by Roger Dobson
The critic J. Randolph Cox wrote that Wheatley’s ‘supernatural manifestations are often described in too much detail for them to be truly frightening’. Wheatley admired Machen’s skills as a terror-weaver. If only he had studied Machen’s subtle methods of keeping his horrors veiled. In To the Devil—A Daughter when Satan appears to our heroes in a crypt they wisely keep their backs to him. The episode is all the more effective for its subtlety. Curiously, in The Devil Rides Out it is claimed that the Devil is a bogeyman invented by the Church, who does not exist as an entity, yet by the time of Gateway to Hell de Richleau accepts that Satan is a real being. This is an interesting theological switch. Did the concept of the Devil boost sales?
A further curious contradiction exists. Any reader would assume from his black magic stories that Wheatley was a devout if unorthodox Christian. As he wrote in Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts: ‘And should you ever be confronted with an evil manifestation, have no fear. Pray for help. It will immediately be given to you. Make the Sign of the Cross and “thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night”.’ He claimed to pray to ‘the Lords of Light’: he apparently swallowed this aspect of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical farrago. No one has yet proved that the Lords of Light do not exist but it might be unwise to place one’s trust in them. A fortnight before his death Wheatley accepted conditional baptism from the Bishop of Peterborough, an old friend.
It was the depression of the 1930s that turned Wheatley towards writing fiction. He inherited the family’s Mayfair wine business in 1927, and his clients included kings, princes, dukes and millionaires. The Wall Street crash and the resulting depression left him heavily in debt. Encouraged by his second wife Joan, he thought he could perhaps make fifty pounds from a novel. Henry Dewhirst, a psychic Wheatley was impressed by, the original for Wheatley’s ghost-hunter Neils Olsen, urged him to take up authorship, prophesying that his books would sell in their millions. He named a date seven weeks hence. Wheatley said his agent later sold a book to Hutchinson on that date.
As an author Wheatley often had difficulty distinguishing between good and bad ideas. Lovecraft was cursed by a similar problem: he was an imaginative genius who dreamed up the Necronomicon and witch-haunted Arkham yet he trusted readers would be unnerved by whistling cosmic octopi. Lovecraft successfully managed to ruin many of his stories by introducing climaxes where, for example, a ghostly entity’s ‘titan elbow’ is revealed. Rather than being spine-tingling this seems funny. Who else, other than Wheatley, would call a protagonist, even if it is just a nickname, Toby Jugg? The hero of To the Devil and The Satanist Colonel Verney has the nickname ‘C.B.’, for ‘Conky Bill’, from the cloak-and-dagger merchant Maxwell Knight who had a Wellingtonian nose. Hammer wisely altered the character to a Wheatley-like author, John Verney, played by Richard Widmark, who called the company ‘Mickey Mouse Productions’. The most unbelievable element of the film is that Verney’s occult novel, The Devil Walks Among Us, carries a photograph of the author on its front cover.
Other flaws abound in Wheatley. De Richleau’s lecture about the reality of magic in The Devil Rides Out is repeated almost word for word in Strange Conflict, just as Conan Doyle repeated a chunk of Holmes’s deductive reasoning in ‘The Cardboard Box’ from ‘The Resident Patient’: doubtless the mix-up was due to Watson confusing his notes. In The Devil Rides Out, after rescuing Simon Aron from the thrillingly described sabbat Rex dresses him in the only clothes he can find: shorts, a cricket cap and bicycling cape. Wheatley probably regarded this as a bit of light relief amid all his horrors. Simon’s clobber amuses de Richleau if not the reader.
Wheatley’s opinions of the occult were fascinating and perplexing. In 1956 he wrote a series of articles on Black Magic for a Sunday paper, reprinted in Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts. He apparently followed Montague Summers’s line that a global occult conspiracy operating, with black masses celebrated in the world’s great cities. Readers wrote to him claiming to have been entangled with such sects. One woman said she had been sold to the Devil as a child by her father: the inspiration for To the Devil—A Daughter. The heroine Christina Beddows has been dedicated to Satan from girlhood. She is the lynchpin in a plot of Augustus Copley-Syle who sets out to create a homunculus. Once he arrives on the scene in Chapter Fourteen the book takes off and becomes almost as compelling as The Devil Rides Out.
