Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts Read online

  GUNMEN, GALLANTS

  AND GHOSTS

  DEDICATION

  1933—1943

  FOR

  My darling wife

  JOAN

  As a very small acknowledgement of all

  the help she has given me in my ten years

  as an author.

  D.W.

  Contents

  Introduction

  THE GHOST HUNTER

  Story I The Case of the Thing that Whimpered

  Story VI The Case of the Long-dead Lord

  Story X The Case of the Red-Headed Women

  Story XV The Case of the Haunted Château

  OTHER STORIES OF THE OCCULT

  Story IV A Life for a Life

  Story VIII In the Fog

  Story XIX The Snake

  ARTICLES ON THE OCCULT

  Story XIII Voodoo

  Story XVII Black Magic

  MAINLY OF CROOKS AND WAR

  Story II Orchids on Monday

  Story III Special Leave

  Story V In the Underground

  Story IX When the Reds Seized the City of Gold

  Story XI The Born Actor

  OTHER WRITINGS

  Story XII The Deserving Poor

  Story XIV Love Trap

  Story XVI The Sideboard

  Story VII The Fugitive King (from Old Rowley. A Very Private Life of Charles II)

  Story XVIII The Red Verdun (the first siege of Stalingrad; from Red Eagle)

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  A Few Words From the Author

  On September 4th, 1939, I offered my services free for the duration of the war to the announced, but as yet unformed, Ministry of Information. As my work had already been translated into nineteen languages and I was over forty, to use such talents as I have been blessed with on propaganda seemed the best way in which I could serve my country. Most fortunately, as it turned out, not one of the three applications I made for enrolment received even the courtesy of a reply.

  For the following nine months, much disgruntled at being unable to find suitable war employment, in contrast to my family, every member of which had done so, I wrote the first of my Gregory Sallust spy thrillers—The Scarlet Impostor. Then, in May 1940, Hitler, of all people, secured me a break. The Germans’ victorious advance to the Channel ports and the imminent collapse of the French army made it appear as good as certain that his next move would be the invasion of Britain. People in high places began taking urgent measures to oppose enemy landings and showed sudden willingness to consider useful suggestions from any quarter. My wife was working in MI.5 and suggested that I might produce a few ideas. In consequence, I wrote a paper on Resistance to Invasion.

  Shortly afterwards, fantastic as it may seem, I was told that all three of the Chiefs-of-Staff had read my paper. Of the hectic months that followed I have given an account in my book Stranger than Fiction. But to put it briefly: between June 1940 and the autumn of 1941 I wrote twenty papers, amounting to half a million words, on such diverse problems as Village Defence, How to Keep Turkey Neutral and Strategy in the Mediterranean at the request of members of the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet. Extraordinary to relate, these papers were read even by His Majesty the King, who did me the honour to send me his commendation upon them.

  As this work was entirely voluntary, during that period I remained my own master; so between writing my War Papers I was able to continue chronicling Gregory’s exploits against the Nazis in Faked Passports, The Black Baroness and V for Vengeance. But in December 1941 I received a truly great reward for having burned so much midnight oil while thinking up real ways of bringing pain and grief to our enemies. Hitherto, regulations had forbidden my being given any secret information on the conduct of the war; but it was then decided
that my work would be of more value if I were put into uniform and so become eligible to receive full particulars of our resources and intentions. This led to a special appointment being created for me on the Future Operations Planning Staff, and my being the only civilian ever directly commissioned to become a member of that strategic stratosphere.

  For the following three years I worked in the famous fortress basement as one of Sir Winston Churchill’s Staff Officers and made my very small contribution to planning all our great operations of war.

  I count myself extremely fortunate to have been privileged to help in formulating Cover Plans and other devices calculated to mystify and mislead our enemies, but such work was continuous and exhausting. It entailed not only endless conferences with officers of the three Services and Foreign Office officials, but also, in order to be able to express a well-founded opinion at such meetings, an up-to-date knowledge of every aspect of the war.

  This entailed reading many thousands of words every day—Minutes from the Prime Minister; the minutes of the War Cabinet, of the Defence Committee, of the Chiefs-of-Staff Committee, of the Joint Intelligence Committee and of the Inter-Service Security Board; Foreign Office telegrams ‘In’ and ‘Out’, the Intelligence summaries of the three Services, and, during the course of the week, a dozen other papers such as Directives to Force Commanders, despatches from the battle-fronts, operations under consideration, submarine sinkings, state of tank production, food resources in Britain, civilian morale, estimated arrival of U.S. Forces, analyses of the effect of bombing on German cities, measures to be taken in the event of gas warfare, bacteriological warfare and bombardment by Hitler’s secret weapon—and so on and so on.

  It will, therefore, be readily understood that during those years I could give neither thought nor time to writing a novel. But my publishers were insistent that by some means I should endeavour to keep my name before the public. Somewhat dubiously, therefore, I agreed to collect together a number of pieces; short stories published and unpublished, extracts from my two biographies that made stories in themselves and other items, for publication in volume form; and when we examined the material we found that we had enough for two volumes.

  To add a little to the interest of this hotch-potch, I managed to find time to write a brief introduction to each piece, telling how I had come to write it; so, to some extent, these notes are a record of several periods of my life. The two volumes were published with the titles of Mediterranean Nights and Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts.

  Before the war, it was generally accepted by publishers that a volume of short stories by a well-known author would sell only one sixth of the copies that could be sold of a novel by him. Having little hope that these would do more than bring my name back temporarily into the review columns and even feeling distinctly uneasy about the reception of such patchy work, my surprise and delight can be imagined when Mediterranean Nights sold more copies in its first six months than had my last fulllength book. In that period it earned me over £2,000 and Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts proved equally successful.

