Dennis Wheatley’s The Eunuch of Stamboul

Published in 1935, The Eunuch of Stamboul is one of Dennis Wheatley’s straight spy thrillers, as distinct from his more famous occult thrillers.

Swithin Destime is a 35-year-old captain in a distinguished British regiment. He has virtually no money of his own and is thus entirely dependent on his army pay but he is content enough. Content that is, until fate steps in in the person of Prince Ali. Prince Ali is a nephew of the last Ottoman Sultan but he also holds a senior position in the new Turkish secular government established by Kemal Atatürk. He is therefore a representative of both the old and the new in Turkey and he is not a man that anyone would want to offend.

Unfortunately Swithin Destime has managed to offend him, in a quarrel over a woman. Prince Ali was trying to take liberties with a young woman, Diana Duncannon, in whom Swithin had a very strong prior interest. In the ensuing fracas Captain Destime knocks Prince Ali down. The fact that Prince Ali was at fault doesn’t help. The prince was at the time a guest of Destime’s regiment, and the British government is very very keen not to cause an incident with Turkey. Swithin Destime has no choice but to resign his commission.

Things look a little grim until Diana’s father Sir George Duncannon, a wealthy banker with extensive interests in the Near East, offers him a job, in Constantinople. Swithin is fluent in Turkish, Greek and Arabic, useful accomplishments since he will be acting as a kind of unofficial spy. Sir George is anxious to invest in Turkey but he has convinced himself that a  major upheaval is coming in that country. He has no idea of the nature of the upheaval - it’s Destime’s job to find that out.

He discovers what appears to be a plot to overthrow the government of Kemal Atatürk. It is not entirely clear what the ultimate aims of the plotters are but they seem to be hoping to restore conservative religious practices and possibly to dispense with the secular government altogether. What really worries Destime is that the conspirators also seem inclined to restore the empire of the Ottomans and to launch a jihad. This could create complete chaos in the Balkans and that chaos could result in the Great Powers being drawn in, leading perhaps to a general European war. While Destime has no particular feelings about Atatürk’s regime one way or the other the prospect of another European war appal;s him. He feels he must do something, although he has no idea what that something might be.

Destime’s efforts tend to demonstrate why espionage is a game best left to professionals. He’s brave and resourceful and reasonably intelligent but he does not know the rules of the spy game and he makes some bad mistakes. Making mistakes is something he can ill afford to do. He is up against formidable adversaries, the most formidable of all being Kazdim Hari Bekar. Kazdim is a eunuch but he has successfully made the transition from palace servant under the Ottomans to policeman under Atatürk and is now Chief of the Secret Police. He is ruthless, cruel, vindictive and very very cunning.

Destime has cause to reproach himself for not handling the situation the way Bulldog Drummond or the Saint would have done. In fact even by the standards of amateur spies Destime commits some spectacular blunders. He is however nothing if not persistent. He just doesn’t know when he’s beaten. He falls into the hands of the bad guys on more than one occasion, he is beaten and humiliated and sentenced to execution. Somehow he manages to come through, partly through luck and partly through sheer pigheadedness.

As well as secret policemen he also has to deal with beautiful female Russian spies and with fellow Britons even more incompetent than himself, plus of course the Turkish conspirators. He can’t go to the Turkish government - they would never believe his story without evidence (which he doesn’t have) - and he has to be careful about involving the British Embassy (he is after all a spy and a potential embarrassment to His Majesty’s Government).

Wheatley is at times prone to giving us extended info-dumps but in this case it’s pretty much unavoidable (unless the reader is already an authority on Turkish history) and they’re actually quite interesting.

This is a typical Wheatley thriller, which means more sexual content than is usual in 30s thrillers, an outrageous but very entertaining plot, a fair bit of violence with just the faintest hint of sadism and a good deal of glamour in an exotic setting. It all sounds a bit like a 30s version of a Bond thriller, which is not surprising since Wheatley was an important but often overlooked influence on Ian Fleming.

The Eunuch of Stamboul is a bit on the trashy side and Wheatley did not quite have the effortless panache of a Leslie Charteris (or an Ian Fleming for that matter) but there’s still plenty of good old-fashioned fun to be had here. Recommended.

Dennis Wheatley's They Found Atlantis

Dennis Wheatley was most famous for his “Black Magic” occult thrillers but these were only a small part of his very large output. Wheatley wrote thrillers, adventure tales and even science fiction. He wrote three lost world novels, including (in 1936) They Found Atlantis.

I happen to be a great fan of lost world stories and Wheatley’s forays into the genre were both interesting and rather idiosyncratic.

