Dennis Wheatley - The Devil And All His Works

[dem bones]

Dennis Wheatley - The Devil And All His Works (Hutchinson, 1971)

A lifetime of reading and research lies behind Dennis Wheatley's world famous Black Magic and Occult novels.

Now, in this absorbing, lavishly illustrated book he describes and sums up his findings and his conclusions.

Throughout history the elemental principles of Good and Evil, of Light and Darkness have interacted and struggled for domination. The evidence of invisible influences on mankind, hypnosis, faith-healing, telepathy, is plentiful. The studies of astrology, numerology, palmistry, alchemy and the Cabala are described. Here is the history of religion and magic among the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Incas, down to the present day.

Here also are described the outward manifestations of those beliefs: human sacrifice, the mysteries of the Pyramids, the rituals of the Druids, witches' sabbaths, the perverted frenzies of the Black Mass, the conjuring up of the spirits of the dead.

The Devil and All His Works, which includes 48 pages of colour plates, 167 black and white illustrations and 6 maps, is probably the most complete, most graphic survey of the forces of Darkness ever published.

I sent a wants list to my friend at Spitalfield Stuff last week. I didn't even bother putting certain items on there for the simple reason that, in the unlikely event of him having copies, I'd not be able to afford them.

Then I nipped down to his stall on Sunday ...

When this was first published it cost £4.50 so paying the same for a copy in decent nick with it's dust jacket today seems more than reasonable, and it's great to have some more Wheatley non-fiction to get stuck into. First impression: he's recycled much of his 'black magic' essay (Gunman, Gallants & Ghosts) and I'm sure I recognise snippets from a few of his 'library of the occult' intro's. Will be coming back to this (and answering pm's, posts, e.t.c.) when I've shrugged off latest bout of flu, etc.

[redbrain]

admin said:

Dennis Wheatley - The Devil And All His Works (Hutchinson, 1971)
A lifetime of reading and research lies behind Dennis Wheatley's world famous Black Magic and Occult novels.

Yeah, right!

I once owned a fat hard covered book on this topic, with an introduction by Dennis Wheatley. The author's surname was Ahmad, or something like that, and it had a red cover - but I don't remember much else about it, apart from Wheatley's introduction. In it, he said that he was often asked to write a "factual" book about black magic and the occult, but he knew very little about those subjects. Such knowledge as he had, he said, was derived entirely from this book...

Later he seemed to change his mind of the subject, and started to claim to be an expert. I think he may have spotted that there was money to be made as a black magic expert.

Still, four and a half knicker is an OK price for the book.

[pulphack]

ooh, that'll be Rollo Ahmed, an 'expert' of dubious origins, who had his book ghosted by our Den in 1933, if memory serves. it was republihed about a decade ago as one of those paperback you could only get in National Trust shops, along with Inn Signs of England, Great Churches, The English Village - i had a load of these at £2 a pop, and they were all pre1940 texts. the ones of villages had lovely line drawings, but i digress.

the ahmed book read to me like straight-forward den, with little to differentiate it from anything else he was doing - although it is very early in his career, isn't it? i had a novel set in hollywood that was non-horror, and was about 1934. i quite liked it, but could it be that ghosting the ahmed book made him realise that black magic might be lucrative?

[dem bones]

pulphack's right: that will be his introduction to Rollo Ahmed's The Black Art (John Long, 1936) so we might give him the benefit of the doubt and say he'd had opportunity to learn a good deal more about the subject in the intervening 35 years. That said, of the few "serious student of the occult" I've met, not one will give Wheatley's 'Black Magic' writings the time of day (unless they're in the mood for a good laugh) so, even taking into account that they wouldn't admit to liking his stuff in the first place, we're back at square one.

Disappointingly on this occasion he's atypically modest when it comes to who should receive credit for The Devil And All His Works. Apparently it came about at the insistence of his publisher and the dedication runs:

"For my dear wife Joan

When Mr. George Rainbird first invited me to write a book of this kind, I felt that I lacked the academic knowledge for such an undertaking.

But a few months later Mr. Rainbird approached me again, and my wife then persuaded me that from the four thousand books in my library and nearly sixty years of serious reading, I had acquired more knowledge than I could have by a few years spent at any University. It is therefore to her that my readers owe this book, and I the great enjoyment I derived once I set about writing it."

