ABSTRACT
During a career spanning four decades, Dennis Wheatley wrote over fifty books and sold “over 40 million copies in Britain” alone. Gina Wisker argues that “the titillation of the potential daily presence of true evil” in Wheatley’s occult fiction “is comfortingly matched by an equal certainty that order and the status quo will be resolved; that honour, honesty and the wartime spirit of Britain can overcome anything nasty lurking in the visible or invisible enemy’s plans”. One of the key features of Wheatley’s success was that he developed an “author-persona” early on in his career, marking himself out as a true expert in the fields of the occult and international political history. Thus, for Wheatley, writing a novel was not merely an artistic endeavor but a social service, or rather, a party-political broadcast, a message to the public about his perception of the state of the nation.
