Dennis Wheatley: The Man Who Monetised The 'Beast'

Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977) is indisputably a giant of modern literary fiction if one measures such things by book sales alone. During the 1960’s he consistently sold more than one million of his novels each year and over forty million across the duration of his colourful lifetime. The majority of his seventy published works orbit political, historical and espionage themed hubs, with just eight concentrating upon the far darker subjects of black magic, occult ritual and the extraordinary phenomena of the supernatural realm. The Devil Rides Out (1934) and The Haunting Of Toby Jugg (1948) epitomise the mesmeric vein of pure commercial gold Wheatley mined to an astonishing degree. He cast his authorial spell over generations of entranced acolytes, having cannily recognised an inchoate appetite for tales with an occult motif. For me, his remarkable literary success is even more intriguing and fascinating than the dark subjects he wrote about!

Wheatley’s magical touch, indeed his master stroke, was to not only perceive a market for his “supernatural thrillers”, but to assiduously research his chosen thematic territory and in doing so, overtly encourage his readers to accept his status as a non-practicing aficionado of all things supernatural. Upon this creative loadstone, he played his next ace and publicly consulted notable and magnetically nefarious luminaries of the clandestine occult arts.

His fiction became a doorway through which the innocent could pass safely to witness the recondite esotericism of the darkly seductive realms of black magic and satanic ritual. Whilst alternative doorways existed, they were intellectually obscure, determinedly off-putting and perhaps critically, a little too close to the demonic fire that fuelled them. He gave his curious readers safe passage upon his Stygian barge with the certainty of a return trip back to suburban normality. A ticket took the simple form of purchasing his books!

Wheatley turned to writing in 1931 as a remedy for his financial woes. The Mayfair vintner business inherited from his father collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression. With a checkered pedigree in the merchant navy and few solid credentials, he rapaciously exploited his network of socially important personages, including significant contacts within the British Intelligence Service. His authorial pen greatly benefited from a diverse range of exceedingly well-placed sources.

His second novel, The Forbidden Territory (1933) was the first of his canon to be published, and dealt with the rescue of an American prisoner from the Soviet Union. It was an instant success. Casting about for an equally enticing theme, Wheatley pounced upon the occult and would go on to put the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown to shame as he consciously fished a rich stream. With little regard for his standing with literary critics, Wheatley set about the materialistic task of manufacturing commercial success. His readers were not short-changed, though this twenty-first century reader found himself wondering what all the audience approbation had been about!

Looking at both The Devil and The Haunting perhaps begins to explain the mystery. On the face of it, both are cracking pot boiler yarns sharing the common theme of diametrically opposed supernatural forces battling for supremacy. Plucky protagonists, exemplars of redoubtable decency are pitted against Satanic forces. The malfeasance of evil miscreants is unleashed upon our intrepid heroes, as they contend with the heinous unnatural crimes of those intent upon immoral gratification. In both cases, the villains employ black magic and occult ritual as tools to bring about the destruction of their adversaries and the realisation of their dastardly plans.

Wheatley lifts the lid off the sarcophagus concealing the source of his villains mysterious powers and enables his avid reader to vicariously witness the machinations of black magic and demonic collusion. In both cases, upstanding good eggs triumph, overcoming their demented persecutors, leaving the reader titivated by their close encounter with perilous, but satisfyingly vanquished demonised agencies. Along the way, characters are given numerous clunky opportunities to expatiate ad nauseam upon all things occult, and thereby furnish the reader with a digestible body of satanic law. A potent formula, as I’m sure J.K. Rowling might agree!

Wheatley’s villains are brilliantly realised. Damien Mocata and Helmuth are classic Hammer House of Horror charismatic evil geniuses, with the Duke de Richleau a truly marvellous champion of the forces of good, far exceeding Van Helsing’s erudition and elan. Both plots are well made and moments of tension compellingly conveyed. However, they are novels sans almost any other literary merit, and indeed deeply unpalatable to the modern reader in terms of their jarring racism, xenophobia, class elitism, sexism and political bias.