An eccentric German scholar, Dr Herman Tisch, is convinced that he has discovered the location of the fabulous lost civilisation of Atlantis. It was located in mid-Atlantic, just south of the Azores. He also believes he has discovered the precise location of the capital city, with its vast treasures. 

The problem is that the city is now a thousand fathoms below the surface of the Atlantic. That problem he has solved by obtaining a bathysphere. Not just a bathysphere, but a very large and very sophisticated example capable of safely transporting up to eight people to the deepest depths of the ocean. 

He does still have one problem though - his expedition will be very expensive and he has no money. He did secure a wealthy backer but alas his patron managed to lose his fortune on Wall Street. Now he has another patron in view - the fabulously rich Duchess Camilla da Solento-Ragina. The duchess, an American beauty, proves to be amenable to persuasion.

Joining the Duchess and Dr Tisch on the German scholar’s yacht are Camilla’s cousin Sally, a middle-aged ex-Royal Navy officer always referred to for some reason as The McKay, Camilla’s business manager Rene P. Slinger and three men locked in desperate competition to becomes Camilla’s second husband - Hollywood star Nicky Costello, a Romanian prince and a Swedish count.

There is however dirty work afoot. A gang of international criminals has a plan to get its hands on Camilla’s millions. What seemed likely to be an amusing cruise with the possibility of making a genuinely important archaeological discovery becomes a nightmare. The gang has no plans for murder. What their ringleader has in mind is much more cunning and much more terrifying.

The first half of the book is therefore mainly a crime thriller, interspersed with visits to the sea bed in the bathysphere. Then it changes gears dramatically as the lost world story takes over. Our protagonists face dangers and horrors of a very different sort, and find Atlantis. Leaving Atlantis will however be much more difficult.

Herr Doktor Tisch was right after all. His theory as to the location of Atlantis was correct, but Atlantis is not quite a dead civilisation after all.

Atlantis is a kind of Garden of Eden. I assume Wheatley intends us to think of it as a Paradise. It’s all free love and everyone is always blissfully happy and there’s no jealousy and no conflict. Or perhaps his depiction of Atlantis is intended to be just a little ironic (although Wheatley was not known for his irony). To me it seems more like Hell than Paradise and the wise happy Atlanteans seem vacuous complacent and horrifyingly shallow. 

There are moments that may strike the reader as rather Lovecraftian. It’s possible, although unlikely, that Wheatley was aware of Lovecraft at that time so the atmosphere is more likely to derive from William Hope Hodgson (who was himself an influence on Lovecraft). Hodgson specialised in weird maritime tales and They Found Atlantis can be thought of as a weird maritime tale.

As you expect from this author there are long passages of expository dialogue but given the nature of the story it’s hard to see how they could have been avoided and they’re not overly clunky. There’s also some black magic!

Wheatley had his weaknesses but he knew how to tell a decent adventure story and this one has some real excitement and quite a bit of action. Recommended. 

His later lost world tale, The Man Who Missed the War, is also recommended.

Dennis Wheatley's Star of Ill-Omen

Dennis Wheatley was famous for his immensely popular occult thrillers but he write straightforward thrillers as well, and even some science fiction. His science fiction output includes the 1952 novel Star of Ill-Omen.

In 1952 flying saucers were a worldwide sensation and belief in them was at least moderately respectable. Wheatley evidently thought they would make a good subject. Being a thriller writer though he liked secret agent heroes so he made his hero, Kem Lincoln, a British secret agent. In the early 1950s you might expect a British intelligence agent to be assigned to a case involving the threat from the Soviet Union or Communist China but Kem’s latest assignment deals with a different menace altogether - the Argentine nuclear menace!

Argentina’s dictator, General Peron, has begun an ambitious nuclear weapons program which has apparently made significant breakthroughs - breakthroughs that would make nuclear weapons much simpler and much cheaper to produce. Or has he? British Intelligence is inclined to think Peron is bluffing, but on the other hand he might want them to think he is bluffing. In other words, it could be a double bluff. Either way Kem Lincoln has to find out what is actually going on and whether this threat is real or not.

Kem has to infiltrate the home of Colonel Escobar, the man in charge of the general’s atomic weapons facility. While he’s doing that he decides he might as well seduce the colonel’s beautiful young wife Carmen. Before Kem can discover Argentina’s atomic secrets he, Carmen and Colonel Escobar are kidnapped by a flying saucer and taken to Mars!

At this point you might be thinking to yourself if this is a Dennis Wheatley thriller why is there no communist conspiracy? Do not panic. There is indeed a communist conspiracy. The Martians have also kidnapped two Soviet atomic scientists plus an MVD man (the MVD being a predecessor of the KGB). The chief Soviet scientist is actually an ex-Nazi scientist with an implacable hatred of the British that has its roots in the Boer War.

