Dangerous Inheritance

Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

For
S. and A.
with every kind thought
from their friend

DENNIS

Introduction

1 The Matchmakers

2 The Fateful Letter

3 Happy Days in Corfu

4 The in the Woodpile

5 It Could Have Been Murder

6 What's To Be Done Now?

7 A Rose with Many Thorns

8 A Desperate Situation

9 Within an Ace of Death

10 Enter Simon Aron

11 The Trap

12 Simon Seeks Revenge

13 Battle of Wits

14 The Battle Continues

15 The Unexpected

16 The Duke Refuses to Compromise

17 Of Ancient Cities and Modern Love

18 The Sword of Damocles

19 Of Mirabelle and Murder

20 Well Planned, but…

21 A Desperate Bid for Freedom

22 Meanwhile in Colombo …

23 The Duke Plays His Last Great Hand

A Note on the Author

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

There can be few more beautiful places than the island of Corfu, and that was why the Duke de Richleau had decided to build a villa there in which to spend a good part of his declining years. Air travel made it easy for his friends to come out to stay with him, and in April 1958 he had four guests: the Princess Marie Lou, her husband Richard Eaton, their daughter, Fleur, and Rex Van Ryn's son, Trusscott.

They had lunched under an awning at the south end of the sunny terrace, then moved for coffee and liqueurs to the north end, from which there was the best view of the enchanted lagoon, in which it was said that, long ago, Ulysses had been washed ashore.

Trusscott and Fleur refused liqueurs and, having drunk their coffee, walked away down the flight of broad stone steps that led to a garden of tall palms, candle-like cypresses and massed banks of many coloured flowers. The young American was very tall and Fleur's short-cut, copper-coloured hair barely came up to his shoulder.

As the three older people watched them go de Richleau turned to Marie Lou and murmured, ‘Yes, it would be nice, wouldn't it?'

He was very old now. His hair was thin and white, his fine aquiline features lined with tiny wrinkles; but his grey eyes flecked with yellow, under the ‘devil's' eyebrows, could still at times flash with brilliance and his mind had lost nothing of its swift intelligence.

She smiled at him. ‘Dear Greyeyes, how like you to guess what I was thinking. It really would be lovely if they fell for one another, but I'm afraid there's not much chance of that.'

Richard was just on fifty. His brown hair with its widow's peak was flecked with grey, and as he ran his hand back over it in an habitual gesture he remarked, ‘If they did, there's nothing would please me more. With taxes as they are in our Welfare State I've all I can do to keep Cardinal's Folly going; and I'd hate the old place to pass out of the family. But it will have to when I die unless Fleur marries money. For her to tie up with old Rex's boy would be the perfect answer.'

‘But if she did marry him they'd live in the States.'

‘For most of the year, perhaps; but with the Van Ryn millions they could well afford a place in England.'

‘She might not want it,' mused Marie Lou. ‘The problem of servants is becoming more and more difficult, and it would be no fun trying to run a rambling old house like ours without adequate staff.'

Richard shrugged. ‘Given enough money that's no problem; and servants in England would still cost them less than they'd have to pay in America.'

‘Perhaps; but Fleur is terribly modern in her tastes. She has no love for old things or country life. The friends she brings down to stay scoff openly at all traditions, and although she's too well mannered to say so in front of us I know she agrees with them. I really can't see her becoming the lady of the manor.'

‘I fear you brought that on yourselves,' said the Duke quietly. ‘By letting her go to London University what else could you expect?'

‘I know,' Richard sighed. ‘Ever since Harold Laski was the star professor there it's been a breeding place for Reds, and now it's full of blacks and browns who are anti everything we've ever believed in. It's no wonder that she looks on us as “squares”. I was dead against it from the start, but like an ass I gave way.'

‘We had to, darling.' Marie Lou laid a hand on his arm. ‘She was set on it and old enough to know her own mind. The times
are gone when parents could insist on their young leading the kind of life they would like them to. She's got too good a brain to waste and she wouldn't hear of Oxford or Cambridge. How could we stand in her way?'

Richard took her hand and kissed it. ‘You're right, my sweet. I'm just an old fogey who still believes in Britain and regrets the passing of the Empire; so it riles me to hear Fleur's friends belittling all it stood for and see them going about like a lot of unwashed tramps. I suppose we should be thankful that, anyway, she still has a bath every day.'

‘One can rarely have it both ways,' de Richleau's soft old voice came again. ‘At least you can be proud of having a daughter with the brains and determination to get her M.A. And she won't remain in her present state for long. Someone once said that anyone who was not a Communist when he was twenty had no heart and if he remained one when he reached thirty he had no head. I, of course, never had a heart.'

He gave a quiet chuckle and went on, ‘But that does apply to a great many people; particularly the young folk of today, who have been made far more conscious than their predecessors of the hunger and squalor that afflict the greater part of the world's population. I know Fleur took sociology with the idea of serving in one of those organisations that bring aid to backward peoples; but she's too attractive not to marry, and women can be like chameleons in allowing their husbands to colour their beliefs and interests. All the odds are that, unless she marries some firebrand while she still has this crusading bug, in ten years' time she'll be as much a true-blue Tory as yourself.'

‘I pray you may prove right, Greyeyes. But she's our only chick and it's going to be an anxious time waiting to see what she does make of her life. I'd gladly give five years of mine to have her happily engaged to young Truss before our visit here ends. How long is he staying?'

‘I've no idea. Rex, very wisely I think, decided to send him to Europe for seven months before he starts at Law School in the autumn, and he's doing a modified version of the old Grand Tour; but, of course, unaccompanied by a tutor. I wrote that
I hoped he would spare the time to look in on me here. Realising that anyone so aged as myself would be poor company for the boy, and recalling that he took rather a fancy to Fleur when he, his father and myself spent Christmas with you at Cardinal's Folly four winters ago, I mentioned as an attraction that you would be with me for a while from mid-April, and he wired me from Athens asking me if he could arrive today.'