THE READING RHEUM: TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1953)

I've reviewed all three of Dennis Whealtey's occult novels starring his characters "the Three Musketeers," but Wheatley had other serial heroes cross swords with evil magicians. Another series, consisting of just two novels, focused upon a middle-aged former espionage agent, Colonel Verney, and both of his exploits involved Satanic evil. It's of some interest that the publication date for the first Verney outing, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, is 1953, the same time that Wheatley claimed the last Musketeers novel took place, though the author almost certainly wrote that story in the 1960s.

Middle-aged British thriller-writer Molly Fountain gets a taste of real danger when a young woman, Christina Mordant, moves in next door. Nosy Molly finds it odd that Christina seems utterly isolated save for occasional visits from her father, so Molly offers herself as a sounding-board. What Christina reveals moves Molly to summon help, first that of her strapping grown son John, and then that of her former espionage colleague Colonel Verney. 

In brief, Christina's father consecrated his daughter to the Devil, and there's a Satanic cult waiting until the young woman reaches the age of 21, at which time it will be propitious to sacrifice her. The heroine doesn't actually know that this is her fate, but she does suffer a schizophrenic nature, seeming virginal and innocent by day but sexually rapacious by night. Molly for the most part fades from the main story as Verney and John Fountain join forces to keep Christina from falling in Satan's hands.

Though the basic plot sounds unremarkable, Wheatley devotes quite a bit of effort to showing all the detective work Verney and John must do to ferret out the truth, as well as showing the many stumbling blocks that impede their efforts. John handles most of the action-scenes, partly justified by the fact that within a few days of knowing Christina the two fall in love. Most of the romance-elements are routine, though I did like an early scene in which on the first meeting of the two youths, each one begins thinking about the physical shortcomings of the other-- which is meant to denote their resistance to their initial attraction.

In contradistinction to Wheatley's 1934 DEVIL RIDES OUT, the book that made him famous for occult thrillers, there's no advanced occult theory propounded, nor are there any mentions about non-Christian religions that are on a par with the Christian religion. DAUGHTER seems firmly entrenched in British interpretations of Catholicism and its "Church of England" analogues, in that the reason Christina can be promised to Satan is that her father deliberately fails to have her baptized. Also, spinning off from the belief that a Black Mass can only be performed by a defrocked Catholic priest, the leader of the Satanists is a canon of the Church of England, but not a practicing priest. To be sure, this character, Augustus Copley-Syle, is fully conversant with modern theories of Magick, and he and Verney descant learnedly on one of Wheatley's favorite topics, Aleister Crowley. Also, the villain's main scheme isn't just a standard Satanic ritual. Rather, the master plan involves animating an artificial creature, the "homunculus," an occult notion that had been in the wind at least since Somerset Maugham's 1908 novel THE MAGICIAN. 

In keeping with Wheatley's penchant for black-hearted villains, Copley-Syle is surely one of his best, and proves in many ways more memorable than any of the good guys. In addition to all the thriller elements, Wheatley devotes a great deal of attention to the theme of Christian redemption, exemplified by the heroes' successful attempt to redeem Christina's Satanist father. At the same time, the author goes the extra mile by coming up with novel settings. Instead of staging the climax in the usual abandoned church, the ritual takes place in a hell-like series of underground caverns, "the Cave of the Bats," rumored to have been a site of sacrificial rituals from pagan times.

I have not read the second Colonel Verney novel, but I have the impression that it dispenses with John Fountain and introduces a new young swain to do the heavy lifting for Verney. There's a marginal crossover-element introduced during the conversation between Verney and Copley-Syle when they discuss "that business with Mocata"-- Mocata being the villain defeated by the Three Musketeers in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. Said business would have taken place about nineteen years before DAUGHTER, but I don't know if Wheatley ever again intimated connections between his various serial universes.

THE READING RHEUM: GATEWAY TO HELL (1970)

About fifty pages from the end of GATEWAY, the character of Rex makes this pronouncement on his friend the Duc de Richleau:

I know that on many questions you’re a real old-fashioned die-hard. You’d like to see Britishers still running a third of the world, and playing polo in their off-time, with a Two-Power Navy to back them up. But you’ve liberal views where human relations are concerned.

