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Dennis Yates Wheatley January 8, 1897-November 11, 1977
Birth Date: January 8, 1897 Death Date: November 11, 1977 Genre(s): MYSTERY/CRIME/SUSPENSE FICTION; FICTION Table of Contents: Biographical and Critical EssayJump to Additional DLB Essay(s) on This Author: British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918-1960 WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
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Dennis Wheatley, who also wrote history and political analysis, was called "Prince of Thriller Writers" by a critic in the Times Literary Supplement (8 June 1940), and this motto was emblazoned on the spines of the collected edition of his works. In his lifetime he published more than sixty volumes of fiction, principally in the fields of adventure, espionage, and historical romance. They sold over twenty million copies. The majority of them are long, three hundred to four hundred pages, for he believed in giving the reader his money's worth. Wheatley's works of fiction can be divided into six categories: four sets of books with continuing characters (the Duke de Richleau, Gregory Sallust, Julian Day, and Roger Brook), plus stories of black magic and straight adventure novels. The hero of each series was developed to exist in his own world, as though the books in that series formed his official biography. For example, novels about the Duke de Richleau were designed to fill in gaps in the character's life, which extends from 1894 to 1960. Dennis Yates Wheatley was born in London, 8 January 1897, and educated at Dulwich College, on board H.M.S. Worcester, and privately in Germany. He served in the Royal Field Artillery, the City of London Brigade from 1914 to 1917, and then with the Thirty-sixth Ulster Division between 1917 and 1919, when he was gassed and invalided out. His father and grandfather before him had been vintners, so it was natural for him to join the family wine firm, Wheatley and Son, in 1919 after his military service. He became the sole owner of the firm on his father's death in 1927. Prior to that, in 1923, he married Nancy Robinson; they had one son, Anthony, and were divorced in 1931. Wheatley's career as a writer began in the 1930s. The firm of Dennis Wheatley, Ltd., was affected by the Great Depression in the early 1930s, and the company went into liquidation with Wheatley himself sustaining a loss of several hundred thousand pounds. With his new bride, the former Joan Johnstone, Wheatley practiced every possible economy including limiting themselves to a glass of sherry each in the evenings. Encouraged by his wife, who had read his short stories in manuscript, Wheatley bought some paper and sat down to write a thriller. The result was Three Inquisitive People (1940), a detective story which involves formal deduction in which Richard Eaton's mother is murdered in her Mayfair flat. In quick succession Wheatley wrote several short stories, selling one ("The Snake") to Nash's in London and Cosmopolitan in New York, and wrote a second novel, The Forbidden Territory (1933). Both he and his publisher (Hutchinson and Company) thought this a much better story than Three Inquisitive People, which they had accepted, so it was published first. Determined to help market his own work, Wheatley sold some pictures and furniture and used the money to print two thousand postcards advertising the book, which became a worldwide best-seller. Alexandre Dumas was a great influence on Wheatley, who ascribed his lifelong interest in history to reading his novels. The characters in The Forbidden Territory have direct counterparts in Dumas. The Duke de Richleau himself is Athos, the conservative Richard Eaton is d'Artagnan, Simon Aron (the liberal Jew) is Aramis, and the democratic American, Rex van Ryn, is Porthos. Wheatley readily acknowledged that The Golden Spaniard (1938) was his version of Dumas's Twenty Years After (1845), while The Prisoner in the Mask (1957) was inspired by the Man in the Iron Mask section of Dumas's The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848-1850). Following Dumas's lead in The Three Musketeers (1844), Wheatley saw the potential for writing several stories about a single set of characters, but he did not want to confine himself to endless sequels. Again following the practice of Dumas, he alternated stories featuring the duke with others about Gregory Sallust. Wheatley took nearly a year to write Black August (1934), his Wellsian account of a Russian revolution set in the future (roughly 1960). The hero, Sallust, was based in part (his appearance and personality) on a friend of Wheatley's from World War I, Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe, was to appear in ten additional novels, the majority belonging to a series of spy thrillers set during World War I. Black August is greatly informed by Wheatley's knowledge of the Soviet Union, which he displayed in his 1937 biography of the Russian marshal, Kliment Voroshilov. After two novels (Black August and Contraband, 1936) with Sallust as hero, Wheatley conceived the idea of using him in a series set during the early years of World War II. The first novel, The Scarlet Imposter (1940), sent Sallust into Germany as a spy and involved him with the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Wheatley quickly followed up the success of this with a direct sequel, Faked Passports (1940), which continued Sallust's adventures in Germany and during the Finnish-Russian War (1939-1940). Since he had not published two consecutive books about the same character before, he was uncertain whether to continue with the Sallust saga or to turn to another subject. He left it up to his readers by including a request for suggestions at the end of the second novel. When the votes were tallied, he began the third in the series, The Black Baroness (1940), about the 1940 German invasion of Norway. Anxious to find a way to use his imagination on some project more directly connected with the war, he accepted an offer from the British Intelligence branch, M15, to write a paper outlining measures for countering a possible invasion of Britain. The reception of this by the Imperial General Staff encouraged the production of further papers on resistance to invasion and the utilization of the Home Guard for village defense. This led to his accepting a position as a member of the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet from 1941 to 1944. In 1945 he was made a wing commander on Sir Winston Churchill's staff. He was awarded the Bronze Star by the United States for his services to the Allied war effort. After the war the Wheatleys bought a two-story Georgian mansion, Grove Place, in Lymington, a small, ancient town, about halfway between Southampton and Bournemouth. Wheatley and his wife expended much time and money restoring the house and grounds. Wheatley also devoted much time to raising