<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Dennis Wheatley (Dennis Yeats Wheatley) (January 8, 1897 – November 10, 1977) is rarely remembered today and most of his titles have disappeared from bookstores and are out of print from publishers. However, he was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and commercially successful authors of supernatural fiction.

Born into an upper middle class family of Mayfair wine merchants in South London, he entered the business after being expelled from Dulwich College and became the sole proprietor of Wheatley and Son after his father’s death in 1926. In debt and nearly bankrupt, Wheatley left four years later to pursue a writing career and his first published novel, The Forbidden Territory (1933), was an adventure set in Soviet Russia that introduced “Those Modern Musketeers”, the Duke du Richleau, Rex Van Ryn, Simon Aron and Richard Eaton. The book was an instant success.

Although Wheatley worked in various genres, including historical romance, international espionage, adventure and even science fiction (Star of Ill-Omen (1952)), he was best known for publishing books which fell into two specific categories – black magic and lost worlds. The latter include such titles as The Fabulous Valley (1934), They Found Atlantis(1936), Uncharted Seas (1938) and The Man Who Missed the War (1945). Wheatley’s books became popular amongst adolescent readers because of their somewhat titillating “adult” content, and there was an inherent “British colonialism” quality about his fiction.

It is said that during one forty-eight hour period, Wheatley smoked 250 cigarettes, drank five magnums of champagne, and still managed to write 20,000 words. Beginning with his best-seller The Devil Rides Out (1934), the author became popular for his novels of black magic and the supernatural. The book reunited Wheatley’s “Modern Musketeers” from The Forbidden Territory, and the Duke de Richlieu and his companions returned in Strange Conflict (1941).

After World War II, when he worked for four years as the only civilian given a commission with the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet preparing for the invasion of France, Wheatley returned to the theme of the supernatural in a string of popular novels: The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil – a Daughter (1953), The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark Forces (1964), Unholy Crusade (1967), The White Witch of the South Seas (1968), Gateway to Hell (1970) and The Irish Witch (1973).

Now in his seventies, and very rich from his books, it was estimated that he had somewhere between forty and fifty million copies of his books in print in twenty-seven languages. Although he warned his readers very firmly against “being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way”, towards the end of his career he drew upon his knowledge of black magic to write the lavishly illustrated non-fiction study The Devil and All His Works (1971).

He had only been a published writer for less than three years when Wheatley was invited to edit A Century of Horror Stories (1935), one of the key anthologies of the genre. In 1973 Sphere Books launched an ambitious series of reprint volumes under the umbrella title “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult” with introductions by the author. Nearly fifty titles eventually appeared. Although he did not write many short stories, some of the best are collected in Gunman, Gallants and Ghosts (1943).

In 1967, Britain’s Hammer Films produced Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) from a script by Richard Matheson and starring Christopher Lee as a perfect Duke de Richleau. The studio followed it up the next year with The Lost Continent, based on the novel Uncharted Sea. Lee also co-starred with Richard Widmark in Hammer’s 1976 adaptation of To the Devil a Daughter (aka Child of Satan), which marked the final nail in the coffin of the studio’s original cycle of horror films.

Perhaps because of the snobbery and jingoism inherent in his work, Wheatley’s books have fallen out of favor with modern readers. However, for more than four decades he was a best-selling horror writer whose popularity rivaled that of Stephen King today. The Times Literary Supplement once referred to him as the “Prince of Thriller-writers”, and that is the epitaph that graces his tombstone.