So if you're joining us today, we are diving
into a figure who honestly feels like he was
invented by a screenwriter who just who couldn't
quite figure out what genre they were writing.
Right. If you look at the source material we've
got for this deep dive we're pulling from his
Wikipedia entry today, we are looking at a man
who was all at the same time a highly respectable
Mayfair wine merchant. the world's leading fictional
authority on Satanism and a high level strategic
deceiver for the British government during World
War Two. Exactly. It's just a completely jarring
combination of careers. It really is. I mean,
usually you've got people who are either firmly
grounded in the, you know, the commercial business
world or they're off in the ether writing about
the occult. But Dennis Wheatley managed to be
both. And then he somehow applied those exact
same skills to help win the Second World War.
And just to be clear for you listening, we aren't
talking about some. obscure fringe author here.
The entry shows that in the 1960s, Wheatley was
selling a million books a year. Yeah, a million
a year. He was literally known as the prince
of thriller writers. If you walked into any British
bookshop in, say, 1965, he would have occupied
entire shelves. But today, if you bring him up,
the name mostly draws a blank. Or or maybe people
vaguely remember a classic Hammer horror movie.
Which is exactly why we're doing this deep dive.
Our mission today is to connect all these bizarre
dots. We want to unpack how the very specific
skills of a luxury wine merchant, you know, cultivating
taste, understanding narrative, selling an experience,
how that translated into writing massive hits
about black magic. Right. And then even more
wildly, how that translated into convincing the
Nazi high command that the D -Day. landings were
going to happen in the completely wrong place.
This is fascinating. So let's start with that
early foundation, the wine merchant aspect, because
he wasn't just a writer who happened to like
a good vintage. He was born into the trade. He
was born in 1897 in Brixton Hill. The family
business was Wheatley and Son, which was a very
well -regarded wine business in Mayfair. So right
from the start, he's being roomed for this life
of upper crust commerce. But if you look at his
early life, there are these little quirks that
show he wasn't really cut out to just quietly
balance ledgers. Yeah, my favorite detail from
his early life has to be his time at Dulwich
College. Oh, the expulsion. Yes, he was expelled.
And it wasn't for failing grades. or, I don't
know, getting into a fistfight. The Wikipedia
page notes he was expelled for allegedly forming
a secret society. It's almost too perfect, isn't
it? It really is. It completely foreshadows everything
he would become. I mean, most schoolboys are
worried about exams or sports, and Wheatley is
already organizing clandestine groups in the
shadows. He clearly had this innate drive to
organize people and deal in secrets. But then
that, you know, that boyhood play acting. runs
headfirst into a very grim reality because he
was part of that specific generation that went
straight from school into the trenches of World
War I. He actually moved to HMS Worcester as
a merchant Navy cadet first, but then he's commissioned
into the Royal Field Artillery. Right. And we
really need to pause on his World War I service
because it heavily contextualizes his worldview
and his later writing. He didn't just serve in
a quiet sector. He was in the thick of it. Passchendaele.
Yeah, Passchendaele. He was actually gassed in
a chlorine attack there and eventually invalided
out of the war. And that experience, that sheer
mechanical brutality of the trenches. It seems
like something that fundamentally shaped him.
Absolutely. When you read his thrillers later
on, even the really wild supernatural ones, the
violence always has this very specific, unromantic,
heavy feel to it. He knew exactly what a battlefield
actually looked and smelled like. It wasn't abstract
for him. No, not at all. But he survives. He
makes it back to London, and he takes over the
family wine business. Yeah, Wheatley and Son.
And for about a decade, he's basically living
the life of a man about town. He's selling vintage
port and champagne to aristocrats, learning the
social codes of the British elite. Because where
he's gathering all the raw material for his future
characters, right? Like... The Duke de Richelieu.
Exactly. The Duke de Richelieu is his most famous
protagonist, and he is essentially this idealized
version of the Mayfair world Wheatley was operating
in. Cultured, wealthy, always knowing the exact
right vintage for every occasion. But of course,
that party comes to an abrupt end. The Great
Depression. The Great Depression. It absolutely
killed the luxury wine trade. Nobody is buying
expensive champagne when the economy collapses.
So by 1931, he's f***ed. forced to sell the firm
so picture this he's in his mid -30s yeah the
family legacy he was supposed to inherit and
run is gone and he's completely broke and he
turns to writing Not because he had some deep
artistic calling, but literally out of pure financial
necessity. It was a total pivot born of desperation.