his son by his first wife and the sons of his second wife by an earlier marriage. While a member of the Joint Planning Staff, Wheatley acquired an intimate knowledge of many matters which could have been used as background for his thrillers. Unfortunately, the Official Secrets Act prevented him from capitalizing on this source. He confided his dilemma to Air Commodore Kenneth Collier, then director of plans, who provided a solution. He suggested Wheatley set his stories in Napoleonic times. From this germ came the inspiration for his post-war stories about Roger Brook. The Roger Brook series began with The Launching of Roger Brook in 1947 and was carefully planned from the start as a finite series with a specific number of volumes. Twelve volumes covering the period of 1783 to 1815: the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and Roger Brook's missions for Prime Minister William Pitt were conceived, written, and published over a twenty-seven-year period. The subplots running throughout the series include Brooks's love affair with Georgina Thursby, his erstwhile mistress, and the antagonism with the school bully, George Gunston, later Brigadier Gunston. Individual novels involve his search for the lost Dauphin, the reconciliation between Napoleon and Josephine, a plot to assassinate the emperor, and the daring rescue of his own daughter at a Black Mass on Walpurgis Night. The series has received much praise for the skillful way in which Wheatley combined his melodramatic plots with accurate historical detail. Wheatley only describes his fictional heroes in general physical details. For example, de Richleau is a slim, delicate-looking man with an aquiline nose, a claret-colored vicuna smoking jacket, and gray "devil's eyebrows," who enjoys his Hoyo de Monterrey cigars. Gregory Sallust is satanic, sardonic, and cynical, with a lanternjawed face and a white scar running from his left eyebrow to his dark, smooth hair. His background is filled in with paragraphs of block description, as is that of his chief, Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust. A lone wolf, Sallust is the ideal hero who will dare anything, if the stakes are high enough. Wheatley was one of the most financially successful writers in the field of the occult. A totally serious, self-conscious student of the subject, he used his novels as vehicles for a coherently developed theory of Black Magic. Personally, he claimed to have never attended or assisted at an occult ceremony and that his knowledge came from research, but a reader of The Devil Rides Out (1934) or The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948) would come away convinced that the author believed in what he wrote about. Some of his other Black Magic novels are not as convincing as these. The diabolists could just as well have been gangsters. Wheatley's reputation as a writer of occult fiction is out of proportion to the actual number of books he wrote in that genre. The Lymington edition of his collected works labeled only one fifth of the volumes as belonging to that subseries. As far as his actual belief is concerned, the closest Wheatley ever came to subscribing to any organized religion or cult was his belief in reincarnation. His political views are apparent and undisguised in all of his works. One need not read between the lines to decide that he was a monarchist, chauvinist, racist, and individualist, yet his readers never seem to have complained. Apparently enough of them shared his views or just enjoyed his exotic situations for his books to continue in popularity. One of Wheatley's contributions to the mystery field, his crime dossiers, underwent a renaissance in the 1980s when they were reissued. Planned and executed in collaboration with J.G. Links, the crime dossiers were murder mysteries in which the physical clues (photographs, broken matches, cablegrams, newspapers) were actually reproduced in the publications. Readers could have the satisfaction of solving the mystery by examining the same clues, in a physical sense, as the detective. The solution was in a sealed envelope. They inspired a number of imitators in both their incarnations. The four titles were Murder Off Miami (1936), Who Killed Robert Prentice? (1937), The Malinsay Massacre (1938), and Herewith the Clues! (1939). Wheatley's life apart from his writing sometimes appears as if it consisted of equal parts of public service, travel, bricklaying, and gracious living. His tremendous output can be attributed to a disciplined work schedule. His secretary would arrive at half past nine in the morning for about an hour of dictating replies to his correspondence. From half past ten to one o'clock he worked on his current book. After lunch he would continue for half an hour, take a nap, be awakened for tea at four o'clock, and continue work until dinner. He often worked after dinner until midnight or two in the morning. This schedule was kept up six days each week. Each novel was a combination of the background history of its locale and the plot of the story. They were uniformly 160,000 words long, or twice the length of the ordinary thriller. In a day when most writers had become automated to the extent of composing their novels on the typewriter, Wheatley still wrote in longhand, in pencil, with a good eraser. He never corrected his manuscripts until most of the book had been written, but he used four people besides himself to proofread the galleys.
After having decided that Desperate Measures (1974), the final Roger Brook novel, was to be his last work of fiction, he began work on his autobiography. In it he claimed that The Second Seal (1950), a novel of the Duke de Richleau's life during World War II, was his best work. In failing health Wheatley devoted the last few years of his life to continuing his memoirs. Planned to appear in five volumes, he had only completed two when death came on 11 November 1977. With the overall title of The Time Has Come (1978), the first two volumes give quite detailed accounts of his life to the end of World War I. Two more volumes, edited from his notes by Anthony Lejeune, were published posthumously (1979), beginning with 1919 and containing the story of his career as a writer through World War II. Wheatley wrote to entertain and was paid well for his success. That his works do not seem destined to survive him makes him a probable source for studies in popular taste in the second quarter of the twentieth century. FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Written by: J. Randolph Cox, St. Olaf College Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 77: British Mystery Writers, 1920-1939. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Bernard Benstock, University of Miami and Thomas F. Staley, University of Tulsa. The Gale Group, 1989. pp. 315-322. Gale Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography
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