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Press review for The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley
"For readers of a certain age, the mere mention of the name Dennis Wheatley (born in 1897) summons up images of naked virgins splayed across altars, goats’ heads, chalices of blood and fat men in robes. In a word: satanism. At the height of his career, Wheatley’s chunky paperbacks crammed bookshop shelves: The Devil Rides Out (made into a memorable Hammer film), To the Devil — a Daughter (also a Hammer film), Gateway to Hell. Wheatley wrote in all sorts of genres, from historical romance to science fiction, but it was his satanic novels that really shifted units. By the end of his life, in 1977, he had sold some 50m copies, and was firmly established as Britain’s best-loved occultist.
It might seem reasonable to guess that Wheatley had himself plunged deep into satanist circles, perhaps even been a practising magus like the infamous Aleister Crowley. Well, yes and no, though mostly no. Wheatley was not entirely a calculating cynic, and though he wrote these tales of devilry mainly because he had discovered that they were highly profitable, he also genuinely believed in supernatural forces of some kind. Not, though, quite the kind you might have expected. The heroes of his books, in which good always triumphs over evil at the 11th hour, are usually Christians, and use prayer and the cross as holy weapons, but Wheatley himself privately despised Christianity as a life-hating, killjoy thing. Quite widely read in world religion, he came to a firm belief in reincarnation, and prayed daily to nebulous entities he called the Lords of Light.
As to supernatural encounters, he claimed to have had at least three or four terrifying experiences of evil, including an alarming night when he called on the devil to help him win at cards — and started winning with eerie success; and a grotesque exorcism, at which a black cloud floated out of a possessed woman’s mouth and disappeared into a cold leg of mutton, which began to swarm with maggots. As Phil Baker points out in this first full biography of Wheatley, this last anecdote is suspiciously similar to a tale by RH Benson; and even if Wheatley did not simply lift it from Benson, it is striking that most of his supernatural reminiscences were written in his later years, when he had an image to sustain, and are seldom mentioned in his earlier diaries or notes.
Baker also shows that Wheatley’s apparently profound learning in the black arts was mainly a matter of deft note-taking or good old fashioned plagiarism. Until 1934, when he hit on the fresh idea of combining the traditional spooky tale with lots of car chases and hand-grenade attacks, Wheatley had shown next to no interest in matters occult.
The splash was made with The Devil Rides Out; Wheatley occasionally chafed against being solely identified with devilish romps, but he was a good enough tradesman to recognise a cash cow when he saw one. Sadly, he lived just about long enough to notice that his books were beginning to fall out of popular favour. In more brutal times, his action scenes had started to seem a trifle pallid, not to say corny; and his sex scenes, which helped boost his popularity with adolescents, were no longer raunchy enough. And then there was the matter of his politics. Almost every one of his novels has a generous dollop of right-wing propaganda, cheerful enough in the earlier books, but increasingly rancid in the welfare-state years. It reached the point where Wheatley was seriously proposing that satanism was at the heart of British trade unionism and black militancy.
But this career profile is only part of the story told in Baker’s thoroughly entertaining biography. Wheatley’s life is also the fairly ripping yarn of a young man who, by a combination of industriousness and sheer luck, managed to accomplish his boyish dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman. His family had done well in the wine trade, and though he yearned for a more aristocratic way of life, for a while he did quite well in the family business, too. He just about scraped a commission in the army for the great war, but for a writer of thrillers, he had a disappointingly placid life: the sole melodramatic event of his early years was the murder of a good friend, Eric Tombe, a fascinating, self-created decadent and con man.
The real adventure of Wheatley’s life came in the second world war, when he worked as an adviser to the War Office. His greatest achievement in this field was the production of a 15,000-word paper entitled The Invasion and Conquest of Britain, an imaginative exercise in what the Nazis were planning, which shook our high command to their boots with its sheer “swinishness”. This was probably Wheatley’s finest hour, though he seems to have made a valuable contribution to other parts of the war effort, too. Baker has uncovered a fascinating episode in which Wheatley produced an anonymous novel aimed at the Islamic nations, calculated to make the faithful distrust all Nazis. What a shame to see this rather gallant, swashbuckling entertainer decline into a sour and vulgar reactionary in his later years; but what fun the old devil gave us in his day. "