There are certainly Martians, but whether there is a Martian civilisation is another matter. What passes for civilisation on the Red Planet is actually a bit like civilisation in the Soviet Union - highly regimented and not terribly inspiring. In fact it’s pretty grim.

In this book the hero has to thwart both a communist plot and a Martian plot, both equally deadly. 

Kem Lincoln is an interesting hero. Many modern readers will doubtless find him to be rather unattractive. Oddly enough the things that make him most unappealing are the very things that make him such a modern hero. Kem Lincoln is a million miles away from the hearty good sportsmanship of Bulldog Drummond, or the clean-limbed decency of Richard Hannay, or even the cheerful sense of mischief of Simon Templar. Kem Lincoln might be daring and resourceful but he is also sexually promiscuous, breathtakingly ruthless, callous, selfish and entirely lacking in pity. In fact he’s much closer in spirit to James Bond than to Bulldog Drummond but even James Bond seems like an old-fashioned romantic by comparison. With Kem Lincoln Wheatley was (perhaps consciously or perhaps unconsciously) edging towards the modern hero who is more anti-hero than hero.

Wheatley’s concept of Martian society might be grim but it’s quite well thought-out. Of course you have to remember than in 1952 a great deal less was known about Mars than was the case just twenty years later after the first space probes reached the planet. Wheatley based his book more or less on what was known at the time and it’s clear he did quite a bit of research. The famous canals of Mars play an important roe in the book - their existence was not finally disproved until the mid-1960s.

On the whole this is typical Wheatley - the infodumps are rather clumsy, the story-telling is vivid and wildly imaginative and totally outrageous, the tone is politically incorrect to a degree that takes one breath away. On the other hand, and typical of Wheatley, it’s often politically incorrect in unexpected ways while being remarkably modern in equally unexpected ways. 

Star of Ill-Omen is odd but entertaining. Recommended.

Dennis Wheatley’s Contraband

Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977) achieved his greatest lasting fame with his Black Magic occult thrillers but they were a comparatively small part of his total output. He wrote in a number of genres, including science fiction and historical thrillers, but a very large part of his work consisted of pure thrillers, including Contraband (the second of the eleven Sallust books and published in 1936).

Wheatley forms an essential link between John Buchan’s Richard Hannay and H. C. McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond spy thrillers of the 20s and the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming which began to dominate the genre in the 50s. Most histories of spy fiction will tell you that Fleming revolutionised the genre by adding generous helpings of sex and graphic violence seasoned with a dash of sadism. This is quite true, but it was Wheatley who took the first steps in that direction. Even in the 30s Wheatley’s books incorporated as much sex and violence as he could get away with, and there is even that very slight hint of sadism. 

There are further significant similarities between the two writers. The opening scenes of Contraband could quite easily have formed the opening of a Bond novel. There is the meeting between the spy hero and a beautiful mysterious and potentially dangerous woman in a casino, there is the emphasis on the world of glamour and money, there are the painstaking descriptions of the trappings of the world of the powerful and wealthy, and the strong suggestion that the hero is a connoisseur of fine food, fine wines and expensive women.

Ian Fleming was a fan of Wheatley’s work and freely acknowledged Wheatley’s influence on the Bond novels.

In Contraband a chance encounter with the beautiful Sabine Szenty in the casino in Deauville puts Gregory Sallust on the trail of smugglers. At least they appear to be smugglers but since this is Wheatley we’re fairly safe in assuming there’s something far more sinister than mere smuggling going on. Scotland Yard is also taking an interest in this case and although Sallust is a patriotic enough Englishman he has his own agenda which does not necessarily coincide with that of the police.

Sabine is up to her ears in this criminal activity but Sallust has fallen for her. This tends to have a slightly unfortunate effect on his judgment. 

Making a reappearance in this tale is Lord Gavin Fortescue, the sinister deformed aristocratic villain of Wheatley’s earlier novel Such Power is Dangerous. And a delightfully malevolent villain he is too.

You might be wondering how Wheatley is going to work the communist menace into material like this but don’t despair - he manages to do so. It’s this angle that makes the book more of a political/spy thriller than a straight crime thriller. Wheatley was somewhat obsessed by this menace and he was astute enough to realise that the most deadly threat is the threat from within, and that this threat was quite likely to come from members of the ruling class. Given that this was the era in which Cambridge University was the KGB’s main recruiting ground Wheatley was (as so often) right on the money.