  It will be remarked that nearly half the stories in Mediterranean Nights form a series, from which the book takes its title. This is no accident as, years ago, when I was writing these stories, I chose their localities in accordance with a scheme to collect them, after they had been published in magazines, and republish them under that title in book form. But alas, like many another plan, it achieved only partial fulfilment. There should also have been stories set in Marseilles, Naples, Alexandria, Istanbul, Gibraltar, Malaga and half a dozen other romantic places, but these never got written, or were later used as the scenes in my full-length novels. Instead, a few that are not strictly Mediterranean territory are included together with a series of six short spy stories, a one-act play and my earliest effort as an author—age eleven—which readers may find amusing.

  In Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts there is a series of stories generally entitled ‘The Ghost Hunter’, which have the same central character. As in real life that character was a most exceptional person I have, in the introduction to the first of the series, given some particulars about him. Originally it was my intention to write a dozen or more Ghost Hunter stories and later publish them in book form. But, unfortunately, other work interfered, so only four got written. However, this volume includes three other stories of the occult, and eight stories about crooks or spies—four of which are new to this collection—and a passage which makes a story in itself from each of my biographies, A Private Life of Charles II and Red Eagle, an account of the Russian Revolution; both of which were out of print for many years owing to their type having been destroyed in the blitz on Plymouth.

  The initial success of these two collections must, in part at least, be attributed to the fact that by 1942 and ‘43, the blackout had denied people many normal recreations for so long that there had been an enormous increase in the demand for books. Yet the sequel was even more gratifying. These two volumes have had to be reprinted again and again. Over twenty years they must have provided a few hours of entertainment for tens of thousands of people, for the demand for them in hard-back covers has never waned.

  That is my publishers’ ample justification for now offering them to the public in a paper-back edition. If the reader of this collection, whether it be Mediterranean Nights or Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts, enjoys these oddments of my invention, I hope that he or she will equally enjoy its companion volume.

  P.S. In this introduction I have mentioned my Gregory Sallust spy stories. In 1946 and 1958 the publication of Come into My Parlour and Traitor’s Gate continued his adventures as a secret agent, but only up to 1942. So many people later wrote to me insisting that I should carry on the chronicle of the battle of wits with the loathsome Gruppenführer Grauber up to the end of the war, that I obeyed the wishes of these faithful readers. Shortly after this volume appeared for the first time my account of the last round between Gregory and the Nazis and Hitler’s desperate reliance on Black Magic to save him from defeat was published under the title of They Used Dark Forces. I have every hope that readers have found it even more gripping than its predecessors.

  STORY I

  This is the first of the Ghost Hunter series; and, as I have mentioned in the General Introduction, their central character is based on the personality of a most exceptional man whom I came to know well.

  He was the only man I have ever met who could foretell the future. I do not mean in a vague, indeterminate way which might be interpreted by the credulous to fit in, more or less, with whatever befell; but as a genuine seer who could describe actual scenes many months before they occurred and give definite dates for the fulfilment of his prophecies.

  For the purpose of the stories I have called him Neils Orsen but his real name was Henry Dewhirst and any charm both of appearance and character which I may have succeeded in giving to Neils Orsen is derived from my memories of his wise and greatly gifted original.

  I visited Dewhirst some five or six times between 1928 and 1932 and I think the professional procedure of this great occultist is worthy of record. He always told his visitors that, if they wished to send their friends to see him, such friends should ring up and ask for an appointment without mentioning their own names or that of their introducer. In this way he covered himself from any suggestion that he had found out by normal means about the prospective client before his first visit.

  Dewhirst’s flat was a bright, sunny place on the top floor of a tall building. It was furnished in a comfortable modern style and for his work he used neither crystal, cards, tea-leaves nor any other aids to focussing the subconscious which are normally necessary to less gifted practitioners of the secret arts. When I arrived he sat me down in an armchair on one side of the fireplace, gave me a cigarette and taking the chair opposite began to talk in a swift, rambling monologue; having told me that I was not to reply to any questions he might put to me. Such questions as he did ask he answered himself immediately afterwards, somewhat on the
following lines.

  ‘Are you an only child? Yes, you are—at least, if you have a sister there is a big gap in your ages and you see little of her.’

  ‘Have you a sister a lot younger than yourself? Yes, you have, but only one and no brothers and for all practical purposes you were brought up as an only child.’

  The monologue was evidently a tuning-in process because from a vague groping to begin with, in which pointless remarks about the weather, travel, politics and trade were mingled, it soon crystallised into a series of statements, made with complete confidence, about myself, my history and my personal affairs. Quite early in the first interview he told me that to ‘see’ the names of people who were strangers to him was beyond his powers but that he thought that my initials were D.I.W. which was pretty good, as the middle one is, actually, Y. Later he reminded me of events in my childhood which had loomed large at the time but were known to very few and had been almost forgotten by myself.

  Towards the end of this session he said that I should marry again but not for some years to come; that I had not yet met my second wife; that she would be the sister of a friend but that we should meet through complete strangers and in connection with a business matter. He saw us sitting in a wood-panelled room at an oval table. This meeting took place with no prearrangement some four years later, exactly as Dewhirst had foretold, even to the manner in which my future wife did her hair!

  The second thing on which he always insisted was that I should become an author and one who would win fame in that profession. At the time I was a wine-merchant in a business which I owned and I was making a good income, but still Dewhirst never ceased to urge me to forsake the glass for the book, an idea which seemed crazy to me who, as far as I knew, had no gift for writing. At each interview he never failed to ask me:

  ‘Well, have you written anything yet? No. I can see that you haven’t—but you must!’