4th January 2019

In Wheatley’s books the primary villain is not of supernatural origin, but a mortal with very earthly political motivations.

Born the son of a wine merchant in 1897, Dennis Wheatley would go on to become one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century. Harbouring a life-long love of the works of Alexander Dumas, his first novel ‘The Forbidden Territory’ introduced his heroes the Duc De Richealu, Rex Van Ryn and Simon Aaron. This trio was a direct homage to Dumas’s musketeers with the novel telling of the group’s adventures in Soviet Russia and the titular ‘forbidden territory’.  Indeed, this book is far more typical of Wheatley’s stories than the works he would become most famous for, his ‘Black Magic’ thrillers. During his lifetime Wheatley wrote seventy-six novels and only eleven of these (and one non-fiction work) fit into the black magic category. In general, his style can be described as bridging the gap between Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond stories of the 1920’s and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels of the 1950’s. Yet this small collection of Occult books was to prove his most lasting legacy as well as the source of his revival in the 1960’s. Yet in an age that was termed ‘the permissive society’ when liberalism was beginning to rule and empire was at its end, the stories of Wheatley seem oddly out of place. For, at the heart of each of his occult novels is a key political message, one which Wheatley hid under the veil of dark forces.

In his novels, these ‘Dark Forces’ are usually presented as a tool, used by a villain as the source of their power. Generally, his stories follow the basic structure of a thriller and the occult aspects are imparted in large chunks of exposition. Through these Wheatley takes the opportunity to lecture the reader with interesting anecdotes and historical titbits. Usually the Devil himself is undefined and unexplained, only appearing twice in Wheatley’s works (discounting Pan in The Devil Rides Out). First, he appears unseen in To the Devil a Daughter forcing the characters to turn their backs before he speaks. His second appearance was in arguably Wheatley’s greatest occult novel, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, where the Devil is presented as much more terrifying, with the outward form of a giant spider. With Satan often AWOL, the role of the big-bad is usually taken up by one of his worshippers, and Wheatley draws obvious inspiration from well-known occultists such as Aleister Crowley. In Wheatley’s books then, the primary villain is not of supernatural origin, but a mortal with very earthly political motivations. Jugg is an excellent example, with the antagonist having strong communist links. It is through motivations such as these that Wheatley is able to impart his views upon the reader, the first example of which occurred in only his third novel.

When musing on why he chose the subject of the Occult as this basis for The Devil Rides Out, Wheatley recalled that; ‘I tried very hard to think of a subject for my next book that would hit another high spot. It then occurred to me that although in Victorian times there had been a great vogue for stories of the occult in the present century there had been very few’[1].  The 1920s and 1930s were the centre of a burgeoning Occult ‘boom’. Steven Sutcliffe states that this was when Spiritualism and other ‘occult religions’ were at ‘their peak of social influence’[2] and Crowley was at the height of his powers (having published his seminal work, Moonchild in 1929 and in 1930 exhibiting a series of paintings in Berlin[3]). The discourse on the links between the extreme right and the Occult is far and wide[4] and in the 1930’s the political and spiritual interests of class groups seemed to merge[5]. The chief villain of The Devil Rides Out, Satanist Mocata, intends to use the Talisman of Set to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and cause war with Nazi Germany. Wheatley himself would never discuss that essentially, The Devil Rides Out is an appeasement novel. Seemingly unperturbed however by the fact that war with Nazi-Germany did occur, all of his subsequent ‘black magic’ thrillers followed the mould of placing contemporary politics at the heart of the plot. His next Occult work Strange Conflict (1940) was written for the war effort, telling of Nazi Germany’s attempts to conquer the Astral Plane.  The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To The Devil- A Daughter (1953) The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956) and The Satanist (1960) all feature villains with a strong link to communist ideology and in the later works, the trade union movement.  His final black magic work to feature the Duke De Richleau, Gateway to Hell (1970) has as its villain the leader of a Black Power movement.