In 1949 Wheatley briefly corresponded with a Tory MP, Sir Waldron Smithers (a fine name for a supporting Wheatley character), who wanted facts about such practices. Phil Baker writes: ‘Wheatley was not particularly keen to be questioned about this, and in fact he must have known that however useful it might be for potboiling and propaganda, there was an embarrassing shortage of Satanic practice in 1940s Britain.’ The occult revival, as part of the counter-culture, did not emerge until the 1960s. Wheatley’s own books seemed to fuel the public fascination with Satanism. He denied this, but the law of influence suggests it was so: countless little girls have dreamed of becoming ballerinas after seeing The Red Shoes.
Sinister forces began gathering in the 1950s. The detective Robert Fabian, John Gawsworth’s Duke of Verdugo, published London After Dark (1954) which told, in Wheatleyan prose, of a Satanic temple in Bayswater. By the altar was an African idol, the ju-ju, ‘rubbed to a greasy polish by the ecstatic bare flesh of the worshippers’. The police were apparently powerless to act, though it is not clear why. Wheatley alluded to this account in his Sunday Graphic articles (‘women were giving themselves up to hideous eroticism with a great carved ebony figure’), and made fictional use of Fabian in To the Devil. He has Molly Fountain, the book’s heroine, have a character say that Fabian ‘worked in close collaboration with C.B. You have no idea of the horrors they uncovered.’ But wasn’t Wheatley ‘stimulating the curiosity that is feeding this evil?’ he was asked in a radio interview. No, he claimed; his books stood as warnings. As Timothy d’Arch Smith has observed: ‘Wheatley actually did the occult a great disservice in that he reduced hermetic science to the rogering of virgins on altar tops, but goodness what fun the books were.’
Phil Baker entertainingly charts Wheatley’s dealings with occult associates such as Crowley, Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed, the author of The Black Art (1936). Rollo appears as Copley-Syle’s Egyptian servant in To the Devil. Wheatley hailed these individuals as ‘top boys in that line’. Wheatley’s relations with Summers were especially curious. Summers loved The Devil Rides Out and, like Crowley, dined with him. One weekend Wheatley and his wife Joan visited Summers at his home, Wykeham House at Old Alresford, Hampshire (haunted, like many of Montie’s homes), where they were alarmed to find a score of enormous spiders on their bedroom ceiling. ‘When I mentioned this, he replied only, “I like spiders”; and in his garden my wife came upon the biggest toad she has ever seen.’ Summers claimed that this was, in fact, a reincarnation of a dear friend and, although this might seem unlikely, who can prove he was wrong? After taking Wheatley into a room containing only a pile of books on the floor Summers offered to sell him a rare book. ‘When I refused to buy it, I have never seen such malefic anger come into the eyes of any man,’ wrote Wheatley. Summers, like many a freelance, was often chronically short of funds. Wheatley arranged for a telegram to arrive summoning him and Joan back to London which at least shows Wheatley’s gentlemanly side: most people would simply have packed up and left. Wheatley never saw Summers again but the satanic villain Canon Copley-Syle in To the Devil—A Daughter has Montie’s rotund form, piping effeminate voice and long white hair and dresses in the style of a Restoration bishop. ‘He was dressed in a black frock-coat, ribbed satin vest, clerical collar, breeches, gaiters and black shoes with silver buckles; all of which added to the impression that he was a divine of a past generation.’ Wheatley acknowledged Somerset Maugham’s lead in using Crowley as Oliver Haddo, the villain in The Magician (1908). Wheatley himself, after a lifetime of gourmandising and smoking ended up looking like an elderly, portly twin of Charles Gray, who played Mocata so brillian
tly in the film of The Devil Rides Out.
