‘For my generation of Essex teenagers, Dennis Wheatley’s novels represented the essential primer in diabolism,’ Ronald Hutton, the historian and expert on paganism, recalls.
‘For my generation of Essex teenagers, Dennis Wheatley’s novels represented the essential primer in diabolism,’ Ronald Hutton, the historian and expert on paganism, recalls. It wasn’t peculiar to Essex. In the Sixties, reading Dennis Wheatley was something one did to prove one’s daring — and to get the atmosphere right for spooky parties. We may not have realised that they were seriously dated; that they represented a British tradition of gentlemanly adventure (which Colin Watson neatly dubbed ‘snobbery with violence’); or that we were engaged in having our cake and eating it too — for the books contained enough suggested sex and actual violence to satisfy the depraved attitude of 16, while ensuring that right triumphed in the end.
Wheatley was born in the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (somehow even that seems appropriate) and apparently under a lucky star. Coming of a family of high-class grocers, he volunteered at the outbreak of war and was commissioned, but despite being determined to see action he never seems to have been in serious danger. After the war he took over the wine-merchant side of the business and set about converting himself from a temporary to a permanent gentleman, aided by two remarkable gifts — for promotion, and for making (and keeping) useful friends. Unfortunately (as it seemed then) the early Thirties was not a suitable time for lavishly presented catalogues of rare wines; Wheatley’s firm was taken over, leaving him with plenty of time for writing.
This may not have seemed an obvious choice. Wheatley had managed to avoid most forms of education, and his favourite reading was Dumas, Orczy and Anthony Hope. But during the war he had met a charming devil called Eric Tombe, who set him on a very different course of reading — ‘aestheticism, decadence and esoterica’. Tombe lived up to his lack of principles: after the war he became a con-man and was eventually sensationally murdered by his personal thug (a crisis that introduced Wheatley to the world of private detectives, and in which he was lucky to escape police interest himself). Tombe was to live again in Wheatley’s novels as Gregory Sallust, ‘a cynical but brainy devil’. Wheatley — fundamentally a simple man — was fascinated by Evil while firmly remaining on the side of Good. During the second world war his contacts got him into Deception, where, as well as providing extremely practical advice for citizens in case of invasion (and initiating the policy of removing station names to confuse the enemy), he was tasked with imagining the Nazi plans for the invasion, and was later gratified to find he had been on the right lines.
Wheatley’s novels were enormously successful: in the Sixties he had 55 books in print and was selling well over a million paperbacks a year. It is not difficult to see why. He provided clear conflicts of Good and Evil and had a talent for nailing archetypes, coupled with a simple determination to entertain. He wrote that ‘people who live in miserable rows of grim little houses don’t want to read about other people who live in miserable rows of houses’. He had a poor prose style, but a superb grasp of plotting.
Wheatley is almost forgotten today (lucky to the last, he lived to the age of 80, despite a life of heroic self-indulgence) and one might wonder if there is a case for 609 pages about him. In fact Baker, critically sifting the evidence and placing Wheatley with perfect accuracy in the English class system, makes his case admirably. He provides us with a good story, well told, and plenty of jokes. Wheatley would have been delighted.
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