Dennis Wheatley

Dennis Yates Wheatley (1897-1977) was born in Brixton, south London, the son of a wine merchant. His best-known books were occult and supernatural thrillers, starting with The Devil Rides Out (1934); but from the beginning there were science fiction elements there too. Black August (1934) is about a future war, after which Britain is rescued from collapse by a palace coup. His large output includes other science fiction novels, such as They Found Atlantis (1936) (they found Atlantis), Sixty Days to Live (1939) (about the arrival of a destructive comet), and Star of Ill-Omen (1952) (which features flying saucers). A library of witchcraft and adventure. Dennis Wheatley, storyteller supreme, made a lifelong study of the occult. His meticulous research into the black arts reveals almost unbelievable sorcery. He warned. ‘By participating in Satanic Rites, however sham, one can make oneself a focus for Evil.’ No writer cared more about authenticity. This is true not only of his Satanist books, but also of his many other novels.

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Wheatley was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant into the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War. Dennis was gassed in a chlorine attack during Passchendaele and was invalided out, having served in Flanders, on the Ypres Salient, and in France at Cambrai and Saint-Quentin. In 1919 he took over management of the family’s wine business. In 1931, however, after his father’s death, and with business having declined because of the Great Depression, he was financially over-extended, faced near bankruptcy, and was forced to sell his wine business. Knowing his love of telling tales, his wife suggested he write a book. DW wrote a detective novel called ‘Three Inquisitive People’ which introduced the Duke de Richleau and his friends and it was accepted for publication by Hutchinson, who were to be his publishers for the rest of his life. Before the book could be published he wrote a second book, an adventure story set in Russia and featuring the same set of heroes – ‘The Forbidden Territory’. Hutchinson decided this was a better novel and should be published first. He followed this with an ‘out of series’ novel which he wrote in a fortnight, and then went back to the writing of impeccably researched novels with ‘Black August’, which featured his second principal hero Gregory Sallust, and ‘The Fabulous Valley’. In 1934 he wrote an occult novel, ‘The Devil Rides Out’. Frequently rated as the best occult novel of the twentieth century, and it is his most famous work.

During the Second World War Wheatley was a member of the London Controlling Section, which secretly coordinated strategic military deception and cover plans. His literary talents led to his working with planning staffs for the War Office. He wrote numerous papers for them, including suggestions for dealing with a possible Nazi invasion of Britain (recounted in his works Stranger than Fiction and The Deception Planners). The most famous of his submissions to the Joint Planning Staff of the war cabinet was on “Total War”. He took part in the plans for the Normandy invasions.

After the War, Wheatley bought a mini country mansion in seaside Lymington in Hampshire, and he continued to write books, introducing a third principal character, Roger Brook, whose exploits took place in the Napoleonic era. He worked hard and to a well-disciplined routine. For around eight months of the year DW would devote himself to his writings. He would rise mid-morning and sometimes go to bed well after midnight, depending on how his writing was going. He took the remaining months off to go travelling, partly for pleasure and partly to research his next books. In the days when international travel was a distinct privilege, he went round the world twice, and used countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Mexico and Egypt as backdrops for his books. During this time several of his books were filmed by Hammer, the most famous being ‘The Devil Rides Out’ with his friend Sir Christopher Lee playing the role of the Duke, a role which he enjoyed enormously.

Dennis Wheatley wrote sixty five books in all, with fifty six being novels and the remainder non-fiction. Eleven featured the Duke de Richleau, eleven Gregory Sallust, and twelve involved Roger Brook. Some nine of these are considered ‘Black Magic’ novels – a genre for which he is particularly famous.

By the nineteen sixties, Wheatley was selling over a million copies of his novels a year; his work was sold in around twenty nine countries and translated into over twenty eight languages, and altogether he is estimated to have sold something like fifty million copies of his books in his lifetime.

He wrote with great intensity and created an amazing variety of characters and situations. The 52 volume Heron Edition of Wheatley’s novels, which includes his espionage and adventure stories, as well as the occult, is the only finely-bound edition in the world.
The craftsmanship is of the highest standard. Scarlet Kidron and lavish golden and black embellishing have been used to startling effect. The illustrations were specially commissioned from English artists.