But it worked. His very first published book,
The Forbidden Territory in 1933, was an immediate
massive hit. It was reprinted seven times in
its first seven weeks. That's incredible. He
quickly realized he had a real knack for pacing
and plotting. But the true shift. The one that
completely defined his career and what he's remembered
for happened the next year when he decided he
was going to write a thriller about the occult.
Right. The black magic phase. Now, prior to this,
if you think about occult fiction, it was mostly
what? Ghost stories. M .R. James. Subtle, creepy
hauntings in old manners. Wheatley did something
completely different. He did. He treated black
magic almost like a technical subject within
a fast -paced action thriller. In his books,
magic has specific rules. It has procedures.
And to get that right, he didn't just sit in
a room and use his imagination. He actually did
incredibly deep research. And this is where his
social network comes into play again. His friend,
the journalist Tom Dreiberg, actually introduces
him into the real London occult underground.
Which, believe it or not, was a very active scene
in the 1930s. Wheatley gets introduced to people
like Raul Ahmed, who had written a book called
The Black Art. He meets the Reverend Montague
Summers, who was this eccentric clergyman who
firmly believed that witches were a literal present
danger in modern society. And of course, the
big one, he meets Elister Crowley. The Elister
Crowley connection is just... wild to me. You
have Dennis Wheatley, this deeply conservative
king and country Mayfair wine merchant, sitting
down to have lunch with the man the tabloids
called the Great Beast 666. It's a great image,
though by all accounts, the source material notes
that Wheatley found Crowley to be a bit of a
sad, diminished figure by that point. Aging,
always hustling for money, Wheatley actually
ended up paying for the lunch. But he mined Crowley
for information. He wanted the rituals, the proper
terminology. He was after very... But the irony
here, and I think this is so important to point
out, is that he never actually practiced any
of it himself, did he? Never once. And that is
a crucial distinction. Wheatley was a believer,
yes, but very much in the traditional Christian
sense. To him, these occult forces were absolutely
real and they were purely evil. Right. He explicitly
stated he would never engage in a ritual because
he was terrified of opening a door he wouldn't
be able to close. So his books are essentially
these grand morality plays. It's the right -hand
path battling the left -hand path. It's such
a fascinating contradiction that he became the
ultimate fictional authority on a subject he
morally completely detested. The Wikipedia page
notes that his 1934 book The Devil Rides Out
was hailed by James Hilton as the best thing
of its kind since Dracula. It cemented his reputation
forever. He created whole series. You had the
Duke de Richelieu for the occult stuff. But he
also mixed genres. He had Gregory Sallis for
WWII espionage and Roger Brooke for historical
thrillers set during the French Revolution. OK,
so he's building this massive literary empire
in the 1930s. But then the real world starts
sliding toward World War II. And this is where
the story pivots from bestselling author to high
level spy. Easily the most surprising chapter
of his entire life. When the war breaks out,
he isn't sent back to an artillery regiment.
He actually gets recruited into something called
the London Controlling Section, or the LCS. Even
the name sounds like something straight out of
a thriller. The London Controlling Section. What
did they actually do? Their entire job was strategic
deception. Not tactical deception like camouflaging
a specific tank or hiding a bunker. They did
strategic deception. They had to convince the
German high command to move entire armies and
divisions to the wrong countries. And Wheatley
was brought in because the war office realized
something very clever. What was that? Well, military
men think in terms of logistics and supply lines.
But if you want to fool Hitler, you need someone
who thinks in terms of plot. Oh that makes so
much sense. A general looks at a map of Europe
and sees trip movements. A novelist looks at
that same map and sees a narrative. Exactly.
Early in the war, Wheatley actually wrote a massive
paper called Total War. He basically just brainstormed
every terrible, devious thing he would do to
Britain if he were the Nazis. And it genuinely
terrified the British leadership because he had
such a vivid imagination for disaster. So they
commissioned him as a wing commander in the RAF
Volunteer Reserve and put him to work inventing
lies. And big lies, too. The Wikipedia entry
details his involvement in the deception plans
for the Normandy invasions. Yes, the D -Day deceptions.
The overarching goal was to convince the Germans
that the Allied invasion was coming anywhere
but Normandy, usually Pas -de -Calais or even
up in Norway. So he's helping script this massive...
Fake reality, fake radio traffic, feeding rumors
to double agents, creating entirely fictional
armies up in Scotland. It's literally storytelling
on a global scale. He was writing a fiction and
his audience was the German intelligence services.
And he took it. incredibly seriously. He was
awarded the U .S. Bronze Star for his role, actually.
