One of the giants of popular fiction, with total sales of around fifty million books, Dennis Wheatley held twentieth-century Britain spellbound. His Black Magic novels like The Devil Rides Out created an oddly seductive and luxurious vision of Satanism, but in reality he was as interested in politics as occultism. Wheatley was closely involved with the secret intelligence community, and this powerfully researched study shows just how directly this drove his work, from his unlikely warnings about the menace of Satanic Trade Unionism to his role in a British scheme to engineer a revival of Islam. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Phil Baker examines Wheatley's key friendship with a fraudster named Eric Gordon Tombe, and uncovers the full story of his sensational 1922 murder. Baker also explores Wheatley's relationship with occult figures such as Rollo Ahmed, Aleister Crowley, and the Reverend Montague Summers. Wheatley saw existence as a conflict between the forces of light and darkness, with the forces of darkness increasingly threatening to win, and his sense that ?living well is the best revenge? was closely bound up with the identity he carved out for himself as the smoking-jacketed connoisseur, with his wine cellar and his fine library. Like Sax Rohmer and John Buchan, Wheatley has now moved from being dated to positively vintage. AUTHOR: Phil Baker has been widely praised for The Dedalus Book of Absinthe, and has reviewed for a number of papers including The Sunday Times, The Observer and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of an academic book on Samuel Beckett and has recently completed a biography of the London artist Austin Osman Spare. He lives in Central London.