While this novel does, as indicated earlier, anticipate some of the stylistic signatures of Fleming’s Bond novels in structure it is fairly typical of British thrillers of the interwar period, and while Sallust prefigures Bond in some ways he still has a good deal in common with other thriller heroes of the 20s and 30s like Simon Templar and Norman Conquest. He’s fiercely individualistic and unlike Bond he would never dream of taking orders from anybody.

The book does (like many Wheatley novels) have its clunky moments. There are some lengthy and slightly clumsy expository speeches. On the other hand it also has Wheatley’s virtues - some very well-executed action and suspense scenes, plenty of energy and a hint of outrageousness. 

One of the oddest and most interesting things about Wheatley’s writing was his willingness to utilise the same heroes in books belonging to quite different genres. Gregory Sallust appears in straightforward thrillers such as this one, and in science fiction novels like Black August and occult thrillers such as the excellent and very imaginative They Used Dark Forces. Wheatley in fact seemed to have no regard for genre boundaries - his heroes could just as easily find themselves battling criminal masterminds, international spies or the legions of Satan. In fact you could say that Wheatley created a single fictional universe in which all these threats co-existed.

On the whole Contraband is thoroughly enjoyable hokum. Recommended.

Dennis Wheatley's They Used Dark Forces

Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977) is best remembered today for what he termed his Black Magic novels. In fact these made up only a small part of his total literary output. Most of his books are non-supernatural thrillers including quite a few historical thrillers. To describe the majority of his books as straightforward thrillers would however be misleading since there is nothing straightforward about them. Wheatley’s defining characteristic is the outrageousness of his plots.

Wheatley wrote no less than eleven thrillers featuring super-spy Gregory Sallust, a character who was to have a considerable influence on Ian Fleming when he created James Bond (Fleming and Wheatley had met during the war when both were doing intelligence work). They Used Dark Forces is one of several Gregory Sallust thrillers that are also Black Magic thrillers.

Wheatley’s Black Magic novels included some stories that can be considered to be out-and-out horror (The Haunting of Toby Jugg and The Ka of Gifford Hillary being in my view the best of these) but most of them are best described as occult thrillers - books which are structurally thrillers but include elements of the occult. 

They Used Dark Forces was published in 1964 and it concludes the story of Sallust’s wartime adventures. Sallust has been sent to Germany in the guise of a German officer (he speaks fluent German) to find out exactly what the Germans are up to at their top-secret research station at Peenemünde on the Baltic. What they were up to was in fact the testing of two of the secret weapons project that Hitler hoped would turn the tide of war in his favour. The V-1 was a pilotless aircraft carrying a warhead of just under a ton of high explosive. The V-2  rocket was a more formidable weapon, carrying a slightly larger warhead but quite impossible to intercept.

Sallust is accompanied on this mission by an old friend, Kuporovitch. Kuporovitch is a former Bolshevik general who is actually a convinced anti-communist. While undertaking this mission Sallust will encounter a man who is destined to play a very large role in hi future adventures. Ibrahim Malacou claims to be Turkish but is in fact a Jew, and he is also a Satanist. At this point, if you’re unfamiliar with Wheatley’s work, you might be thinking that this is going to be an anti-semitic novel. Wheatley’s attitudes towards Jews were like his attitudes towards most things, much too complicated to be dismissed so glibly. Wheatley had no particular antipathy towards Jews. Gregory Sallust is suspicious of Malacou because he is a Satanist, not because he is a Jew. And he is prepared to overlook Malacou’s Satanism because Malacou is also fanatically anti-Nazi. Sir Winston Churchill famously remarked that, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Gregory Sallust decides to adopt a similarly Churchillian policy towards Malacou, reasoning that anyone who hated Hitler as much as Malacou did couldn’t be all bad even if he was a devil-worshipper.

The Peenemünde episode occupies the first half of the book. The second and much more interesting half sees Sallust stranded in German-occupied Poland. His attempts to escape back to Britain lead him instead to a German prison where he once again encounters Malacou, and will eventually lead him to Hitler’s bunker. A very dangerous place to be in 1945, so it’s just as well Gregory can rely on getting some help from his old buddy Hermann Goering. If you’re wondering why Goering would be helping out a British secret agent and a Jewish black magician you’ll have to read the book. Suffice to say that it’s exactly the kind of plot you expect from Wheatley, and that he makes it work much more effectively than it has any right to do.

Wheatley had a mind that was much attracted to conspiracy theories and in general his best books are the ones with the most bizarre conspiracy theory plots. Given the enthusiasm of Hitler and other senior Nationalist Socialists for the occult the plot of They Used Dark Forces is perhaps only slightly stranger than fiction.