After one reads GATEWAY TO HELL, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that author Dennis Wheatley was intentionally projecting his own sociological outlook upon the leader of his “Four Musketeers. Appearing in 1970, GATEWAY was the last-published in Wheatley’s “Musketeers” series, and though Wheatley claims that the action of the novel begins in 1953, it’s obvious that he wrote it during the 1960s. He mentions a “Doctor Luther King,” even though MLK wasn’t on the political map until 1955, when he lead the Montgomery bus boycott. Further, the heroes’ Satanic adversaries this time round have organized a movement called “Black Power,” which group advocates the violent overthrow of White Culture as did the more extreme movements of the sixties—none of which were seriously active in the 1950s. Even the name “Black Power” is clearly indebted to a political slogan that didn’t gain general acceptance until the decade of the sixties (though Richard Wright did author a book titled “Black Power” in 1954). Clearly, Wheatley took material from events of the 1960s and back-dated it so that he could show his heroes fighting Satanic evil when they were still relatively hale and hearty—unlike the author, who passed seven years after GATEWAY’s publication.

The “Musketeers” series consisted of eleven books, and only the three I’ve reviewed on this blog were outright occult adventures, the rest falling under the “espionage” rubric. I’ve still read no biographical material on the series’ author, though I’d encountered one or two assertions of his conservative politics even before beginning this review-project. Initially I tried to give Wheatley the benefit of the doubt in my review of THE DEVIL RIDESOUT, choosing to read the book’s multi-cultural villains as being an indicator of the author’s cosmopolitan sentiments. However, STRANGE CONFLICT  made this interpretation untenable, and in GATEWAY Wheatley apparently takes great pleasure in depicting his multinational cabal of Satanists to represent almost every culture on the map except those from France, Britain and the U.S. To be sure, some of the villains are Caucasian—particular a leftover German Nazi, who still nurses grudges against the Allies. Still, Wheatley seems a little too pre-occupied with how many of his walk-on villains are of mixed race.

In DEVIL, three of the musketeers have to rescue one of their number when he’s seduced into Satanism. In GATEWAY the author basically repeats this trope. American Rex Van Rijn apparently embezzles funds from the family bank and flees to join a Satanist group in South America. This supposedly explains the alliance of the leftover Nazi with the Satanists, though it’s a little off-putting that the author expects readers to accept a Nazi who allies himself to a “Black Power” movement. To be sure, the aim of the Satanist leader is to incite massive anti-white riots around the world purely to foment suffering, not to empower people of color, and thus it’s implicit that all of the “colored people” in the evil group are basically selling their kindred down the river.

Before exploring the novel’s politics further, I’ll note that there are some decent thrill-sequences here, though far less than STRANGE CONFLICT, which also showed Wheatley emphasizing politics over metaphysics. The pace is much slower, as the heroes make slow progress tracking down their law-breaking buddy, and Wheatley lets the action bog down several times, particularly in a time-wasting sequence where two of the good guys have to go on trial for murder. Where occult theory is concerned, Wheatley does try to be cosmopolitan, as there are a number of arguments set to prove the existence of both ‘good pagans” and “good witches.” But often the author interrupts the action so that his well-educated characters can descant about this or that topic for pages at a time. Like the voodoo-villain of STRANGE CONFLICT, the villains here are one-dimensional blackhearts. I suspect the reason that DEVIL’s bad guy was so persuasive was that Wheatley based Mocata in part on the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley.

In contrast to STRANGE CONFLICT, there are no attempts here to justify negative racial characterizations; all the evildoers, light or dark, are defined by their resentment of the people who are currently in charge. As one sees in the above quote, Wheatley assures his readers that the book’s heroes are basically respectful toward people of all religions and ethnicities. Still, though the author takes pains to acknowledge the many ways that people-of-color have suffered in White Culture, he’s never passionate about those injustices, as he is about his fears of a massive race-war.

I certainly do not disagree with the logic of Wheatley’s assessment about the wasteful stupidity of any sort of race-war, and the concomitant stupidity of anyone who advocates such a position, be it Stokely Carmichael or the morons who greenlighted the script of BLACK PANTHER. Yet, because Wheatley conflates this particular extremist position with the bugaboo of Satanism, it’s impossible to believe that he’s made a genuinely moral assessment of the subject. In the final analysis, despite his attempts to ameliorate his conservative sentiments, he’s just as much of a clumsy manipulator as his political opposite Spike Lee. But in contrast to Lee, at least Wheatley can address more than just one monotonous subject.

