Crowley was always on the lookout for disciples and associates with money or journalistic influence, and he would have liked to continue his acquaintance with Dennis Wheatley (“Public Thriller Writer No.1”, as he was known in the Thirties). They had several friends in common, including Tom Driberg and Lord Donegall, an aristocratic journalist and radio personality (“wonderful time at Punch's club with Donegall”, Crowley wrote of a night in October 1932; Punch's was at 5 Waverton Street, Mayfair, now demolished, and figures in Wheatley's thriller Three Inquisitive People).
But Wheatley was less keen to see Crowley again, and seems to have used pressure of work as an excuse, after which Crowley's communications take on an increasingly jibing quality. “Most ingenious,” he wrote at one point, “but really a little Ely Culbertson, to advertise your love of rare editions in a thriller blurb!” (Ely Culbertson was an American bridge player, whom Crowley evidently found vulgar).
Crashing through short-term addresses as usual, in October-November 1934 Crowley was staying at the Milestone Hotel, Kensington Court (opposite Kensington Gardens). He had been abrasive (“Rumpus at Tombstone,” he wrote in his diary like the title of a cowboy novel: “Farewell speech – very loud and clear in main lounge. ‘I think everyone in this hotel should know that there is a spy to listen in to telephone conversations. And I warn you all to beware of blackmailers.’”). That was 29 October. He then seems to have moved to the Hotel Washington on Curzon Street (now the Washington Mayfair). But on 9 November, the day after he lost his appeal against Nina Hamnett and Constable publishers, he had to write “Hotel chucks me out!!”
Wheatley's novel, The Devil Rides Out, went on to become the greatest popular occult novel of the twentieth century, as Dracula is of the nineteenth. In it, his hero the Duke de Richleau – who leads a thoroughly Mayfair life, with a Rolls-Royce, a smoking jacket, and coincidentally a flat on Curzon Street – saves a girl called Tanith from Satanists, and prevents a war with Nazi Germany.
On Halloween, 31 October 1934, the first serialised instalment of The Devil Rides Out appeared in the Daily Mail, and Crowley wrote Wheatley a note on Hotel Washington letterhead: “Dear Dennis Wheatley,” it said, “Did you elope with the adorable Tanith? Or did the witches get you Hallowe’en?”