Dennis Wheatley 1897-1977

I’ve just been re-reading a book by the now forgotten author Dennis Wheatley.  He was born in South London, to a middle class family in 1897 and was sent to a good school (Dulwich college), but was expelled, allegedly for forming a secret society.  He wasn’t into schooling and then ended up in the Merchant Navy.

 Soon afterwards he served as an officer in the First World War.  His family wine business occupied him after he left the army in 1919, but by the 1930s, it was doing badly and he decided to sell up and become an author.  He wrote his first novel in 1932, but it didn’t get published for some time.

He wrote historical and contemporary thrillers with a strong military bent.  He had war and “secret ops” and propaganda experience which helped him with his plots.  He also had some interest in the occult, and wrote several Black Magic based thrillers though he always warned his readers against getting involved in such things.  

He was an extremely conservative thinker and felt that Britain was “going to the dogs” and that socialist reforms would make people lazy and weak.   In his writing he usually champions the conservative cause, backing the English Tories against the Whigs and the British government against the French revolutionaries or Napoleon.

He published his first novel “Three Inquisitive People” in 1933 and it sold very well, and he went on with his writing career. His heroes are usually aristocratic and independent minded and often pretty ruthless in how they achieve their ends.  He is not greatly sympathetic to left wingers but he is usually fair to them, and while there are times when he comes across as dated, and bigoted, generally speaking, he was a good story teller.  His works are well researched and while he is not an elegant word smith, he knows how to keep a readers’ attention and to be a page turner. His Gregory Sallust series, about a former army officer who is involved in spying during World War Two, and who marries a beautiful German aristocrat who is anti-Hitler, are said to have been a partial inspiration for the James Bond novels.

His women characters are usually less active than the males, but are often involved in spying as well, and they are not above using their physical charms to lure people into confiding in them, and using sex appeal to contribute to the causes they serve.

However, he is sympathetic to women, and usually if not quite the equals of the male adventurers, they are seen as fairly much equivalent.  As a man of his time, he does not like women to be quite as promiscuous as men, and doesn’t expect them to be as active physically but there is definitely a role for them and he does not criticise female characters for being sexually active, but celebrates it. One of his best novels, Desperate Measures, convers the end of Napoleon’s reign, and Waterloo, where Roger Brook, his British agent, uses his identity as Colonel De Breuc to foil the Bonapartist cause, and tires to marry his beloved mistress Georgina.

Dennis Wheatley was married twice, and died in 1977.