Reading between the lines, Mrs. Wheatley was probably pissed off with him for cluttering up their mansion with his mouldy old black sorcery collection only for him to sheepishly admit at this late juncture "well actually, I only bought them for all the nudie photo's. I mean, look at this ... "

Had no idea Wheatley ghosted the Ahmed book which, as far as I can recall, borrows far too copiously from good old Montague Summers for it to have any credibility whatsoever.

[redbrain]

I, too, had no idea that that DW had ghosted the Ahmed book - and that makes what he wrote in the introduction downright weird. That said, I was enormously unimpressed by the Ahmed book and I don't think it remained in my possession for very long. I used to have quite a large collection of "factual" books about the occult, but don't believe that I now own a single one of them.

[valdemar]

I have a great copy of this book, and it is a great read. I was thinking about Wheatley, who is known worldwide as 'The Black Magic Man': but out of his entire output, which was over 60 books, only nine are occult - based. [not in order]
1] To The Devil A Daughter
2] The Devil Rides Out
3] The Satanist
4] Strange Conflict
5] The Haunting Of Toby Jugg
6] They Used Dark Forces
7] Gateway To Hell
8] The Ka Of Gifford Hillary
9] The Irish Witch, and this is only marginal, being mainly a historical novel.

Nine out of sixty - not a high proportion really, is it?

[jamesdoig]

Apr 15, 2012 0:29:00 GMT valdemar said:

Nine out of sixty - not a high proportion really, is it?

You could add a few more at a pinch, eg Unholy Crusade, The White Witch of the South Seas (maybe), Gateway to Hell. And don't forget his shhort stories, edited collections and Library of the Occult.

You know, Graeme Flanagan tells me that he corresponded with Wheatley in the '60s when he was 16 years old and has a couple of letters from him - Wheatley must have been a decent chap if he took the time to write to kids.

[valdemar]

Hmm. Just looked at that last post of mine, and realised that I should have written: ''Explicitly Occult based''. Bits of esoteric thoughts pop up all through his writings, and his right-wing leanings do make me grit my teeth, but once you tell yourself that it's coming from a writer who was primarily a high-class wine merchant, very wealthy, and terrifyingly well connected to the famous and powerful, then you can get on with his stories. He never rated himself as a great writer, but, he said, ''I can tell a story''. And, by god, he could. He's a bit like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, in that: when he was good, he was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid. [Star Of Ill-Omen comes immediately to mind here]. I've read most of his oeuvre, but his historicals, whilst very well researched, left me cold. On the other hand, I adore 'They Found Atlantis', and my absolute favourite is the exceedingly weird 'The Man Who Missed The War', which succeeds in wrong-footing the reader all the way. It starts as a war story, progresses through a lost at sea tale, and ends as science fiction. Another I have a soft spot for, is the bolshy 'Black August', simply as it is set near where I live, and has a scaffold set up outside our Town Hall, with the main characters awaiting their doom in my all-time favourite pub [where I still go to sink a few pints of London Pride whenever I get the chance].

[Dr Strange]

Dec 13, 2007 13:53:15 GMT pulphack said:

ooh, that'll be Rollo Ahmed, an 'expert' of dubious origins, who had his book ghosted by our Den in 1933, if memory serves.

I don't think that's correct. According to the denniswheatley.info website -

In 1936, Hutchinson asked DW to write a serious study of the Occult, but at that stage he did not feel he was qualified to do it justice. He accordingly suggested Rollo Ahmed undertake the task, and DW later described the resulting book, 'The Black Art', as "one of the best I have ever read on the subject".

www.denniswheatley.info/museum/room.asp?id=7&exhib=3

[pulphack]

in my defence i did say if memory serves and hadn't looked it up - however i would still take that comment with a pinch of salt as if you've ever read the book you'll remember that the style is either ghosting or a slavish copy of DW. the copy i had was a reissue which might have been senate, but i'm sure that notion that DW ghosted it was in the introduction.

anyone else here read it? it'd be interested to know if it came over as very DW to anyone else. when i wrote the above quote it was five years back, and it was several before that since i'd read it.