Gift Suggestion – Why not put your own collection together? If you are interested in more than one book as a gift then please email me with your selections and I will confirm availability and give you a Special Price

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Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope (1815—1882) was an English novelist whose popular success concealed until long after his death the nature and extent of his literary merit. In his own time, Trollope’s novels were as popular with the common reader as they were admired by George Eliot, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Today, he is probably the most widely read and loved nineteenth century English Novelists after Dickens and Jane Austen.

Trollope grew up as the son of a sometime scholar, barrister, and failed gentleman farmer. He was unhappy at the great public schools of Winchester and Harrow. Adolescent awkwardness continued until well into his 20s. The years 1834–41 he spent miserably as a junior clerk in the General Post Office, but he was then transferred as a postal surveyor to Ireland, where he began to enjoy a social life. In 1844 he married Rose Heseltine, an Englishwoman, and set up house at Clonmel, in Tipperary. He then embarked upon a literary career that leaves a dominant impression of immense energy and versatility.

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Among the best-known of his novels are two series of six novels each collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire and the Palliser novels, as well as his longest novel, The Way We Live Now. His novels address political, social, and gender issues and other topical matters.

A series of books set in the imaginary English county of Barsetshire remains his best loved and most famous work, but he also wrote convincing novels of political life as well as studies that show great psychological penetration. One of his greatest strengths was a steady, consistent vision of the social structures of Victorian England, which he re-created in his books with unusual solidity. The Barsetshire novels excel in memorable characters, and they exude the atmosphere of the cathedral community and of the landed aristocracy.

Trollope’s other major series, the Palliser novels, which overlap with the Barsetshire novels, concerned itself with politics, with the wealthy, industrious Plantagenet Palliser (later Duke of Omnium) and his delightfully spontaneous, even richer wife Lady Glencora featured prominently. However, as with the Barsetshire series, many other well-developed characters populated each novel and in one, The Eustace Diamonds, the Pallisers play only a small role.

Trollope published four novels about Ireland. Two were written during the Great Famine, while the third deals with the famine as a theme (The Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Kellys and the O’Kellys, and Castle Richmond, respectively). The Macdermots of Ballycloran was written while he was staying in the village of Drumsna, County Leitrim. The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848) is a humorous comparison of the romantic pursuits of the landed gentry (Francis O’Kelly, Lord Ballindine) and his Catholic tenant (Martin Kelly). Two short stories deal with Ireland (“The O’Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo” and “Father Giles of Ballymoy” Some critics argue that these works seek to unify an Irish and British identity, instead of viewing the two as distinct. Even as an Englishman in Ireland, Trollope was still able to attain what he saw as essential to being an “Irish writer”: possessed, obsessed, and “mauled” by Ireland.

Trollope’s popularity and critical success diminished in his later years, but he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels have acquired a good reputation. In particular, critics, who concur that the book was not popular when published, generally acknowledge the sweeping satire The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece. In all, Trollope wrote 47 novels, 42 short stories, and five travel books, as well as nonfiction books titled Thackeray (1879) and Lord Palmerston (1882).

In 1859 Trollope moved back to London, resigning from the civil service in 1867 and unsuccessfully standing as a Liberal parliamentary candidate in 1868. Before then, however, he had produced some 18 novels apart from the Barsetshire group. He wrote mainly before breakfast at a fixed rate of 1,000 words an hour. Outstanding among works of that period were Orley Farm (serially, 1861–62; 1862), which made use of the traditional plot of a disputed will, and Can You Forgive Her? (serially, 1864–65; 1865), the first of his political novels, which introduced Plantagenet Palliser, later duke of Omnium, whose saga was to stretch over many volumes down to The Duke’s Children (serially, 1879–80; 1880), a subtle study of the dangers and difficulties of marriage. In the political novels Trollope is less concerned with political ideas than with the practical working of the system—with the mechanics of power.

Discover Trollope – A guide to Britain’s celebrated Victorian author.

Starting in 1989 The Folio Society began publishing the first complete edition of Trollope’s novels and continued at the rate of several per year until all 47 novels had been published.

This superb uniformly bound complete collection is generally available on my website together with the edition that was later produced by the Folio Society for the Trollope Society.

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