Dennis Wheatley’s writing technique
Novels with historical backgrounds: a comparison of what DW said about his method of writing his novels with factual/historical backgrounds, and the evidence to be found in his manuscript packs
To my knowledge, DW referred on two occasions to how he wrote his novels with factual/historical backgrounds. These were:
DW’s Cantor lecture to the Royal Society of Arts
(Published in the RSA Journal No. 4908 of 18 September 1953, ‘The Novelist’s Task’, page 762)
Here he wrote:
'... I, too, have been most fortunate in that respect [i.e. becoming a favourite of that part of the public that reads serious books - CB], but only owing to a most laborious technique which consists of writing two separate books and dovetailing them into one another.
For example, in my book The Second Seal I covered the period from April to September 1914. First I wrote a 100,000 word history of those six world-shaking months, giving all the outstanding facts about the murders at Sarajevo and the diplomatic crisis that led to the outbreak of the First World War, together with an account of the strategy and battles on all fronts up to the major defeats suffered by the Austrian and Russian armies in the East, and ending with the turn of the tide in the West when the Germans were halted at the Battle of the Marne. Then, without altering a single relevant date or fact, I welded into this account characters of my own invention, making them the vehicles for both a spy story and a love story.'
and
DW in ‘Drink and Ink’ page 251
Here he wrote:
'My books were, on average, about 160,000 words, which is over twice the length of the ordinary thriller. But in the fact that my books were not ordinary thrillers lies the secret of their success. Actually to create each book I wrote a combined two. One of these would consist of a history of Ceylon or Mexico, or of a period in the Napoleonic or Hitler wars. Into these factual accounts I wove a spy story, desperate situations and boy jumping into bed with girl.'
The italics in both are mine.
Being aware of these accounts, when I examined the manuscript packs of books like the Roger Brook novels and other books with significant factual/historic content (such as ‘The Second Seal’ and ‘They Used Dark Forces’), I fully expected to find in them evidence that DW wrote these books in three stages: first a factual book, second a book of fiction, and finally a consolidated book which melded the two into the final, finished version.
This was not however what I found.
In no case did I find a fully-written ‘fact only’ book as I expected, nor indeed any trace of one.
Instead what I always found [as I half-expected having listened to DW’s 1977 Television interview for The Book Programme with Robert Robinson where he discussed how he always knew exactly ‘where he was going’ before he started to write any book] was that having done his research - and in some cases written very detailed notes of the contents of the particular factual books he had read (a good example of this is to be found in the manuscript pack for They Used Dark Forces, and is illustrated on the page on research in this Special Exhibition), were three stages of synopses, followed by a fully formed pencil draft.
The first synopsis was a synopsis of purely factual events, and this was often accompanied by a chronological timeline of the key factual/historic events.
The second synopsis, evidently written after the first, was a synopsis of the factual events into which the fictional storyline had been dovetailed. Frequently this was done by DW writing the element on the left of the page with a vertical line written down the middle, with the corresponding fictional elements written on the right.
Typically, these would then be followed by a third, fully integrated synopsis of each chapter in which the factual and the fictional elements were seamlessly intertwined.
The fully integrated pencil draft of the book - corrected where necessary - then followed.
I was initially somewhat surprised that what I found differed so much from what DW had written when he described his working methodology, but thinking about it, I came to the view that what I found, while different to what he described, made sense. Apart from where DW wrote long ‘info dumps’, which might well have been written at a different stage to the rest of the novel, if DW had written two separate books (one fact and one fiction) and then shuffled them together like a pack of cards, the result would - without further, and quite difficult and detailed work - have been quite disjointed - and apart from the ‘info dumps’, the books are not disjointed.
Therefore, it seems to me to make sense that as I found with the manuscript packs, in reality, DW did his separate factual and fictional preparations only at the preliminary synopsis stage, melded then together in a later synopsis stage, and then embarked on writing a consolidated novel.
It would, of course require an enormous feat of memory to do this as DW would have to have held all the factual and fictional threads in his head when he was writing the book post synopses, but as those of us who once played ‘Alibi’ at a Convention can attest, DW did had a prodigious memory - and in the days before instantly accessible data, that was probably true of most of the educated population.
This would have been aided by the way in which, when he was writing, he clearly immersed himself in his novel - not allowing visitors on working days - and may also explain why he and his wife slept in separate bedrooms. One might perhaps imagine him waking at night with a new embellishment, and jotting it down, or perhaps going down to his study to work on it before the inspiration or the detail left him.
Why DW explained things differently in the passages quoted from Cantor Lecture and from ‘Drink and Ink’, one can only speculate - and one might note that in neither did he mention the importance of his synopses, which he seems only to have mentioned in his final Television interview. Perhaps DW thought the reality would be too complex to explain to his audience and so he explained things rather differently, laying the stress on the fact that he gave his public two books in one (a factual book and a book of fiction), which in a sense he did, rather than going into the minutiae of how he actually wrote them.
Of the two, the passage in ‘Drink and Ink’ accords most with what is found in the manuscript packs, because it allows that the ‘two books’ might have been written, as it seems they were, concurrently; but the passage in DW’s Cantor lecture allows no such ambiguity - it clearly stages, and at seeming odds with the evidence, that the fictional history was written first.
If DW were still alive, I would certainly be asking him about this discrepancy.
C.B
April 2025
Postscript
It occurred to me while writing this brief article to speculate on whether DW might have written a complete initial factual book in each case, but have somehow omitted to insert it or any trace of it into any of the manuscript packs. I have ruled this out as unlikely in the extreme as DW put so many other bits and pieces into his manuscript packs - presumably with a view to allowing posterity to see how he worked - that it is hard to believe that NO trace would have survived in any of the packs of even a single page of draft supportive of this process. Furthermore, as noted above, had DW written two books and then shuffled them together, there would have been a huge amount of alterations where he ‘stitched’ the two elements together, and there is no sign of these.
Hence my evidence-based conclusion that DW’s writing process when he was writing his novels with factual/historic backgrounds was the one that I have described above.