Fans of Wheatley will not be surprised to learn that Gregory Sallust’s sex life plays an important part in the novel. The use of copious quantities of sex and violence is one of the many elements that Ian Fleming borrowed from Dennis Wheatley.

They Used Dark Forces includes most of Wheatley’s weaknesses as a writer, in particular his propensity for lengthy digressions on military history and politics and his fondness for rather clumsy info-dumps. Personally I see this as more of a feature than a bug, given that Wheatley’s views on military history and politics are so entertainingly provocative and so delightfully politically incorrect. Wheatley may have been a political reactionary but he was a complex, intelligent and often surprising political reactionary.

And the novel also features Wheatley’s strengths, most notably his ability to tell very strange stories very entertainingly.

They Used Dark Forces will delight confirmed Dennis Wheatley fans. If you haven’t yet explored the delights of Wheatley’s fictions it’s probably a reasonable enough place to start that exploration. Highly recommended.

Such Power Is Dangerous

Such fame as Dennis Wheatley still possesses is based almost entirely on his “Black Magic” occult thrillers but these books represent only a fraction of his vast output. He wrote  a large number of straight thrillers as well, of which his 1933 novel Such Power Is Dangerous is an early example.

While this book has no occult elements it does have many of the features that Wheatley fans enjoy so much - an over-the-top conspiracy theory, a bizarre and convoluted plot, a healthy dose of paranoia and a set of ludicrously but delightfully excessive villains. And it has another feature familiar to Wheatley aficionados - an intense dislike of much of the modern world.

In this novel Wheatley turns his attention to Hollywood. You would expect that the villains would be Hollywood studio moguls but, surprisingly, Hollywood’s moguls are for the most part the victims of a conspiracy rather than the instigators of one. A wealthy English nobleman with an insatiable lust for power, Lord Gavin Fortescue, is the chief villain. He has come up with a plan to control the entire world film industry. While he is a wealthy man he does not possess the enormous resources that would be needed to take over Hollywood directly. Instead he has come up with a plan based on using other people’s money and his own very considerable skill in manipulation and financial chicanery.

The idea is to form a gigantic combine. If he can persuade six or seven of the major studios to join forces they will be able either to squeeze out the other studios or force them to join. His intention is that the combine will include not just the American studios but also the major British and German studios (the novel was written at a time just before the Nazis came to power when the German film industry was still a very major player). The idea that the combine would need to include British studios was probably largely a matter of patriotic wishful thinking on Wheatley’s part. 

It should be noted that all the studios, moguls and movie stars mentioned in the book are fictitious although a few at least are clearly based on real people. Percy Piplin is obviously Charlie Chaplin while it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out the identity of the real-life counterpart of the British director Titchcock.

Of course a gigantic conspiracy aimed merely at making money would have held little interesting for Wheatley. The actual aim of Lord Gavin’s plot is to gain almost unlimited power. We are told that whoever controls the world film industry will be in a position to brainwash whole populations, which of course in the 1930s would have been quite accurate. That’s the wonderful thing about Wheatley’s fantastically elaborate conspiracy theories - once you get past their sheer outrageousness they do possess a certain plausibility. 

A British starlet named Avril Bamborough gets caught up in these machiavellian machinations. She also gets mixed up with Nelson Druce, the handsome son of a Hollywood studio chief. Druce becomes the implacable enemy of the Combine although at this stage he has no idea of the identity of the prime mover behind it. Avril will find herself caught up in further disturbing complications, including murder. The forces behind the Combine are not in the least unsettled by the regrettable necessity of murdering those who oppose them.

Lord Gavin Fortescue is a rather splendid villain, a man of immense intelligence, but it is a warped and distinctly unhealthy intelligence.

It goes without saying that there’s a good deal of political incorrectness in this novel, although Wheatley has the ability quite often to be politically incorrect in unexpected ways.  Wheatley was an arch-conservative but not always exactly a typical conservative. Wheatley’s deliciously outrageous political incorrectness is of course one of the chief attractions of his work for a certain class of reader, a class in which I certainly include myself.

Such Power Is Dangerous is not top-drawer Wheatley but it is an unusual and undeniably highly entertaining concoction. Warmly recommended.

The Man Who Missed the War

Dennis Wheatley’s novels were often outrageous in both concept and plotting, and The Man Who Missed the War is Wheatley at his most outrageous. His great gift was that he could take an utterly unbelievable plot and sell it. The more outlandish the plot the more enthusiasm he displayed in telling it. 

The Man Who Missed the War was published in 1945. It’s both a lost world novel and a novel about the war. That might sound like an unlikely combination but such was Wheatley’s imagination that he was able to combine these two contradictory ideas with remarkable cleverness.