Wheatley’s occult associates: Crowley, Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed.
One of the oddest aspects of the Wheatley-Summers relationship is that Wheatley recounts a story Summers told him of an exorcism he claimed to have conducted in rural Ireland. The story is told in fictional form in To the Devil—A Daughter:
The place was deep in the country, so the wife had prepared a meal. In honour of the priest she had brought a leg of mutton, but at the time the case proved a very stubborn one. The possessed man became violent, struggling and blaspheming, and had to be tied down. For over two hours the priest wrestled with the fiend, conjuring him to come out without success; but at last he triumphed. A wisp of evil-smelling black smoke issued from the cottager’s foaming mouth, sped across the room, apparently passing through the leg of mutton, then disappeared through the wall. When the exhausted victim had been put to bed the priest and the rest of the family sat down to supper, but they were unable to eat the mutton. When it was touched it fell from the bones, absolutely rotten and alive with maggots.
In the account in Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts it is the farmer’s wife who is possessed. In the novel Molly Fountain relates the incident, saying it was told to her by the priest, ‘a most saintly old man’: a description that hardly fits Summers. This fascinating story bears striking similarities with ‘Father Meuron’s Tale’ by R.H. Benson from A Mirror of Shalott (1907). In the story, set on an island, La Souffrière, the possessed character is, one infers, a poor black woman, and at the end it is bread and mutton that pullulate with worms. Why did Wheatley not recognise the story or not have his attention drawn to it? A Mirror of Shalott was published by Wheatley’s own publisher, Hutchinson. ‘Father Meuron’s Tale’ was reprinted in Dorothy L. Sayers’s collection Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928). Could it be simply a case of life imitating art? This is merely one of the many enigmas surrounding the life and times of Montague Summers. No one has ever penetrated to the bottom of Summers’s life, and, at this late stage, it seems unlikely anyone ever will.
Wheatley’s adventurous fiction can be traced back to his childhood love of the boys’ paper Chums and Dumas, Baroness Orczy, and The Prisoner of Zenda, with bands of intrepid friends bound together by undying loyalty triumphing against impossible odds. Kitchen-sink Realism played no part in his works. Writing a preface to a book by Dumas he praised the author’s championing of ‘loyalty, courage, and fortitude’, and he regarded his own books as promoting such virtues. In The Golden Spaniard (1938) Wheatley ingeniously had his heroes take opposing sides over the Spanish Civil War: de Richleau and Richard Eaton support the monarchy and, with their liberal sympathies, Simon and Rex back the socialist cause, just as Dumas had sometimes placed his musketeers on opposing sides in his novels.
Curiously, Wheatley’s books never took off in the U.S. though he was published there. The Biggles books suffered a similar fate. A Ballantine Books advertisement puffed Wheatley as coming ‘from England, the home of witches and black masses’, which is one way of describing this blessed plot.
In his writings Wheatley drew connections between occult groups and communism and trade unionism. Did he truly believe this conspiracy theory or only pretend to believe it with an eye on his sales? By the 1960s Wheatley had become ‘Britain’s occult uncle’, hailed by the press as ‘the man who knows more than anyone else about this strange, evil cult’. He certainly claimed to have insight into occult groups, quoting an MI5 friend (Maxwell Knight? famous as a yarn-spinner) telling him, ‘Believe me, Dennis, I would rather be up against a combination of the most dangerous German and Russian agents I have ever known than up against “The Brothers of the Shadow”.’
A few years later horror assumed a darker face, with the Charles Manson murders, The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Wheatley’s books seemed quaint by comparison and so, after his death, he assumed dinosaur status.