Rather like a monochrome horror movie, his characters float along on a tidal wave of contrived threat, leaving Wheatley with little more to do than push the story onward when required. Both are liberally sprinkled with the lingua-franca of the mysterious and unnatural, together with the lexicon of bizarre ritual and blasphemous practice. Sensational, amusing and addictively seductive, I can appreciate their appeal, but only up to a point! Wheatley drew upon far more than good storytelling to catalyse his undisputed fame.

The zeitgeist of his epoch presented rich pickings. An earlier period had seen Gothic fiction enjoy considerable success and the appetite remained, albeit re-cast amongst his modern audience. The US Government poured millions of dollars into realising the military benefits of clairvoyance and telekinesis. His society was fascinated by high profile adepts of black magic and those purporting to possess supernatural powers. Wheatley understood the public obsession with such individuals and stuffed his fiction to brimming point with references to them and their sensational doings. He chose three such luminaries to focus upon, almost guaranteeing him public interest in his fiction. He even exploited anti-Nazi sentiment and the fear of Communism, by framing them as satanic organisations. Certainly no Edgar Allan Poe, he knew how to make being a writer pay!

Chief amongst Wheatley’s inspirational sources was the pre-eminent English occultist, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Overtly lubricious, perverse and outrageously provocative, Crowley had styled himself a prophet of the quasi-religious Thelema cult and wrote prodigiously, if unintelligibly upon black magic and its associative topics. Highly intellectual and independently wealthy, Crowley courted a reputation for mastery of the occult, acts of uninhibited blasphemy, sexual flagrancy and achieved the dubious status of being known to the general public as “The Beast”. His infamy was only matched by his egomania and appetite for notoriety. Numerous literary versions of Crowley had already wormed their way into the public psyche, with John Buchanan’s 1926 The Dancing Floor a notable example. Wheatley had lunched with Crowley and modelled the evil villain of his The Devil Rides Out, Damien Mocata, on this infamous and controversial figure.

A second seminal influence on, and source of, Wheatley’s dark fiction was the well known witch-hunting expert and Catholic priest, the Reverend Augustus Montague Summer. The reverend was a leading expert of vampirism, lycanthropy, and of course witchcraft and produced the first English translation of the witchhunter’s manual, the Malleus Maleficarum in 1928. Again, Wheatley absorbed valuable esoteric and scintillatingly graphic knowledge and based another of his characters upon the, if not notorious, then unequivocally shady reverend - in this case, Canon Copely-Syle, whom we meet in To The Devil A Daughter (1953).

Bringing up the rear of his trio of guides was Rollo Ahmed, an Egyptian mystic who had spent most of his adult life in the Caribbean and South America. He was relatively well known for his apparently supernatural self-control and his unassailable knowledge of the charming art of Voodoo! Wheatley’s public association with Crowley, Summers and Ahmed gave his books a feint whiff of subject-matter authority and more than a sales-driving hint of verisimilitude.

Wheatley’s intuition told him that the general public were not only interested in the supernatural, but many actually believed in it. According to Professor Bruce Hood in his 2009 book Supersense – the Brain Science of Belief, modern psychology provides compelling empirical evidence to suggest that humans are predisposed to intuitively seek and believe in supernatural forces from birth. Possessors of both a ratiocinative and intuitive intelligence, we actively seek the “something out there”. It’s a fascinating read and I recommend it to anyone seeking to get to the bottom of that one weird experience most of us have apparently had. Perhaps this last point goes some way towards explaining Wheatley’s astounding appeal during his own lifetime, and for an ongoing appetite for similar, but considerably better written fare during our own.

Even Wheatley himself admitted to believing in apparitions and towards the end of his life confessed that the episode depicted in The Haunting was a meticulous account of his own such experience aged nine. Indeed, his author’s note in The Devil, though a clever authorial stage whisper, urges his readers to avoid the “very real” dangers they face if tempted to explore occult practices for themselves.

Whether Wheatley believed or not is perhaps largely irrelevant. The salient point to me was that he was less of a literary magus and far more of a canny authorial magician with the power to enchant his readers. He turned literary water into a vast lake of commercial wine. Quite apt for a failed vintner with a flair for good old fashioned storytelling. Certainly not top flight literature, but devilishly good fun nonetheless, if you can forgive his many sins!