THE READING RHEUM: STRANGE CONFLICT (1941)

In my review of Dennis Wheatley's 1934 novel THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, I mentioned that the book struck me as being more "cosmopolitan" than some pop-fiction of the period. For instance, the ensemble of the first book included Rex Van Rijn (American), Richard Eaton (a presumably Christian Brit), Simon Aron (Jewish Brit), and the Duc de Richleau (Frenchman). One of DEVIL's support-characters, Eaton's Russian-born wife Marie-Lou, becomes a de facto addition to the "four musketeers," who during Wheatley's career were equally known for battling both foreign intrigue and supernatural evil. Yet I also had a dim memory of some dodgy racial aspects to the next of Wheatley's supernatural outings, the 1941 STRANGE CONFLICT, though I hadn't read it in over twenty years.
I've now finished re-reading CONFLICT, and my negative memory of the novel's racial politics were more than justified. It must be said that, to the extent that one can put aside an awareness of those politics, CONFLICT is nevertheless a suspenseful action-adventure story, though not as involving, or as symbolically inventive, as DEVIL RIDES OUT.

CONFLICT takes place in 1941, when England is suffering under the impact of the Blitz. Though the Duc and his friends are not directly involved with the British military, they're nevertheless enlisted for a special mission. It seems that the German forces have been continually attacking British naval positions with uncanny accuracy. Since there seems to be no physical way for German agents to have gained such intelligence, the Duc searches for metaphysical solutions. Sure enough, when the Duc and two of his friends unleash their astral bodies-- something that was old-hat in Wheatley when Doctor Strange wasn't even a gleam in Steve Ditko's eye-- they do indeed find that an evil adept has been spying on British naval positions, and transmitting said info to the Nazis. The "five musketeers" must then track down the adept and block his attempts to help the Axis forces.

In DEVIL RIDES OUT, Wheatley devoted considerable energy to researching the purported occultism-theories of his time, and he wrought an imaginative tapestry from that raw info, producing one of the best "occult detective" novels of the 20th century. There are some inventive touches in CONFLICT, but Wheatley is not nearly as interested in metaphysics this time around. Instead he's advocating a sociological theme that might be considered out-of-step even in his own era: the idea that "people of color" need to keep their place.

In today's political climate, it's also impossible to distinguish a "racial myth" from a genuinely racist myth. All sociological myths have some elements of chauvinism, and thus I've defended various authors, from Sax Rohmer to Margaret Mitchell, from the charge of "active racism." I cannot, however, make any such defense of Dennis Wheatley, because I think he's actively pushing the idea that European and American colonizing forces should never have ceased their dominion over what President Taft called "our little brown brothers."

Though the Nazis are the proximate cause of England's sufferings, somehow Wheatley never manages to address what modern readers consider the Third Reich's defining characteristic: an attempt to extol the Aryan Race above all the so-called "mongrel hordes." Despite the fact that one of the musketeers is Jewish, there's no mention of Jews suffering in concentration camps. Wheatley saves all of his anger for the maltreatment of other Europeans, such as French and Polish peoples. Wheatley's concerns are so Eurocentric that he never says much of anything about the Pacific conflict, though one unnamed Japanese agent has a minor role in CONFLICT. Wheatley does call the agent a "Jap," but the author shows no overt animus toward Orientals, and the enemy spy even gives a half-decent account of himself, using judo against the Herculean American Rex. Apparently Wheatley saved up all of his resentments for persons of the Negro race, showing no awareness that the Nazis shared similar sentiments.

About a hundred pages into the novel, the Duc and his aides encounter the enemy adept and fight him on the astral plane, where all of them change their shapes continually. At one point the adept assumes the form of "a brawny Negro," which turns out to be a half-truth at best. The adept escapes the heroes, but they find a clue that leads them to the adept's home base in Haiti. The quintet travels to Haiti, and on the way they pick up an apparent ally, a mute young woman named Philippa. At this point, the reader has no real evidence of any animus toward Negroes, not least because Philippa is presented as a perfectly comely young woman, despite being an "octoroon."

However, once the travelers arrive in Haiti, they're given constant evidence that the country is a cesspool, one that badly needs European or American oversight to be run properly. To be sure, most of these negative observations stem from an apparent benefactor, a very educated "Mulatto" named Doctor Saturday, who's perhaps not above prejudice when he claims that mulattos are inevitably smarter than pure Negroes. Nevertheless, one suspects that Wheatley is making Saturday the vehicle for his own sentiments, while allowing his sturdy Brit heroes to rise above such invidious statements. In addition, since Saturday regales the travelers with copious stories about the practice of voodoo, only a very dim reader would not suspect that Saturday is actually the mystery adept, who showed his "true color" on the astral plane by making himself look like a Negro man. Though there are a few instances in which the heroes encounter Haitians who don't fit the stereotypes of laziness or stupidity, Wheatley clearly puts his thumb on the scales to show that black people cannot self-govern. And even the "octoroon" Philippa is actually one of Saturday's pawns, in that she's actually a zombie whom Saturday assigned to keep tabs on his enemies. Despite being mute, she would seem to be the most high-functioning zombie in all literature.

