.” Wheatley was intensely aware of the power of the mass media, in a period obsessed by the notion of ‘propaganda’: press baron Lord Beaverbrook even described Christ as a “great propagandist”.
Wheatley had meanwhile written Old Rowley, a biography of Charles II. He had hoped this might go into a series of royal biographies published by the firm of Peter Davies, but they turned it down because Wheatley was insufficiently well known. In the event this was for the best: Wheatley sold it to Hutchinson, pitching it to editor Joe Gaute as a good advertisement and promotional vehicle for his other books. They made a good job of it, with illustrations by Frank C Pape, and as an in-joke Pape depicted Joan as the young Countess of Shrewsbury, to whom she was related.
Old Rowley shows Wheatley’s affection for Merrie England and dislike of the Puritans. He sounds a number of contemporary notes, relating the 1660s to the pyjama parties and “bright young people” of the 1920s, and the religious bigotry of the seventeenth century to the “loathing which was engendered in our own population by an exceedingly able Ministry of Propaganda in the late war.” Just as the English believed the Germans crucified prisoners and gouged out the eyes of the wounded, so the Anabaptists believed Catholics ate Protestant children.
Britain was deeply troubled in the early Thirties, with unemployment seemingly beyond the power of parliamentary government: Churchill said that democracy itself was “on trial”, and popular columnist J.B.Morton (‘Beachcomber’) wrote “The machinery of parliamentary government, which works clumsily and laboriously, is incapable of dealing with the kind of crisis we are facing today. You might as well expect a Mother’s Meeting to conduct a military campaign.”
That was Morton not in the Express, where he is remembered, but in the Mosleyite paper Everyman. It is with this national crisis, and the age of dictators, that Old Rowley had its most contemporary resonance, since Charles II dissolved his quarrelling Parliament and ruled as a benevolent autocrat. Timely Thirties lines include “general unrest had reached such a height that revolution was feared by many”; the Whigs, pledged to overthrow the Tories, included “the fanatics and madmen who pester every Government, the human dock rats from Wapping, the hooligans, the jail-birds, and the very scum of the London gutters”; and in due course Charles dismissed Parliament and its “would-be Kommisars”.
In Wheatley’s celebratory summary, Charles dismissed Parliament as “A House of Talkers”, and through his so-called “despotism” he brought about a “happy, prosperous England”; so “Charles, reigning without a Parliament – stands justified.”
In one of the book’s most striking lines, Wheatley recalls the King finding his way “through the stormy night to the shelter and safety of Mosley.” It could be entirely fortuitous, but some readers might consider the careless grandeur of this statement to be an unnecessarily resonant way of telling readers that the King went to the Lancashire town of Mosley.
*
Wheatley hoped to turn Old Rowley into a film, and drafted a script. Imperilled kings were central to his imagination – as in his three favourite books, Zenda, Pimpernel, and Musketeers – so the story of Charles excited him: “chased through the length and breadth of England … for six whole weeks he was hunted like a hare … this ‘Flight of the King’ is the greatest epic of escape in history …”
Nothing came of his film script, and for years he was unlucky with films. Wheatley and his wife were friendly with the Hitchcocks, and Hitchcock admired The Forbidden Territory. There was a plan for Hitchcock to film it, with Gerald du Maurier – already acclaimed as Raffles and Bulldog Drummond – playing the Duke. Wheatley inserted a bold piece of publicity into Such Power is Dangerous: “I figure to make this picture The Forbidden Territory,” says a character:
… It’s a great story – sledge scenes in the snow – aeroplanes – a gun-fight with the Reds in a ruined chateau, and a dash to the frontier in a high-powered car – marvellous material to work on. It’s by a feller named Wheatley – who he is, God knows, but that don’t matter. There’s plenty of love interest too … It’s got the makings of a master film – great spectacle, human interest – and educative value as well.
In another writer this overlap between art and life might be almost avant-garde, despite the asterisk announcing it was available from Hutchinson at 7/6d. In Wheatley’s case, however, a reviewer complained “I do not approve of an author’s boosting a previous book of his own in the text of his new book, and I am astonished that his publishers did not discourage such a breach of literary manners.”
Gerald du Maurier died and was replaced by Ronald Squire, better known in light comedy roles, and instead of Hitchcock it was directed by a B-movie director. Wheatley was disappointed. In the event his mass medium was not to be cinema but print, publishing books that contained deliberate messages, polemic, ‘editorialising,’ and ‘spin’ of a kind more usually associated with newspapers.
*
Wheatley was now settling into the identity of a writer. He joined the Society of Authors and, thinking it was something writers did, he also joined the PEN Club. Then as now, PEN (“Poets Essayists Novelists”) was a worthy organisation, a kind of literary Amnesty International, much concerned with the civil rights of overseas writers.
Wheatley went to a PEN dinner, with H.G.Wells as Chairman, but he was disappointed when he looked around the room. Where were the famous authors? There seemed not to be any there. He persevered with a second dinner, but at this one a member of the Christian revivalist ‘Oxford Group’, associated with Frank Buchman’s American ‘Moral Re-Armament Movement’ – felt the need to stand up at the table and make a public confession of her sins. That was the end for Wheatley, who was further appalled by the fact that PEN organised tours for members to visit other countries and meet foreign authors: “It seemed sad that Britain should be represented by such people.” He resigned.
Far more useful was the Paternoster Club, “the only important literary club in Britain, which is quite unknown to the general public.” This was founded in October 1933 by Bruce Graeme, author of the ‘Blackshirt’ thrillers (Alias Blackshirt, Blackshirt Takes a Hand, Blackshirt Inteferes, Blackshirt Again, and so on). He had been to the Dutch Treat Club in New York, where authors, journalists, and publishers met, and it gave him the idea of starting something similar in Britain.
