The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley Dark Masters [Kindle Edition]

As a lifelong enthusiast of supernatural and occult fiction I've tried at various times to enjoy Dennis Wheatley's books, with little success. But I know enough about the history of magic to recognise the crucial role that Wheatley played in shaping the occult imagination of the 20th century, and so, somewhat daunted by its 700-page girth, I began reading Phil Baker's biography of the man who put smoking jackets on Satanists and made black magic seem like a wise career choice for many a dreaming teen.

I needn't have worried - this is one of the most entertaining books I've read in years and also one of the most lucidly fascinating and effortlessly informative. In a tone that is alternately warm and wry, sympathetic and scandalous, Baker transports us into a bygone world of genteel bigotry, social climbing, institutionalised xenophobia and the fear of the devil himself. Wheatley himself is portrayed as an engaging product of pre-war Britain, one who sought in his fiction to reflect the world as he thought it ought to be, but found that world slipping away from him even faster than he could knock out novels.

But Baker's book is about more than just Wheatley himself. We learn a great deal about the man and his times through the other characters he comes into contact with - prominent among them his mentor, the Niven-esque underworld chancer Eric Tombe, and a supporting cast of upper class fascists, eccentrics and occultists - some of them, like MI5 founder Maxwell Knight and Tank Pioneer Captain John Fuller, all three at once.

I was genuinely sad to see Wheatley go at this wonderful book's end and, as a measure of the biography's success, I was so flushed with enthusiasm for Dennis and all his works, that I immediately bought a copy of The Devil Rides Out and began reading it. I gave up after 30 pages.

Dennis Wheatly was not a great writer, perhaps not even a good one and Phil Baker, while giving full credit to his story-telling abilities, is by no means blind to the absurd aspects of his writing, nor to the unattractive elements of racism and snobbery. However anyone who, as I did, devoured his books in adolescence, will be fascinated to know what sort of a man he was. Phil Baker has been lucky to discover a man with an engagingly contradictory character - naive/shrewd, mercenary/idealistic, sensualist/moralising - and an equally strange life. Central to this narrative is his friendship with Eric Gordon Tombe, a fraudster who was eventually murdered by a fellow fraudster. Wheatley sat at the feet (literally in the case of his bookplate) of this weird poseur and drank in his bogus philosophising. Despite eventually becoming aware of the man's contradictions Wheatley resolutely failed to translate this awareness into fiction which was always about black and white, darkness and light. That is the strangeness of the man that Baker brings out so well: a writer who deliberately shut the ambiguities of his life out of his fiction, a relentless self-mythologiser and self-publicist. There are one or two infelicities of style, not inappropriate for a book on Wheatley, and a few errors, such as the muddling of Charles Williams with Charles Morgan, two very different writers. Altogether, though, a very interesting story told with a verve that rivals Wheatley and a humour and subtlety that his subject could only have envied.

This biography has surprises as strange and as unexpected as anything in Wheatley's own novels. Meticulously researched, Baker never stifles his material by presenting it as dreary facts, but vividly and deftly creates an entirely credible portrait of Wheatley in the round, with an enviable lightness of style.
A book worthy of its subject, and likely to be one of the biographies of the year.