As previously mentioned, it seems odd then that in the early 1960’s, at the dawning of the so-called ‘permissive society’ that Wheatley would experience his largest single revival and become known as ‘Britain’s occult grandfather’. The 1960’s to the late 1970’s represented a highpoint in interest in the occult (from films, to books, BBC Radio 4 even got in on the act with its 1968 serial: The Events at Black Tor) and it’s important to stress just how key Wheatley’s novels were in this. The historian Ronald Hutton remembers that as an adolescent, ‘Dennis Wheatley’s novels were eagerly read and despoiled of ideas and images to liven up parties with risqué imagery, for my generation of teenagers they represented the essential primer in diabolism’[6]. Wheatley himself edited ‘Dennis Wheatley’s Library of the Occult’ (a collection of fort-five works by other authors, with a new introduction by Wheatley and containing titles as diverse as Bram Stokers Dracula and Montague Summer’s History of Witchcraft) and wrote six of his Black-Magic thrillers in this period. It was also during this period that the only film adaptations (bar a lacklustre TV version of The Haunting of Toby Jugg in 2006) of his occult thrillers were mounted.

The script for the 1968 film adaptation of The Devil Rides Out was written by horror maestro; Richard Matheson and quite wisely avoids entirely the political aspects of Wheatley’s novel. Instead the Talisman of Set is removed entirely from the plot and the focus is instead is placed on a battle for the souls of the characters Simon Aaron and Tanith. Despite this somewhat monumental change, Wheatley himself was extremely pleased with the film and would give Hammer the rights to adapt all of his works. Several projects were touted (including an adaptation of Jugg and a TV Series) but despite some astounding promotional artwork- none of these came to fruition. The studios final horror film production would be an adaptation of To The Devil A Daughter (1976) though to call it such is highly misleading. The film takes very little from Wheatley, owing far more to The Exorcist (1973) and he himself disowned it, forbidding Hammer to make any more films from his stories. Given how little of his words make it to the screen- it’s perhaps unsurprising that this too, lacked any ties to the book’s political themes, which dealt with a fear of socialism. The film is beset by other issues however, including a famously bemusing ending and a wooden lead. The result is an interesting, but ultimately flawed work.

The majority of Wheatley’s Occult thrillers can be appreciated as just that- lurid exciting potboilers with enough occult jargon littered throughout to garner a sense of authenticity. However, the majority (particularly the later works which seem intent on targeting 1960’s liberal movements) are littered with Wheatley’s own beliefs which make them, by today’s standards, tough to swallow. Like Ian Fleming’s Bond novels or Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu it has been argued that is possible to enjoy them simply as pulp works, if aware of and educated on their heritage. However, it seems highly likely that the 1968 film adaptation of The Devil Rides Out will be his most lasting legacy. Leaving Wheatley’s politics at the door, the film is an engaging battle between the forces of good and evil. One which, unlike many of his books, has dated incredibly little and remains an extremely powerful work.

For more of Callum’s work, check out his site ‘Cocktails in Carcosa’

https://calcarcosa.wixsite.com/website

[1]  Anthony Lejune, ‘Introduction’ in Wheatley, Dennis; The Devil Rides Out (London, 2007), p7

[2] Steven Sutcliffe; Children of the New Age; A History of Spiritual Practices, (London, 2003) p35

 [3] Roger Hutchinson; Aleister Crowley; The Beast demystified, (London, 2006)

[4]  Both Theodor Adorno and George Orwell wrote extensively on the links between the two, the former in a discourse on the links between barbarism and the Occult and the latter in an essay on the work of William Yeats (Partridge, Christopher; The Occult World (London, 2015) p8

[5] The idealist strands of Oswald Mosley have been described as ‘an Occult viewpoint’ (Richard C. Thurlow; Fascism in Britain; A History 1918-1998 (London 1998) p223) American William Dudley Pelley was a well-known American Occultist and far right activist (Scott Beekman; William Dudley Pelley; A life in Right-Wing Extremism and the Occult, (New York, 2005)

[6] Baker, Pat; The Devil is a Gentleman; The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, (London 2009) p. 699