In 1937 a young man named Philip Vaudell can see that war is inevitable. He wants to play a role, but not necessarily a conventional one. His father is a naval officer and so Philip is understandably somewhat obsessed by naval strategy. He is convinced that Britain cannot win a war unless she can keep the Atlantic sea lanes open and he has come up with a bizarre but ingenious idea for doing this. Rafts. Huge convoys of rafts. Let the U-boats try to sink those! His father thinks it’s a mad idea and the Admiralty agrees but Philip’s friend Canon Beal-Brookman encourages Philip to press ahead and to form a company to prove the feasibility of the idea. The rather eccentric churchman has a great influence over young Philip, and soon the company is formed.

Of course Philip will have to make the first voyage himself. It turns out to be an adventure beyond his wildest dreams. He must first deal with Nazi agents determined to sabotage his project, and then with a wild Irish-American stowaway named Gloria. He and Gloria start off hating each other but over the course of several years their feelings have been dramatically transformed. 

Yes, I did say several years. This simple Atlantic crossing becomes an epic voyage. Philip and Gloria find themselves hopelessly adrift and are carried wherever the current happens to take them. It first takes them to the desert shores of Africa, and then eventually to the Antarctic. In the Antarctic they discover evidence that one of Canon Beal-Brookman’s more eccentric ideas was in fact perfectly correct. The lost world of Atlantis did exist. And it still exists, in Antarctica.

At least, a lost world exists in Antarctica peopled by the descendants of the lost race of Atlantis. It’s a very strange and not very pleasant world, a world of high scientific achievement and human sacrifice, and the scientific discoveries of this civilisation include a means for controlling the weather.

Now what does all this have to do with World War II? You might well ask. In fact it has a great deal to do with World War II, and a young man who missed the war by being swept away on a raft will eventually play a very key role indeed in the outcome of that war. I won’t spoil things be revealing how this happens. It’s much more fun to let Wheatley slowly unravel his extraordinary plot.

You might also ask, what’s a Dennis Wheatley novel without Satanic conspiracies with political overtones? Well, gentle reader, you need have no fears on that score. As unlikely as it might sound from what I’ve already told you, there are indeed Satanic conspiracies afoot. Conspiracies with very definite political overtones.

And of course there’s sex. An essential ingredient in any Wheatley novel, and here provided by the high-spirited Gloria and her penchant for wandering about naked. Yes, this is vintage Wheatley.

Philip is perhaps not quite a typical Dennis Wheatley hero. He’s very brave but he is a man swept along by circumstances. He does not have the opportunity, until the very end, to show his mettle as a hero.

The pacing is rather slow in the first half of the book, but rest assured the plot does eventually pay off in a big way.

This is fantastic silly fun, utterly unbelievable but absolutely compelling in its sheer bravado and its extreme eccentricity. Wheatley believes it, and you will too. A fascinating and very unconventional lost world adventure. Highly recommended.

The Ka of Gifford Hillary

Dennis Wheatley’s The Ka of Gifford Hillary, published in 1956, is one of the “black magic” novels for which he was most famous although in fact the majority of his very large literary output consisted of non-occult thrillers. While there is no black magic as such in this book there are certainly supernatural, or at least paranormal, forces at work here.

Sir Gifford Hillary is the chairman of a large shipbuilding firm. He is asked by the Minister for Defence to undertake on an unofficial task. The Minister is convinced that the security of the United Kingdom can only be assured by a complete reliance on nuclear weapons and to fund the building of such weapons economies will need to be made in other areas of defence spending. For one thing, the Royal Navy will need to be abolished. Hillary’s job will be to help in creating a political climate favourable to such a drastic change.

Sir Gifford has other problems closer to home. His beautiful wife Ankaret has had many affairs. Sir Gifford has learnt to deal philosophically with the situation. Ankaret is a passionate woman whose physical needs are considerable but she loves her husband and he tolerates her infidelities. But now Ankaret has created a very awkward situation. Sir Gifford has a scientist named Owen Evans living in his house, a scientist who works for his shipbuilding company but also pursues his own pet personal projects, which at the moment consists mostly of working on a death ray. Ankaret has no intention of sleeping with the scientist but she has been flirting with him rather outrageously and now he has become obsessed by her. So obsessed that he has determined to murder Sir Gifford. Which he does. And Sir Gifford has the unsettling experience of watching his own murder.

Gifford Hillary is dead, but to his surprise he is still very much around. He assumes that this strangely ghostly existence means that he is in fact a ghost but the truth is much stranger than that. It appears that the ancient Egyptians were right - a person has not just a soul but several distinct spiritual essences, one of which is the ka. And now Sir Gifford’s ka has become not just a spectator at his own murder but will be the observer of many other disturbing events.