He understood that a well -placed, believable
lie could do more strategic damage than a bombing
raid. It connects so perfectly back to his writing,
because he was already experimenting with how
to make fiction look and feel like reality long
before the war started. We have to talk about
the crime dossiers he created in the 1930s. For
anyone listening who loves true crime or interactive
games, this is going to blow your mind. Oh, the
crime dossier were totally revolutionary. he
was decades ahead of his time with these. He
teamed up with his friend J .G. Lynx, and in
1936, they created Murder Off Miami. I want to
describe the physical object for you listening,
because it wasn't just a book you put on a shelf.
No, not at all. It was an actual file folder
tied with a ribbon. It looked exactly like a
real police case file. When you opened it, there
wasn't a traditional narrative. It was full of
police reports, fake telegrams, handwritten letters,
crime scene photos. And the real genius was the
physical evidence. The source material says they
included actual strands of human hair, matchsticks,
bloodstained fabric, little pills sealed in tiny
glassing envelopes. The logistics of manufacturing
that must have been an absolute nightmare. Apparently
it was. They had assembly lines of workers literally
gluing pieces of hair and matchsticks into thousands
of folders. But the effect was total immersion.
You, the reader, became the detective. You had
to physically sift through the clues to solve
the murder. and the solution was sealed in a
separate section at the very back that you had
to tear open once you figured it out. Which sounds
exactly like those modern Hunt a Killer subscription
boxes or escape room board games. He just loved
systems and games. He even designed strategic
board games like Invasion in 1938 and Blockade
in 1939. He viewed human conflict, whether it
was a drawing room murder or a global war, as
a complex puzzle with distinct rules and mechanics.
So we have this man who is an absolute master
of simulation. He simulates crimes for his readers.
He simulates allied invasions for the war office.
Did that blurring of lines between fact and fiction
bleed into his writing after the war? Significantly.
When he returns to writing post -war, he starts
heavily incorporating his real -world intelligence
experience. His spy character, Gregory Sallis,
starts operating in a world that feels uncomfortably
close to the truth. And Sallis, by the way, is
widely cited as a direct inspiration for Ian
Fleming's James Bond. Right. I saw that in the
notes. Yeah. Fleming knew Wheatley, the dining,
the drinking, the ruthless agent with a license
to do what needs to be done. That's very much
the Gregory Salas blueprint. But Wheatley also
started having his fictional characters interact
directly with real historical figures. Yeah.
The entry mentions that Salas doesn't just fight
faceless henchmen. He literally sits down and
has dinner with Herman Goering. He does in a
book called They Use Dirk Forces. And this is
where we actually get a very revealing look into
Wheatley's own political psyche, because he.
He portrays Goebel with a surprising amount of
sympathy. Really? Yeah. He frames Goebel almost
as this honorable enemy, an aristocrat who went
down the wrong path, but who still had some twisted
sense of honor. And he does this specifically
to contrast him with Joseph Goebel. How does
he portray Goebel? Much worse. Wheatley describes
Goebel as the extreme left of the Nazi party.
He heavily emphasizes the socialist part of national
socialism because to Wheatley, Goebel's represented
the destruction of the old. world order, the
tearing down of the class system and the aristocracy,
which Wheatley viewed as being just as dangerous
as communism. And this seems to be the real key
to understanding the latter half of his life.
He wasn't just a fun thriller writer. The Wikipedia
entry makes it clear he was a staunch, deep -seated
reactionary. He was a man out of time. He fiercely
supported the monarchy, the British Empire, the
rigid class structure of the Edwardian era he
grew up in. And as he moved into the post -war
1950s and 60s, he watched that world rapidly
evaporating. Which brings us to perhaps the most
intense thing we found in the source material.
The letter to posterity. This part of the story
honestly stopped me in my tracks. It is a remarkable
and frankly chilling historical document. In
the winter of 1947, Wheatley sat down at his
country estate. The war against fascism was won,
but in his eyes, the peace was being lost. The
post -war labor government was in power. Exactly.
They were bringing in socialist reforms, nationalizing
industries. The empire was beginning to break
apart. So he writes this long, sprawling letter,
seals it inside a waterproof urn, and buries
it secretly in his garden. He literally intended
it to be a time capsule for a future civilization.
Because he genuinely assumed his current civilization
was doomed. The letter wasn't actually discovered
until 1969 when the house was being demolished.
