Книга: Dennis Wheatley «They Found Atlantis»

Dennis Yates Wheatley (8 January 1897 – 10 November 1977) was an English author. His prolific output of stylish thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Early life

Dennis Wheatley was born in South London to Albert David and Florence Elizabeth Harriet Wheatley (née Baker). He was the eldest of three children of an upper middle class family, the owners of Wheatley & Son of Mayfair, a wine business. He was expelled from Dulwich College. Soon after his expulsion Wheatley became a British Merchant Navy officer cadet on the training ship HMS Worcester.

Military service

He was a soldier during the First World War but was gassed in a chlorine attack at Passchendaele and invalided as a second lieutenant of the Royal Field Artillery after service in Flanders, on the Ypres Salient, and in France at Cambrai and St. Quentin. In 1919 he assumed management of the family wine merchant business in but in 1931, after a decline in business due to the depression, he began writing and married his second wife.

During the Second World War, Wheatley was a member of the London Controlling Section, which secretly coordinated strategic military deception and cover plans. His literary talents gained him employment with planning staffs for the War Office. He wrote numerous papers for the War Office, including suggestions for dealing with a German invasion of Britain (recounted in his work Stranger than Fiction). The most famous of his submissions to the Joint Planning Staff of the war cabinet was on "Total War". He was given a commission directly into the JP Service as Wing Commander, RAFVR and took part in advanced planning for the Normandy invasions.

Writing career

His first novel published, The Forbidden Territory, was an immediate success when issued in 1933, being reprinted seven times in seven weeks.

Wheatley mainly wrote adventure stories, with many books in a series of linked works. Background themes included the French Revolution (the Roger Brook series), Satanism (the Duke de Richleau series), World War II (the Gregory Sallust series) and espionage (the Julian Day series).

His writing is very descriptive and in many works he manages to involve his characters with real events while meeting real people. For example, in the Roger Brook series the main character involves himself with Napoleon and Joséphine whilst being a spy for Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. Similarly, in the Gregory Sallust series, Sallust shares an evening meal with Hermann Göring.

During the 1930s, he conceived a series of mysteries, presented as case files, with testimonies, letters, pieces of evidence such as hairs or pills. The reader had to read the evidence to solve the mystery before unsealing the last pages of the file, which gave the answer. Four of these 'Crime Dossiers' were published: Murder Off Miami, Who Killed Robert Prentice, The Malinsay Massacre, and Herewith The Clues.

In the 1960s, his publishers were selling a million copies of his books per year, and most of his titles were kept available in hardcover. A few of his books were made into films by Hammer, of which the best known is The Devil Rides Out (book 1934, film 1968). Wheatley also wrote non-fiction works, including an account of the Russian Revolution, a life of King Charles II of England, and his autobiography. He was considered an authority on the supernatural, satanism, the practice of exorcism, and black magic, to all of which he was hostile. During his study of the paranormal, though, he joined the Ghost Club.

Wheatley invented a number of board games including Invasion^[1] (1938), Blockade^[2] (1939) and Alibi (April 1953).

He edited several collections of short stories, and from 1974 through 1977, he supervised a series of 45 paperback reprints for the British publisher Sphere with the heading "The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult", selecting the titles and writing short introductions for each book. These included both occult-themed novels by the likes of Bram Stoker and Aleister Crowley (with whom he once shared a lunch) and non-fiction works on magic, occultism, and divination by authors such as the Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky, the historian Maurice Magre, the magician Isaac Bonewits, and the palm-reader Cheiro.

Two weeks before his death in November 1977, Wheatley received conditional absolution from his old friend Cyril ‘Bobby’ Eastaugh, the Bishop of Peterborough. He was cremated at Tooting and his ashes interred at Brookwood Cemetery. He is commemorated on the Baker/Yeats family monument at West Norwood Cemetery.

His estate library was sold in a catalogue sale by Basil Blackwell's in 1979. It suggested a well-read individual with wide-ranging interests particularly with respect to historical fiction and Europe.

In the early/mid-1970s, 52 of Dennis Wheatley's novels were offered in a set by Heron Books UK. His availability and influence declined following his death, partly owing to difficulties of reprinting his works because of copyright problems. More recently, Wheatley's literary estate was acquired by media company Chorion in April 2008, and several titles have been reissued in Wordsworth paperback editions. A new hardcover omnibus of Black Magic novels was released by Prion in 2011.

His grandson Dominic Wheatley became one of the co-founders of the software house Domark, which published a number of titles in the 1980s and 1990s.^[3]

Politics

His work is fairly typical of his class and era, portraying a way of life and ethos of clubland snobbery that gives an insight into the values of the time. His main characters are all supporters of Royalty, Empire and the class system, and many of his villains are villainous because they attack these ideas, although in The Golden Spaniard he pits various protagonists against each other in the setting of the Spanish Civil War. His works are enjoyable thrillers, and his "Roger Brook" series books, in particular, offer the reader "history without tears" (Wheatley, in the introduction to The Man Who Killed the King). His historical analysis is affected by his politics, but is well informed. For example, Vendetta in Spain (pre-World War I adventure in that country) contains a discussion of political anarchism which is well researched, though unsympathetic. His strong attachment to personal liberty also informs much of his work. This, as well as a sympathetic attitude toward Jews (as shown in the 'Simon Aron' character introduced in 'Three Inquisitive People') caused him to criticise the Nazi system mercilessly, in the 'Gregory Sallust' thrillers set during World War II.

During the winter of 1947, Wheatley penned 'A Letter to Posterity' which he buried in an urn at his country home. The letter was intended to be discovered some time in the future (it was found in 1969 when that home was demolished for redevelopment of the property). In it, he predicted that the socialist reforms introduced by the post-war government would result inevitably in an unjust state, and he advised both passive and active resistance to it.

"Socialist ‘planning’ forbids any man to kill his own sheep or pig, cut down his own tree, put up a wooden shelf in his own house, build a shack in his garden, and either buy or sell the great majority of commodities – without a permit. In fact, it makes all individual effort an offence against the state. Therefore, this Dictatorship of the Proletariat, instead of gradually improving the conditions in which the lower classes live, as has been the aim of all past governments, must result in reducing everyone outside the party machine to the level of the lowest, idlest and most incompetent worker.

[...]

It will be immensely difficult to break the stranglehold of the machine, but it can be done, little by little; the first step being the formation of secret groups of friends for free discussion. Then numbers of people can begin systematically to break small regulations, and so to larger ones with passive resistance by groups of people pledged to stand together – and eventually the boycotting, or ambushing and killing of unjust tyrannous officials."

Dennis Wheatley, A Letter to Posterity

List of works

Film Adaptations

• Forbidden Territory (November 1934)
• Secret of Stamboul; US title The Spy in White (adaptation of The Eunuch of Stamboul; October 1936)
• The Devil Rides Out; US title The Devil's Bride (July 1968)
• The Lost Continent (adaptation of Uncharted Seas; July 1968)
• To the Devil a Daughter (March 1976)
• The Haunted Airman (adaptation of The Haunting of Toby Jugg; October 2006)

Biography

Baker, Phil, The Devil is a Gentleman: the Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, Sawtry, UK: Dedalus. 2009. ISBN 9781903517758

References

1. ^ Boardgamegeek.com
2. ^ Boardgamegeek.com
3. ^ Crash Online: Issue Ten: November 1984

External links

• Dennis Wheatley Website
• Biography
• Complete list of The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult
• Article on Dennis Wheatley
• Wheatley's 1939 game 'Blockade'
• Dennis Wheatley at the Internet Movie Database