He will watch his wife murder the lustful scientist and then calmly forge a letter in his own handwriting placing the blame on Sir Gifford. Sir Gifford is not angry at her for this. After all he’s dead so she’s not doing him any harm and he rather admires her presence of mind in coming up with such a clever way of evading the law.

Hillary will also become a witness to a communist plot to assassinate the Defence Minister and a series of misadventures (partly his fault) that threaten to ruin the career of his nephew. He has two children of his own by his first marriage (Ankaret was his second wife and was much younger than her husband) but frankly they don’t like him and he doesn’t like them. His nephew has become more like a real son to him.

Hillary can see these events happening but he cannot intervene or make contact with anyone. But somehow he has to foil the communist plot and save his nephew’s career. And perhaps there is a way he can influence events. He has an idea of how this can be done but it will prove to be an exceptionally difficult task. Being dead is rather a big disadvantage but Hillary is resourceful and he isn’t giving up. The results of his efforts will lead him to a shocking discovery about his own death.

It all sounds very silly, and it is, but that was never a problem for Wheatley. He was no great literary stylist, his books suffer from certain characteristic structural faults and his characterisation was pretty sketchy but there was no doubt of his ability to come up with bizarrely fascinating plots that worked in spite of their outlandishness. And there was certainly no doubt of his ability to tell an enthralling story.

One of the characteristic faults of Wheatley’s writing was his propensity for indulging in lengthy digressions on the subjects of his favourite political hobbyhorses. Wheatley’s political views are unfashionable today but he gave a great deal of thought to politics and was often unnervingly prescient. His political conspiracy theories were elaborate and ingenious and enormous fun. He was never afraid of pushing his conspiracy theories too far - he pushed them as far as he possibly could.

The book starts a little slowly - Wheatley was never in a hurry - but once the plot really gets going the tension becomes truly nail-biting. Quite apart from the annoyance of being dead everything seems to conspire against Gifford Hillary. Hillary however is not a man to allow death to stop him from doing what he has to do.

There’s actually considerably more to Hillary’s death and his subsequent ghostly existence  than meets the eye but I don’t intend to spoil what is definitely one of Wheatley’s cleverest plots.

It’s both a political thriller and a supernatural thriller. While Wheatley did not write horror as such, his Black Magic books being more accurately described as occult thrillers, there are certainly some effective and very macabre horror moments in this one.

Wheatley is always good trashy fun, with plenty of excitement and a dash of sex, and The Ka of Gifford Hillary is immensely entertaining. Highly recommended.

Dennis Wheatley’s The Satanist

I know I should be embarrassed by my fondness for Dennis Wheatley’s fiction, but I’m not. We all need our guilty pleasures. It remains a mystery how Wheatley could be, as recently as the 1970s, one of the world’s top-selling authors. And then his audience simply vanished.

The book of his that I’m reading is The Satanist, one of his black magic potboilers. And great fun it is. Those dastardly Satanists are conspiring again, this time with the communists, and it’s not just human sacrifice and unspeakable perversions that are on the agenda. They’ve got their hands on a H-bomb.

It’s all done in Wheatley’s usual style, although with more sex than in his earlier books (this one dates from 1960). Much of the time you get the feeling that for Wheatley the evil satanic rituals were just an excuse to get the female characters naked. But interestingly enough, the lead female character is a very strong character, and very sympathetically portrayed although she’s an ex-prostitute. And he isn’t judgmental about her past. And he displays a surprisingly tolerant attitude towards sex in general, when you’d expect quite the opposite from someone with a reputation as an arch-reactionary. It’s these weird contradictions that make Wheatley so fascinating from my point of view.

He was very pulpy, and delightfully hysterical with his crazy conspiracy theories. Even Mulder would have considered this guy to be a bit wacky, but I enjoy his stuff.

Dennis Wheatley’s The Haunting of Toby Jugg

Toby Jugg, the hero of Dennis Wheatley’s 1948 novel The Haunting of Toby Jugg, is a young fighter pilot in 1942, now confined to a wheelchair after being shot down. He is also the heir to a considerable fortune, a fortune that is being administered by a board of trustees until he comes of age. He is convalescing at one of his family’s country properties in Wales. He is becoming increasingly disturbed by a strange presence, a mysterious shadow cast by the moonlight through a gap in the blackout curtains, a shadow that he is convinced is cast by a malevolent and unnatural entity trying to gain entrance to his room.