And when they finally opened it, the Wikipedia
entry outlines that they found basically a manifesto
of pure upper class anxiety. So what exactly
did the letter say? We want to report this impartially,
just looking at what the source material tells
us about his mindset. Well, he predicted that
socialist reforms were going to completely bankrupt
Britain. He predicted the eventual abolition
of the monarchy. He complained very bitterly
about what he saw as the pampering of the working
class. He actually writes, and this is a direct
quote from the entry, it is not a practical proposition
that the few should be expected to devote their
lives exclusively to making things easy for the
majority. Which is a very stark, unapologetic
defense of extreme elitism. But the letter goes
much further than just political complaining.
He actually gives instructions. Right. He treats
the letter almost like a covert briefing paper
for a future underground resistance movement.
He advises future generations on exactly how
to deal with what he calls socialist tyranny.
And he does not mince his words at all. The entry
notes he explicitly advises active resistance,
which he says must include the, quote, ambushing
and killing of unjust tyrannous officials. It's
just shocking to read that coming from one of
the most beloved bestselling authors of the era,
he is literally advocating for political assassination
in a buried time capsule. You really have to
view it through the lens of his WWII experience
in the London controlling section. He had just
spent years actively planning sabotage, resistance,
and total deception against the Nazis. In his
mind, the ideological threat from the political
left in Britain was functionally identical to
the threat from the Nazis. He was just applying
the ruthless logic of total war to domestic British
politics. It paints a picture of a man who was
operating with deep, almost apocalyptic paranoia.
while simultaneously hosting fabulous dinner
parties and selling millions of books. It's that
jarring dichotomy again. On the surface, he's
the jovial, successful, wealthy author. Underneath,
he is seething with this existential fear. And
honestly... I think that tension is exactly what
made his books so incredibly successful. How
do you mean? Because when he wrote about a grand
conspiracy to overthrow the world or a satanic
plot to destroy all of Western civilization,
he wasn't faking the emotional intensity of it.
He truly felt it. He took all of his genuine
political anxiety and poured it directly into
his supernatural thrillers. The Satanists in
his novels were very often just fictional proxies
for the political forces he despised in real
life. So the fear was... real, even if the magic
wasn't. But despite this really intense backward
-looking worldview, he remained incredibly popular
for decades. Eventually, though, the star did
fade. It did. By the 1970s, his writing style
was starting to feel very dated. The whole glory
of the empire value system simply didn't resonate
with the younger post -60s generation. And then,
after he died in 1977, his estate ran into some
very complicated copyright issues. Which effectively
kept his books out of print for a long time.
Yeah, for decades. It wasn't until Bloomsbury
Reader picked up his catalog in 2013 that the
books became widely available again. But even
if people aren't rushing out to read The Devil
Rides Out today, his fingerprints are still all
over our pop culture. We already mentioned the
James Bond connection. And the horror genre owes
him a huge debt. The 1968 Hammer horror film
adaptation of The Double Rides Out starring Christopher
Lee is an absolute cult classic. Wheatley basically
established the entire trope of the sophisticated
upper class occultist. You know, if you're watching
a modern movie and a character is wearing a bespoke
tuxedo while casually fighting a demon, that
is a direct Dennis Wheatley legacy. It's such
a strange, sprawling legacy. A Mayfair wine merchant.
who basically taught the world how to imagine
the impossible, whether he was detailing a black
magic ritual, designing a crime file with real
human hair or inventing a fake army in Scotland
to fool the Nazis. He fundamentally understood
the architecture of belief. I think that's the
common thread through his whole crazy life. Whether
he was selling an expensive bottle of wine, selling
a pulp novel or selling a massive lie to the
German military, he knew exactly how to construct
a narrative that human beings desperately wanted
to buy into. And as we wrap up this deep dive,
that feels incredibly relevant right now. You
know, we talk so much today about being in an
age of information warfare, of deep fakes, of
competing realities. But Dennis Wheatley was
doing all of this with typewriters, cardboard
tanks, and sheer nerve 80 years ago. He was a
pioneer of it. Which leaves us with a pretty
provocative thought to chew on. Today, we spend
so much time worrying about artificial intelligence
generating fake news or algorithms manipulating
our reality. But Wheatley's life proves that
human imagination, armed with just a typewriter
and a deep understanding of human psychology,
can fabricate a reality convincing enough to
fool an entire empire. That's a great point.
It makes you wonder if we are too focused on
the technology of deception when the real vulnerability
has always just been our basic human desire to
believe a compelling story. The human mind is
still the most easily hacked system out there.
Exactly. Well, thank you for taking this deep
dive with us today. It has been a genuinely wild
ride through the archives. It's been my pleasure.
And to you listening, keep digging. Because as
Dennis Wheatley proved, there is always, always
more beneath the surface.