Wheatley’s thrillers featuring Gregory Sallust and his historical series with Roger Brook often make gripping reading. The Brook series ambitiously covers the French Revolution and the Battle of Waterloo: Brook is a British spy who infiltrates Napoleon’s court, allowing Wheatley to chart much of the action from a French viewpoint. These two secret agents, created long before James Bond, are so dynamic they make 007 look like an amateur. Wheatley was the undoubted master of the cliffhanger. A chapter of They Used Dark Forces (1964) ends: ‘As [Martin Bormann] spoke he pulled open a door on his right and signed to Gregory to go through it. A moment later Gregory found himself face to face with Adolf Hitler.’ How can the reader not proceed?
Wheatley’s fertile imagination was put to good use in the Second World War. As a member of the War Cabinet’s Joint Planning Staff he dreamed up deception operations to fool the Nazis. He was involved in Ewan Montagu’s ‘Operation Mincemeat’ (The Man Who Never Was ruse) and ‘Operation Copperhead’, in the ‘Monty’s Double’ mission, with the actor Clifton James impersonating Montgomery in the Mediterranean, successful deflecting the Nazis from the invasion of Normandy.
Like Sax Rohmer and Robert E. Howard, Wheatley is best read in wide-eyed adolescence. Wheatley often wrote considerably below his powers: he was capable of greater things. At least he managed to complete all his sagas: in The White Witch of the South Seas (1968) Gregory Sallust is reunited with his great love Erika Von Epp and lives happily ever after, while de Richleau in Dangerous Inheritance and Roger Brook in Desperate Measures (1974) go to their eternal rewards. The elderly duke falls victim to a heart attack after bringing off one last coup while Brook and his lover Georgina are menaced by a huge wall of water after a dam bursts. While their doom is sealed, he has the presence of mind to speak of ‘a new beginning’, which naturally led fans to believe he might survive the dam collapse like Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls and just as de Richleau had returned in Gateway to Hell; but Wheatley was finished with fiction.
For all his faults, clichés and racial slurs, Wheatley is more satisfying to read than the idiocies of Dan Brown. When one grows weary of the complexities of Proust and Henry James there is always, when in the right mood, Uncle Dennis to turn to for a few hours of innocent and harmless enjoyment. Proust and James are all very well in their way but their works contain a sad insufficiency of virgins being deflowered on altars. Wheatley will probably always have readers no matter how low his critical reputation sinks. He merits rescuing from the dusty shelves of second-hand shops.
With thanks to Phil Baker and Charles Beck.
Roger Dobson with Mark Samuels, B.F.S. Fantasycon,
Britannia Hotel Birmingham, 1998.
CARTOGRAPHER OF MYTH: JOCELYN BROOKE AND THE LAND OF LOST CONTENT
Previously unpublished
Books beget books. A passion for a writer encourages the serious reader to quest after those works which the favoured deity admires, was influenced by, alludes to or steals from. Through serendipity and fate, authors are often discovered by more routes than one. Often, however, the reader lacks the perception to realise that a new world is beckoning. And with stupidity the gods themselves do battle in vain. . . . Take for example the case of Jocelyn Brooke and the book collector (let us call him)—a cautionary tale indeed. The collector—he is a Machen enthusiast—will inevitably encounter that slight but well-crafted essay, Brooke’s The Birth of a Legend (1964). Brooke’s name means very little, but the collector mentally files it away among the list of authors for future examination. Brooke published some books about orchids, didn’t he? And wartime reminiscences? Orchids are beautiful to look at but dull to read about for the non-specialist. And yet the name lingers, for The Birth of a Legend is wonderfully done.
Some years later the collector comes across Brooke’s Orchid Trilogy. He prides himself on his ability to determine whether a book is worth time and effort from a rapid riffle. The trilogy appears to be about orchids. Having been riffled the memoirs are, a little sadly, returned to the shelf. They have failed the acid test
: the collector’s reliable antennae resolutely refused to quiver. Orchids indeed! Botany is all very well for naturalists and flower-pressing infants but life is too short to wade through an autobiographical three-decker devoted to the subject. No, sadly Brooke is not for him and may safely be forgotten.