Toby is unable to convince anyone of the reality of this entity, and he slowly comes to believe that there is a plot against him, a plot to send him mad, or to make it appear that he is already mad. Is this some form of hallucination? Is this unearthly creature real or a product of his imagination? Do the people caring for him actually intend his destruction, or are they sincerely concerned for a young man whose grip on sanity is steadily weakening?

The story is told in the form of Toby’s secret journal. Wheatley was really a writer of thrillers, some of which involved occult forces and some of which involved purely human evil. It’s really an elaborate and bizarre conspiracy theory story rather than a conventional horror story. It’s impossible to take it seriously, and that’s the very quality that makes it vastly entertaining and extremely amusing even for readers who don’t share Wheatley’s political beliefs. You have to admire someone who can weave together such a complex and eccentric paranoid fantasy involving Communists, Satanists, Freemasons and modern theories of education.

As a horror thriller it’s exciting and gripping – Wheatley demonstrates considerable skill in building up an atmosphere of menace, suspicion and supernatural dread. I don’t think very many readers could approach this book the way its author presumably intended it to be approached, but if you read it with the right kind of camp sensibility it really is outrageous fun.

To the Devil - a Daughter, by Dennis Wheatley

To the Devil - a Daughter, written in 1953, is everything you could ask for in a Dennis Wheatley novel. It has wicked devil-worshippers, outrageous conspiracies, and some amusingly lurid descriptions of satanic rituals.

A businessman makes a deal with a satanic clergymen, and has his daughter Christina baptised into Satan’s church. Twenty-one years later, provided she is still a virgin, she is destined to be the centrepiece of a hideous satanic ritual. As she has been dedicated to Lucifer she undergoes a personality change every evening when the sun goes down. In the hours of darkness she becomes a Bad Girl, giving herself up to all kinds of naughtiness.

Luckily she makes the acquaintance of Molly, a middle-aged English writer who used to work for British Intelligence during the war, and Molly and her son John are determined to save Christina from the clutches of the Satanists, and quite probably from a Fate Worse Than Death.

Wheatley also finds time for his favourite hobbyhorse, the links between Satanists and Communism. It’s all breathless excitement, and a silly but highly entertaining romp. The fact that Wheatley took this stuff seriously just makes it even more enjoyable.

This novel was of course the basis for the last horror movie made by Hammer Studios. The movie doesn’t follow the plot of the book very closely at all, but it’s also great fun in its own way.

The Devil Rides Out, by Dennis Wheatley

Dennis Wheatley is one of those authors who has gone from topping bestseller lists to complete oblivion in the space of less than 30 years. As recently as the 1970s he was one of the most widely read authors in the world, with total sales exceeding 50 million copies. Perhaps surprisingly The Devil Rides Out, originally published in 1934, is the first of his novels that I’ve read.

I was of course aware of his reputation for jingoism, racism, sexism and insanely reactionary political views, and for his unswerving belief that Satanism is a major force in the modern world and that we should have nothing to do with it because it’s really wicked and terribly naughty. He even includes an amusing little warning at the beginning of each of his books, which essentially amounts to “don’t try this at home boys and girls.”

In fact his approach to magic and religion is rather more complex than you might expect from his Colonel Blimp-ish image. He dismisses any idea of the literal existence of Satan or of Hell as simplistic nonsense, and his heroes use Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist and even pagan rituals in their battles with the forces of darkness. He certainly does believe in the forces of darkness though.

When the Duke de Richlieu’s young Jewish friend Simon Aron becomes involved with evil devil-worshippers the duke and his two-fisted Texan friend Rex van Ryn find themselves caught up in a desperate struggle not only to save young Simon but to save the world from an appalling cataclysm. The Satanist Mocata is trying to locate the Talisman of Set, which will not only give him vast powers but also unloose the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (which is how Rasputin started the First Word War of course). Rex meanwhile has fallen in love with Tanith; she’s a devil-worshipper, but she’s not really a bad person and eventually she comes to realise the great peril in which she is putting her soul.

There’s lots of drawing of pentacles, and loads of protective rituals, and there are Black Masses, and a Satanic orgy. The Duke is terribly clever (being an aristocrat that goes without saying in Wheatley’s world), Rex is awfully brave, and Simon (despite his dalliances with the dark side) is really a noble self-sacrificing chap, but will they be able to stop Mocata in time?

It’s all great fun, Wheatley keeps the action moving along, and there’s lots of fascinating stuff about the Left Hand Path and alchemy and Egyptian mythology. It’s actually highly entertaining, and I’m starting to suspect that Wheatley is an undeservedly forgotten author. And his books are readily available at absurdly cheap prices in second-hand bookstores. I also picked up a copy of another of his books, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, which I’m now quite looking forward to.