The Paternoster Club met once a month at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street. Wheatley became Chairman in the second year, and he introduced more journalists including Tom Driberg, who wrote the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily Express, and Bunny Tattersall and Lord Donegall, who held similar posts on the Daily Mail and Sunday Dispatch. The Paternoster Club also included booksellers, from the Librarian at Harrods to the managers of W.H.Smiths railway station branches, and the buyers for the great libraries such as Boots. “Our Hon Sec buys 8,000,000 new books every year, and it can safely be said that 85% of all the books bought in the British Empire pass through the hands of certain of its members …”
Wheatley derived special benefits from being a member of the club’s inner circle, the committee, along with Bruce Graeme, Joe Gaute of Hutchinson, Freddy Richardson of Boots and Cecil Hunt, literary editor of the Mail. As Chairman, Wheatley kept an efficient card index on its one hundred and fifty members, including their CVs, special subjects, recreations and other clubs. Members had a considerable influence over what the reading public were fed with, although they were strictly forbidden to mention the Club itself, leading Wheatley to dub it “The Nameless Club”. It was a superb machine for mutual back scratching,
Through another friend on the committee, Victor McClure, Wheatley became a member of the Savage Club, a club associated with writers. In Wheatley’s day it occupied premises on Carlton House Terrace, but Wheatley was not very excited by it, perhaps because it was not socially exclusive enough. Before long he had set his sights on being a member of Boodle’s.
*
Wheatley was unhappy with the quality of Such Power, but he was told that it was a writer’s third book that really counted, and he put the best part of a year into writing Black August, a novel of Bolshevik revolution in Britain. It is set in about 1960, and yet it often seems more like 1926 or earlier, with communist cavalry clattering down the streets.
Poland and Germany are at war, there is a Fascist puppet king on the throne on France, and Britain is in chaos, with Jewish pawnbrokers kicked to death in the East End, troops firing on crowds, and a “mob” burning the “lovely furniture” of Queen Elizabeth II. Minor characters include Choo-Se-Foo, a wily Chinaman and fraudulent practitioner of Modern Art, but the book is more significant for the appearance of the “cad” who is to be its hero: “The scar which lifted the outer corner of his left eyebrow gave his long, rather sallow face a queerly Satanic look.”
It is Gregory Sallust, the resurrection of Eric, who is to figure in Wheatley’s fiction for another thirty-five years. He lives on Gloucester Road as the lodger of his old army manservant, Rudd, who is based on Wheatley’s old cellarman, Lewis. The orders for Black August were so strong that it reprinted half a dozen times before publication. “Terrific!” said the Press: “It would be a dull dog who could lay it down for longer than it takes to wolf a quick Martini,” said A.G.Macdonnell (a friend of Wheatley). “Mr Wheatley … never lets you down,” said Howard Spring in the Evening Standard (a Paternoster); “I do not remember a more vividly or more cunningly told story” said Ralph Straus in the Sunday Times (another Paternoster). Wheatley’s third book was home and dry.
*
Wheatley had published four books in a year and it was time for a holiday, so he and Joan went to South Africa. Bino was now living there in Gandhi’s old house, having married a well-off South African woman, and the Wheatleys stayed with them. Bino showed Wheatley the Johannesburg slums and told him about the violent communist uprising there in 1922, which Wheatley used for a short story, ‘When the Reds Seized the City of Gold’.
Apartheid had not yet been introduced but there were already serious ethnic problems and it was not safe for whites to be outdoors after dark. Despite that – since real life is never quite as black and white as Wheatley’s fiction – when Wheatley lost his wallet, with his money, passport and tickets, he was pleasantly surprised to find one of the local blacks handed it in.
The Wheatleys returned home via Gibraltar, where Wheatley was “strangely delighted” to see the Gibraltar police wearing English uniforms. Back in London, the Younger boys Bill and Jack were now in their teens and were spending more time with their mother and Wheatley. Wheatley took to the two boys, and Bill in particular – an intelligent boy who had been stricken with polio, which left him small in stature and with a partly withered right arm – became the apple of his eye, somewhat overshadowing his real offspring.
Despite his age, Wheatley said the Younger boys were like “younger brothers” to him (not sons). It is a revealing description, because – perhaps because he had disliked his own father and paternal grandfather – he was not very good at paternal relationships. As for the boys, Wheatley thought they liked him because he had a “happy disposition” and a “jolly time” was guaranteed, while their father was gloomy and bad tempered.
Wheatley put his South African holiday to work with The Fabulous Valley, featuring a lost valley strewn with diamonds, but his research was showing. “This is the place, I’ve not a doubt,” cries a character. “Look! It is exactly as described in Hedley Chilver’s book The Seven Lost Trails of Africa.”
Howard Spring, Ralph Straus, James Hilton (another friend) and several other reviewers praised the book, but a less friendly reviewer said “Mr.Wheatley should make up his mind whether he is going to write a thriller or a travel book.”
Now Wheatley had a new inspiration. He would write a book where his research really would show, and to spellbinding effect. He was going to write a book about black magic.
1 In his introduction to his Best Detective Stories of the Year 1928 (Faber and Gwyer, 1929).
2 “Entering her palatial music-room filled with all kinds of instruments, Eloise sat down at a spinet incrusted with lapis lazuli and silver, and flooded the room with the rich, voluptuous strains of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.” (Ouida)