Read Sixty Days to Live Online
Authors: Dennis Wheatley
Sixty Days to Live
DENNIS WHEATLEY
Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones
F
OR
JOHN
AND
HILDA GARDNER
Because they are my oldest friends, because of the many happy hours I have spent with them and because, by a strange coincidence, John suggested that I should write a ‘Comet’ story one day last autumn when that very morning I had decided to write one myself.
5 The unscrupulous ex-Minister
11 ‘Eat, drink and be merry …’
14 Hemmingway goes into action
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
An Offer of Marriage
Lavina Leigh paused for a second in the entrance of the Savoy Grill. The
maître d’hôtel
smiled, bowed and moved forward, upon which she made her entrance.
Lavina was good at making entrances. She was slim, very fair and, although she was not tall, her film work had taught her to make the best of her inches and she carried herself like a Princess.
Even in that sophisticated supper-time crowd, heads turned as she swept forward. Ace director Alfred Hitchcock, perched like Humpty Dumpty on the edge of a chair, gave her a little wave of greeting from one table; and B.B.C. chief Val Gielgud, looking very Russian with his little pointed beard, smiled at her from another.
The man who followed Lavina was in his late forties. He had a square face with a bulldog chin, but his features were redeemed from coarseness by pleasant brown eyes, a fine forehead and a touch of grey in his dark, smooth hair, over either temple.
Sir Samuel Curry was used to appearing in public with good-looking women. He was very rich and decidedly a connoisseur, but even so, on this night towards the end of April he was conscious of a little glow of pride in his glamorous companion as he followed her to their table and they settled themselves at it.
He did not ask her what she would have to eat but ordered for her, as they had been friends for some months and he knew all her favourite dishes. In less than a minute the waiter had departed to execute Sir Samuel’s clear, decisive orders.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I never come here except with you. I much prefer the Restaurant.’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t be difficult, Sam dear. I know you millionaires always congregate there but the Grill’s so much more interesting. Look, there’s Gilbert Frankau and his pretty wife, with Leon M. Lion; and at that other table Doris Zinkeisen and her husband, Grahame Johnstone. You saw Hitch, too, as we
came in. The big man with him is Henry Sherek and the little woman is Hitch’s clever wife who vets most of his scripts for him. Besides, all the big boys on the Press come here and that’s immensely useful.’
Sam Curry smiled a little ruefully. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s part of your job to keep in touch with all these people, but I wish to goodness you’d be sensible and chuck it. You’ll never make a film star.’
Her small, beautifully-shaped mouth opened on an exclamation of protest, but she suppressed it and lit a cigarette before she replied with calm aloofness: ‘I am one already.’
‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ he mocked her. ‘You’re only a starlet. No one’s a real star until they’ve been given a Hollywood contract.’
Lavina lifted her heavy eyelids lazily. ‘That doesn’t apply any more, Sam.’
But in spite of her denial she knew that he was right. In three years she had done very well and, as she was only twenty-three, she still had a good film life before her. But, at times, she was subject to horrid doubts as to whether she would get much further.
Her acting was sound; she had a personality that attracted every man with whom she came in contact and, physically, she was about as nearly perfect as any woman could be, but, all the same, she knew quite well that her beauty was not of a kind best suited for motion-pictures.
It was of that fine, aristocratic type which is based on bone-formation and ensures for every woman who has it the certainty of still being lovely in old age. Her small, perfectly-chiselled Roman nose and narrow, oval face gave her great distinction; but her nose had proved an appalling handicap in her work, as in all but the most carefully selected angles it threw a tiresome shadow when she was being filmed under the glare of the arc-lamps. That one factor had already robbed her of several good parts and might well prevent her from ever achieving real stardom, unless she was willing to have her nose broken and remodelled—which she was not prepared to do.
While they ate their
bligny
and the stuffed quails which followed they talked of the people round about them. One waiter refilled their glasses with Roederer ‘28. Another brought them
fresh peaches. After he had peeled them and moved away, Sam Curry said:
‘When are you going to present me to your people, Lavina?’
Little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, which came from frequent laughter, creased up as she parried: ‘Why this sudden question?’
‘Because I’m old-fashioned enough to want to observe the custom of meeting your relations before I marry you.’
Her blackened eyelashes lifted, showing the surprise in her blue-grey eyes. ‘Surely you don’t mean that you would walk right out of my life if they disapproved of you?’
‘Of course not. It’s just a courtesy.’
‘But I haven’t said that I
will
marry you, yet.’
‘You’re going to, as sure as my name’s Sam Curry.’
She shook her golden head in silent mockery.
‘Listen, Lavina,’ he went on. ‘Even if you could become a real film star, it’s a dog’s life, and you know it. On the set at eight o’clock or earlier most mornings; often working the whole night through; and what little leisure you
do
get is wasted in acting a part all the time: opening bazaars, posing for photographers, endless fittings at dressmakers’, showing yourself off in places like this because it’s vital to get continuous publicity if you’re to keep in the swim at all.’
‘I like it,’ she shrugged.
‘Maybe. But in ten years, at the outside, you’ll be worn out, finished, and no good to anyone. Already you’re losing your eye for make-up and, if you go on this way, you’ll become a hag before you’re thirty. Get some of that paint off your face and look twice as beautiful. Cut out this film business and enjoy yourself, my dear, while you’re still young and healthy.’