The devil is a gentleman : the life and times of dennis wheatley

647 Pages·2011·4.71 MB·English

by  Baker

The Devil is a Gentleman
“Dennis Wheatley’s novels were enormously successful. It is not difficult to see
why. He provided clear conflicts of Good and Evil and had a talent for nailing
archetypes, coupled with a simple determination to entertain … Wheatley is
almost forgotten today … and one might wonder if there is a case for 609 pages
about him. In fact Phil Baker, critically sifting the evidence and placing
Wheatley with perfect accuracy in the English class system, makes his case
admirably. He provides us with a good story, well told, and plenty of jokes.
Wheatley would have been delighted.”
S.E.G. Hopkin in The Spectator
“It is lively and full of period evocation. Baker takes an amused, pin-pricking
but affectionate stance towards his subject.”
Peter Lewis in The Daily Mail
“Phil Baker’s The Devil Is a Gentleman recounts the extraordinary life of
Britain’s most prolific occultist, Dennis Wheatley.”
Rowan Pelling in Books of the Year in The Daily Telegraph “A fantastically
entertaining biography of one of the most popular writers of the twentieth-
century whose work is still part of the public imagination.”
James Doyle in Book Munch
“Wheatley, unusual, overripe and positively fruity by the end, cries out for
contextualization. This is provided by an elegant and skilful writer, possessed of
an excellent wit which he uses sparingly and only ever to precise effect. Highly
sensitive to period, Baker deals with areas such as appeasement and anti-
Semitism (not a Wheatley failing) with much more intelligence than is usually
encountered.”
H.E. Taylor in The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter “He, of all people,
deserves to come back from the dead and win a new following of thrill-starved
souls in thrall to his dark magic.”
The Oldie
“Wheatley took up writing when the family wine business failed, and his
mixture of sex, sadism, snobbery and Satanism proved irresistible to the reading
public.”
Stephen Holden in The Chap
“Here is a masterful account of a writer’s internal and external selves, revealing
the degree to which any creative author’s life must necessarily be a work of
fiction. Baker as a biographer, frankly, is some kind of God-damned life-
archaeologist, approaching the famed occult novelist as a real, seriocomic man
who was far more than the sum of his parts. It is difficult to imagine a more
sensitive and knowledgeable investigation. Black magic stories? That was the
least of it: the reader is left far more astonished by the magic Wheatley wove
around his own life, as revealed by Baker. Superb, concise, insightful and
sublime.”
Jay Rath in The Fortean Times
“Phil Baker … recounts some wonderfully funny moments. A plethora of witty
asides, and a cast of nutters beyond anything Wheatley ever invented, add up to
a very entertaining read.”
Mick Herron in The Bookdealer
“Like Maugham, Greene and Le Carré, Wheatley’s career was influenced by his
intelligence contacts, as was that of another writer whose debt to him is nearly
always overlooked. Ian Fleming stripped down Wheatley’s model to three
essentials identified by Cyril Connolly as the winning formula for the Bond
series: sex, snobbery and sadism.”
Chris Petit in The Guardian
“Phil Baker’s knockout The Devil Is A Gentleman gives us the biography of
Dennis Wheatley, war propagandist and author of Satanic novels read by
millions but loathed by critics.”
Christopher Fowler
“The war was the high point of Wheatley’s life; it’s also the high point of
Baker’s biography.”
Robert Hanks in The London Review of Books
“… it’s lively, racy reading throughout. An enjoyable read, especially for those
of us who remember all those occult novels as a guilty adolescent pleasure. As
David Blundy of the Observer once wrote: ‘Wheatley has been grappling with
the Devil for over thirty years now, and frankly, the Devil’s been pretty decent
about it’.”
David Langford in Murky Depths
For N.C.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some
painful illness,” wrote George Orwell. “One would never undertake such a thing
if one were not driven on by some demon …”
One of the rewards of this struggle is meeting some excellent people, and I
must particularly thank Charles Beck, Roger Dobson, Richard Humphreys,
Anthony Lejeune, Ian Sayer, and Timothy d’Arch Smith for their invaluable
help.
I am also very grateful in various ways to Bob Anderson, Michael Barber,
Louis Barfe, Derek Bradley, Bill Breeze, Bryan Clough, Nicholas Culpeper,
