Authors: Dennis Wheatley
Traitors' Gate
Dennis Wheatley
Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones
For
My friend and war-time colleague
COLONEL SIR RONALD WINGATE
C.I.E., O.B.E.
who was so often ahead of official ‘Intelligence’ in correctly appreciating future enemy intentions, and whose humour, unruffled calm and wisdom were in times of stress a tonic to us all.
1 A Small Buff Form for Gregory
3 The Leopard Does Not Change His Spots
4 Seconded for Special Service
The following quotations are of interest in view of the background of the story.
‘Secrecy can only be maintained by deception. For this purpose I am … Thus we shall keep the enemy in doubt until the last moment.’ Letter from Prime Minister to President regarding preparations for TORCH; 27/7/42.
The Second World War
by Winston S. Churchill, Vol. IV, p. 405.
‘Even the President helped out in this particular deception.’
Crusade in Europe
by General Eisenhower, p. 105.
‘… still engaged in discussions with the Prime Minister in Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Committee about the expedition’s build up and various deception and security measures for keeping the enemy guessing its destination.’
The Turn of the Tide
by Arthur Bryant, based on the War Diaries of Field Marshal the Viscount Alanbrooke.
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 Small Buff Form for Gregory
Late on the night of July 25th 1942 a little group of senior staff-officers stood talking together in a small underground room. They all looked tired and a little pasty. That was hardly to be wondered at as they worked, on average, sixteen hours a day and seldom emerged from the fortress-basement in which, as members of the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet, they had their quarters.
The semi-circular cellar in which they stood had been converted into a mess only as an emergency convenience during the worst air raids of 1940. In its centre two card tables put together enabled six officers to sit down to a meal. One angle was curtained off and behind it a Royal Marine heated soup or knocked up an egg-dish as required; against the wall in the other stood a steel filing cabinet; but, instead of papers, its shelves carried an assortment of bottles and glasses. Crowded into the small space in front of it, the Planners were imbibing stiff whiskies and sodas before betaking themselves to their bunks in a still lower basement.
Usually their off-duty chatter was as light as that of other men, but they had just come from a midnight conference at which a momentous decision had been announced and instructions for intensive detailed planning given to them by their masters, the Chiefs of Staff.
‘Well, Mr. Marlborough has got his way,’ remarked a tall Air Commodore, ‘but God alone knows how it will pan out.’
A Captain, R.N., nodded. ‘Pity we couldn’t have postponed the issue till 1943. Having to go over to the offensive so early means risking everything we’ve got.’
‘Roosevelt’s insistence that American troops should be employed against the Germans in 1942 left us no option,’ shrugged a Gunner Colonel. ‘Since the Washington Conference it has
only been a question of whether we did
Sledgehammer
or
Gymnast
.’
‘The Cherbourg job would have been murder,’ declared a Brigadier of Royal Marines. ‘And, even if we could have established ourselves on the peninsula, we haven’t got the weight of trained troops to break out. It would have become a wasting sore.’
The sailor nodded. ‘At least we can console ourselves with the thought that we stopped Marshall and Harry Hopkins forcing that one on us, and have all along backed the P.M.’s preference for North Africa.’
‘If it comes off it will pay tremendous dividends,’ put in a Group Captain who always appeared to be a little sleepy, but was never quite as sleepy as he looked. ‘With the whole of the south side of the Med. in our hands convoys will be able to go through again; and Malta, instead of being a drain on us, will become a dagger aimed at what the old man calls “the soft underbelly of the Axchis”.’
The tall Air Commodore took him up quickly. ‘Now that Rommel has given the Auk such a bloody nose there can be no hope of the Eighth Army doing
Acrobat
this year; and it will be months before we can achieve a big enough build-up in Algeria to attempt an advance into Tripolitania. Any idea of a link-up in 1942 is now only wishful thinking.’
‘We can’t expect the Germans to take this show lying down either,’ said the Colonel. ‘I’d give pretty well any odds that the moment they learn that the Americans and ourselves have gone into Morocco and Algeria they’ll scrap their agreement with the Vichy French and pour troops into Tunisia.’
‘And put every aircraft they can spare into Sicily and Sardinia,’ added the Air Commodore.
‘It could be worse than that,’ the Brigadier declared grimly. ‘If there’s a leak they’ll take measures beforehand. Then our convoys will sail straight into a trap. Just think of it. Scores of transports crammed with troops coming through the Straits of Gib. with a submarine pack lying in wait for them. And Kesselring’s dive-bombers thick as locusts coming in for the kill. It could be a massacre before we even had a chance to get ashore at all.’