The only positive thing one can say about Doctor Saturday is that, in order to make him a real threat, Wheatley can't avoid depicting him as a brilliant opponent to the musketeers. That said,, he's still a pretty flat figure in comparison to an impressive "racial myth" character like Rohmer's Fu Manchu. His entire motivation comes down to his having been rejected by his British Caucasian father, and this instills in him the desire to see the British people wiped out by the Axis forces. Neither he nor any other character points out that his Nazi masters might want to see his race similarly wiped off the face of the Earth. It's hard to believe that Wheatley was unaware of Nazi racial theories, and so I suspect that he didn't want to say anything that would palliate his message. Indeed, even Wheatley's gods share the author's prejudices. In one sequence, Saturday conjures up the goat-god Pan to use his power against the Duc. Pan, however, considers himself a European god, and in due time he manages to turn the tables on the "half-caste" sorcerer, driving him to his death with a "Pan-ic attack."

With the possible exception of the early "Bulldog Drummond" novels, STRANGE CONFLICT may be the most relentlessly Anglophilic novel of the 20th century. It ends with the Duc pronouncing an encomium on the so-called "Anglo-Saxon race," claiming that it is "the last Guardian of the Light" and "the Bulwark of the World." After the publication of CONFLICT, Wheatley wrote five more "political intrigue" novels with the musketeers, concluding the series with one last "supernatural adventure," published in 1970 even though it dealt with the heroes in the 1950s. It will be interesting to see how the author reacted to the complete dissolution of the colonial world that he advocated.

THE READING RHEUM: THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1934)

One of the few things I'll do to celebrate Halloween is to review the first of Dennis Wheatley's books about a group of occult detectives, sometimes called "the four musketeers."

At the time Wheatley began his series of novels featuring this group of crusaders, a lot of the occult detectives in both America and Europe tended to be rather low-wattage in their adventures-- some examples being Algernon Blackwood's "John Silence" and Sax Rohmer's "Moris Klaw." One of the few rip-roaring occult adventurers, Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, enjoyed almost twenty years of adventures starting in 1925. But De Grandin's violent little Frenchman was crafted with the pulp-readers of WEIRD TALES in mind, and so the stories I've read are all characterized by sex and sensation without much subtlety.

British writer Dennis Wheatley, like many other English writers renowned for supernatural stories, didn't deal exclusively with occult subject matter. The first novel to feature the four heroes-- American Rex Van Rijn, Britishers Simon Aron and Richard Eaton, and the French aristocrat Duc de Richleau (unquestionably named for the Dumas character)-- is a realistic suspense novel, published in 1933. However, the very next novel in the series, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, introduces the idea that the Duc-- an older man who serves as mentor to the others-- is an expert in the occult. When Simon is suborned by a devil-cult headed by an evildoer named Mocata, only the Duc recognizes the reality of the threat. Along with his staunch American ally, the two of them seek to free Simon from spiritual bondage. In addition, young Rex takes a fancy to one of the prettier cultists, a woman named Tanith, and romance blooms, though she is even more important to Mocata's devilish rituals than Simon is. A little later in the story, Richard Eaton, his wife and his innocent child also become embroiled in the supernatural battle between good and evil.

Wheatley's novel has just as many pulp-elements as anything in Seabury Quinn, but Wheatley devotes considerable effort to building up a consistent mystic cosmos, clearly derived from the more ambitious ideas of occultists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Unlike Bram Stoker, Wheatley doesn't propound a strict dichotomy between Christian miracles and Satanic perversities: the Duc often mentions the beneficent aspects of pagan religions that he can use against Mocata's evil. Given that one of the later novels, STRANGE CONFLICT, shows a streak of racist sentiment, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT seems thoroughly cosmopolitan about other cultures. Simon Aron is Jewish, Eaton's wife is Russian, and though there are Satanists of other races, there's no intimation that they're bad because of their race. Wheatley clearly based Mocata on the scandalous magician Aleister Crowley, but Wheatley actually propounds a theory of how Magick works, even quoting Crowley at one point. This is certainly one of the strongest "occult detective" novels in existence, as well as a good rousing adventure-tale as well.

The Duc and his friends appeared in eleven books in all, though only three of them focused on occult topics. As I mentioned, I don't remember the second book, STRANGE CONFLICT, to be nearly as good as DEVIL RIDES OUT, but I may give CONFLICT a re-read before delving into the third and last one, GATEWAY TO HELL.