Linda Donald, Jeremy Duns, Geoffrey Elborn, Mari Evans, Giles Foden, Nigel
Fountain, Keith Hargreaves, Tamsen Harward, Iwan Hedman-Morelius, Michael
Horniman, Andrew Jefford, Steve Kandell, Jane Lewis (née Tombe), Patrick
Matthews, Benedicte Page, Liz Parratt, Mark Pilkington, Ian Pindar, Robert
Potts, Jon Preece, Isabel Quigly, Sandy Robertson, the late Bob Rothwell,
Hilary Rubinstein, David Rule, Helmut Schwarzer, Derek Slavin, Jamie
Sturgeon, Stephen Whatley, Paul Willetts, Derek Witty, Lizzie Wright, Cheryl
Younson and, of course, Sheena.
Philip Brown of Blackwell Rare Books very kindly presented me with a copy
of Catalogue A1136 from 1979 – an essential item for anyone interested in
Wheatley – and helped with the questions it raised. Robert Hardy and Oliver
Irvine of Maggs Bros showed me Wheatley’s manuscript of ‘Of Vice and
Virtue’ (Ayesha), courtesy of the Wormsley Library.
Research is one of the more enjoyable parts of writing, and I am indebted to
the following people and institutions, visited or corresponded with: Sara Land of
the Brotherton Library; Janet McMullin of Christ Church Library; Jan Piggot of
Dulwich College Archives; Penelope Hatfield of Eton College Archives;
Imperial War Museum Library; C. J. Roberts of the Marine Society; Sheila
Knight and other staff at the Public Record Office; Jean Rose of Random House
Archives; Pamela Clark of The Royal Archives; Malcolm Brown of the St
John’s Wood Society; Professor William Ryan at the Warburg Institute;
Westminster Local Studies Library; the Wiener Library; Geoffrey Dunster of the
Old Worcesters; and the Wormsley (Getty) Library. I also used the British
Library, and above all the irreplaceable London Library (in the words of Borges,
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”)
Wheatley always liked to belong, and in pursuit of this strand of the story I
want to thank R. T. Smith of Boodle’s; Graham Snell of Brooks’s; Betty Beesley
of the Garrick; Peter Bond of the Savage; David Anderson of White’s;
Christopher Denvir of the Royal Society of Arts; Maggie Ferguson and Julia
Abel Smith of the Royal Society of Literature; Ilene Wilson of the Royal Society
of St George; and particularly Merlin Holland of the Saintsbury Club.
I was helped financially during the long haul of this book by the Authors’
Fund, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Wingate Foundation. It is very
encouraging to receive awards from such bodies, and their role in keeping
writers from despondency as well as financial ruin is probably under-recognised.
I am doubly grateful to them.
Last – but, in fact, foremost – I should like to thank Dennis Wheatley’s
family, particularly Anthony, Annette, and Dominic, for their hospitality and
generosity with their time.
*
Unpublished material from Aleister Crowley, Tom Driberg, Eric Gordon Tombe
and Dennis Wheatley is quoted by gracious permission of Hymenaeus Beta of
the Ordo Templi Orientis, David Higham Associates, Jane Lewis, and the
Wheatley family, respectively. The author and publishers would be glad to hear
from any other copyright holders that they have been unable to trace.
Contents
Title
Dedication
Introduction: The Devil is a Gentleman
Acknowledgements
 1. Family Romances
 2. The Lost Land
 3. Telling Tales
 4. The Bad Man in Embryo
 5. Jam Today
 6. Good Germans
 7. The Curtain
 8. Officers and Men
 9. The Rich Wot Gets the Pleasure
10. Enter a Satyr
11. The Incredible Journey
12. Last Hope of the General Staff
13. The Only Girl
14. Eric’s Crimson Nights
15. Scheherezade in Streatham
16. Dangerous Liaisons
17. … in a Cloud of Blue Smoke
18. Mr Meyer Investigates
19. Marriage – and a Horror
20. Saved in the Nick of Time
21. The Seer
22. Falling in Love Again
23. First Blood
24. Luncheon with the Beast
25. Top Chaps in the Field
26. The Devil in his Decade
27. The Right Kind of Dope
28. Like Spitting on an Altar
29. The Mystery of the Black Box
30. Death of a Fifth Columnist
31. Strange Conflictv 32. In the Stratosphere
33. Grove Place
34. Rogering Roger
35. The Message in a Bottle
36. An International Spider
37. Into the Cave of Bats
38. Eastern Assignment
39. Clubland Heroes
40. To the Devil – A Daughter
41. Sir Gifford Comes Back From the Dead
42. The Best Revenge
43. Nice Work
44. The Satanist
45. The Reich Revisited, and the Death of the Duke
46. Lucifer Rising
47. The Devil Redux
48. Rivers of Blood
49. The Music of Time
50. The Hound of Heaven

References
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
A Note to the Second Edition
Index
Copyright