[Dr Strange]

Apr 26, 2012 5:54:34 GMT pulphack said:

the style is either ghosting or a slavish copy of DW

But a copy of what exactly? At the time that Ahmed's book came out (1936), The Devil Rides Out (1934) was the only "occult" themed book DW had written (the next was Strange Conflict in 1941). I haven't been able to find anything suggesting that DW ghosted for Ahmed, and it seems much more likely that any similarity is because DW used Ahmed's book extensively as a source for his later writing. That certainly seems to fit with what DW himself said, anyway.

[pulphack]

eh?

what i mean is that the style of the book is either a slavish copy of dear old den's mangled syntax (which we love, to be honest) by someone who decided that it should read like that (possibly to cash in on the success of ...Rides Out), or else it was ghosted by the man himself. i wasn't suggesting it copied any of DW's novels in content if that was what you meant.

at this remove, who can say for sure. to use your own argument against you, DW's first occult novel was two years before this book and it's commonly acknowleged that he consulted people like Harry Price and Ahmed before writing it. so when it was suggested that Ahmed write a book for DW's publisher as 'a serious study' following the success of '...Rides Out' who was better placed to lend a hand in the composition? the fact that DW didn't write another occult novel until 1941 - sorry, but i don;t see how that fits into the argument? the point surely is that Ahmed was a cash-in on the success and publicity of ...Rides Out?

Ahmed was Guyanese although he pretended to be Egyptian, and to be honest not a lot of Wiccans (the stuff i found was quit funny, but then they can be in many ways) have time for the seriousness of his views. he was a convicted fraudster (though i can't find whether it was for the old medium trick, or financial)and so not averse to a bit of finagling.

on the plus side for his sole authorship he had written an autobiographical novel, and i think there's even a picture of the jacket on the DW site. it seems to be rarer than hens teeth, but it would be fascinating to see if the style was similar or if there was a radical difference as this would add to either side of the debate.

certainly, ghosting has never been rare but is rarely discussed. michael korda wrote the bulk of joan collins' novel and when he quit to write his own her second one led to a protracted court case that she lost. chris priest ghosted sally gunnel's autbiography after her olympics win. and jack adrian identified dornford yates as the ghost for edward vii's chauffeur purely by his idiosyncratic style. which is what i stick by for the ahmed. go on, read it and see! it is daft, but it is fun (he likes Atlantis as much as DW, for a start).

[pulphack]

p.s. Ahmed's style influenced DW's style, Doc? leaving the content aside, the glorious DW style had been established since the first couple of books and i can't see much difference in his actual style between the thirties and seventies. most popular writers don't change that much - to take crime for an example, if you look at Agatha Christie there is very little stylistic difference over fifty years, whereas awriter like Gladys Mitchell - who was less popular but technically superior - changed quite a bit as she admired and assimilated new styles and techniques into her own work.

i honestly can;t see how doing a 'reverse influence' trick on the occult books adds to your argument. if this were the case, then everything post Ahmed would be the same except the occult novels which would have a different style. i can't see that based on the (admittedly) few i've read. conversely, everything post 1934 would be stylistically similar (which it is) but would differ from the first few books. which i can't see, on the same basis.

and how does the reverse trick work if ...Rides Out - which has a certain tone you imply is later repeated - came two years before the Ahmed book? DW got a lot of research from Ahmed pre 1934 which fed into his first occult book. but, to follow your argument, he was then influenced by the Ahmed book into a style which he had established before that? sorry, you lost me chronologically on that one.

i know i'm taking it too seriously in one way, but i want to make sense of the timeline in your argument and it seems to go back on itself.

[Dr Strange]

I had actually thought you meant that the content of the Ahmed book (rather than the style) was what led you to think that Wheatley could have had a hand in it - and I have to say I really don't think Wheatley's "style" is anywhere near distinctive enough to form the basis for any argument. Anyway, in the total absence of anything else to suggest that Wheatley might have ghosted Ahmed, and when the man himself acknowledged Ahmed's authorship, I'm inclined to accept that The Black Art was actually written by Ahmed, who Wheatley knew and used as a source of ideas for his "occult" books from The Devil Rides Out on. That at least has the advantage of fitting with what Wheatley himself said.

[pulphack]

Fair enough. I wish I could find where I'd read it was ghosted in the first place, as I'm not making that up. That may not have been correct, of course.

You don't think Den's mangled syntax is unique? I wish I could agree - once read, never forgotten...