People seemingly no longer ask the question ‘Why don’t people read Dennis Wheatley anymore?’, even to the extent that they used to on occasion even 15 years ago – probably because the answer to such a semi-rhetorical question is so obvious: people don’t read Dennis Wheatley anymore because his books are hackneyed, anachronistic, and badly written.
Much in the way that no one asks why people don’t read Jeffrey Archer or Frederick Forsyth anymore – similar Tory authors who also achieved massive mainstream success in their time – and in the same way that very few people may be reading Dan Brown in 20 years’ time either. There is clearly a very limited cultural shelf-life for densely researched mass-market thrillers written for an aspirational readership, and on very few occasions are authors able to cross the line into genuine literature (as Robert Harris is seemingly determined to do).
In Wheatley’s case, he was a hugely successful writer of blockbuster potboilers for decades, during which the cultural sensibilities of the time moved on relentlessly without him. Even as early as 1947, he had written his reactionary proto-Manifesto ‘Letter To Posterity‘ and buried it in an urn on his mansion’s estate – the dire warnings it contained of a bleak totalitarian Britain under the technocratic control of a neo-Bolshevik state machine were clearly nonsensical, but nonetheless the rigid world of empire, monarchy, elitism and noblesse oblige that Wheatley lived in was slowly withering away. The story of how in 1966 a mischievous young editor sent an anonymised Wheatley manuscript to a reviewer, with brutal results (“Above all, the author cannot write”), may rather unfairly taint our perception of his success at the time – he still sold a million books that year – but the fact still remains that by the time Hammer’s adaptation of ‘The Devil Rides Out’ hit the cinemas in 1968 he was totally adrift from the sensibilities of the new generation enjoying the fruits of the occult revival that he had done so much to facilitate (albeit unknowingly).
Some answers can be gleamed from the original novel, released some 35 years before the film adaptation. ‘The Devil Rides Out‘ deals with what is essentially a conspiracy – no surprise there for a novel dealing with the occult; but what is interesting here is how wide-ranging his vision of the conspiracy is. Rather than a specific of group of occultists, the followers of Mocata (a thinly disguised Alistair Crowley) are instead representatives of every element that Wheatley considers anathema to the social order – foreigners, the disabled, women too old to be considered attractive, gays, socialists, and so on; all of which being described in the most colourful gammonian vocabulary of his time. Indeed, reading Wheatley with a modern political sensibility is a very unpleasant experience, filled as his books are with racial slurs and social ignorance. The impression is very much of a moral universe where the good and the bad are clearly defined, and where much of the planet is if not actively in league with the powers of darkness then are at least supremely susceptible to them.
In terms of the powers of good, they are almost solely restricted to the blue-blooded English and other monarchies of the western world, and to the right kind of enterprising white American (such as Rex). Even the jewishness of the youngest member of the group (Simon) is marked out by Wheatley as leading to various forms of moral & physical weakness, and he even gets a Swastika placed around his neck for ‘protection’ at one point. Although de Richleau – essentially a Mary Sue insertion of the author as font of all occult knowledge – is a man who freely borrows from spiritual practices found in a wealth of foreign cultures (including the Yogi, ancient Egypt, and the Kabbalah), he does not appear particularly fond of the foreign cultures themselves. De Richleau is also living out his own fin de siecle era, under the apparent belief that encroaching democracy would destroy his way of life, and we can see that nothing affronts the heroes of the Wheatley universe more than accountability.
The conspiracy Wheatley identifies, then, is clearly a very specific and political one; but he goes even further. As the plot amplifies itself to include a plot to use the Talisman of Set to start a new world war, de Richleau points the finger not at Mocata, but at the country he sees as sponsoring him: “‘You fool…Germany did not make the War. It came out of Russia. It was Russia who instigated the murder at Sarajevo, Russia who backed Serbia to resist Austria’s demands, Russia who mobilised first and Russia who invaded Germany. The monk Rasputin was the evil genius behind it all. He was the greatest Black Magician that the world has known for centuries. It was he who found one of the gateways through which to let forth the four horsemen that they might wallow in blood and destruction–and I know the Talisman of Set to be another. Europe is ripe now for any trouble and if they are loosened again, it will be final Armageddon. This is no longer a personal matter of protecting Simon. We’ve got to kill Mocata before he can secure the Talisman and prevent his plunging the world into another war!” Wheatley continued to publicly link Russia and the communist states to Satanism, going as far as to say that the Devil was literally directing their work. What we see here is Wheatley simply expounding a conspiratorial theory placing Russia (any Russia, under any regime, seemingly) at the centre of an international Satanic conspiracy for world domination.
And it gets, implausibly, worse. During a somewhat unnecessary detour to Paris towards the end of the book, de Richleau explains that after leading a ‘failed Royalist rebellion’ in the 1890s, he fled France for his life and faced possible imprisonment by state security upon his return. His characterisation of 1930s Paris as being a de facto police state filled with spies and Royalist-hunting gendarmarie – when France was one of the 3 most stable democracies in the world – is just plain silly. His subsequent assertions that he chose to “ignore the ban that a government of bourgeois and socialists placed upon me” strikes a bizarrely anti-Republican tone for 1934. It is also worth noting that there was no French monarchist uprising in the 1890s, leading us only to conclude that this portrayal of the Duke as a refugee of nobility dodging the imaginary gulags of interwar France is there just to create the impression that Soviet Russia and the statist France of the Third Republic were in some way the same.
Which, strangely, brings us to the conclusion that the Wheatley analysis is not so anachronistic now as we would like to assert. He would have loved Thatcherism, relished the fall of Communism, been a whole-hearted supporter of the War on Terror, undoubtedly been a supporter of Brexit, and might have ended up a UKIP MEP or otherwise a prominent Farageist. And we can certainly see hints of QAnon, the New World Order, ‘great replacement’ theory, and miscellaneous conspiracies in Wheatley’s absurd and reactionary worldview. Maybe he’s not as dated a writer, then, as we’d like to think – and that is by no means a recommendation.
Voodoo Diplomacy 