As is our custom, this month's update has a Christmas theme.

In the 'cards sent by DW' section we have a new entry, for 1954.

Meanwhile, in the 'cards sent to DW' section I am adding an undated card to DW for Sir John Masterman, a noted sportsman, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and wartime chair of the Twenty (XX), or 'Double-Cross' Committee, which fed false information to the enemy through the country's array of double-agents.

In the Christmas cards section, I have also added a rather charming letter explaining what DW did with the best of his Christmas cards.

My thanks to all the many supporters of this site for the interest and support they have given me in this and other years, and my best wishes for an incident free, happy and prosperous Christmas when it comes along, and for 2022.

Take care,
Charles B.

The 2021 Convention was held over Zoom on Saturday 16th October. To see the Convention Report, please click on the link on the right.

The 2022 Convention is scheduled for 14th-16th October 2022, and will be held at Dartington Hall in Devon, which served as the inspiration for Weylands School in The Haunting of Toby Jugg. There will be a Zoom option for those for whom a trip to Devon will be impractical, and further details will appear on the main Conventions page in due course.

This is an interim update to alert you to an online exhibition being held at the St Barbe Museum in Lymington on Dennis Wheatley, which includes a talk on DW's use of landscape in The Devil Rides Out by Egyptologist John J Johnston. They have put it together with great care using a wealth of material from this site and I hope you will find it interesting.

Sometimes a single picture can say a great deal; and so it is with this month's principal update.

On one of the few surviving copies of DW's War Paper 'After the Battle', on the slip sealing in the maps for his proposed reconstruction of Europe once the war had been won, he wrote:

'It is most earnestly requested that the reader will not break this band and look at the maps before he reaches page 91.
Remember the Murder Dossiers? No cheating now!'

Only a man supremely confident of his position would dare to tease the Chiefs of Staff in this way!

I have also added to the 'Other Publications' section a note of the recent obituary in 'The Guardian' of Iris Sutherland Smith, DW's secretary in World War Two, who has died at the magnificent age of one hundred. Although it doesn't mention it in the obituary, Iris was the youngest of four sisters, and her eldest sister Vera was the secretary and close friend of Joan Grant, DW's inspiration on matters pertaining to reincarnation.

Finally, I have added to the section on 'Original Titles' the original title for 'Such Power is Dangerous', which I have just discovered

I have long been hoping to come across one of the Semisi Maya paintings from the Bond Street Galleries / DW's exhibition in 1967, and now, thanks to John Shoemaker of New York State, I have one. He happened across it in a local shop, did his research, and very kindly contacted me. The picture has slipped a little in its frame, and I will put up a new photo when it has been adjusted, but I thought you might like to see it as soon as the painting arrived in this country.

Many thanks to John, and I look forward to seeing many of you at next month's Convention.

Steve Whatley and Darren Nugent have very kindly made an addition to the list of draft titles which were changed before the stories were printed in book form – 'Blue Murder'

Thanks to Steve Whatley, we can also add our first Argentinian Title to the list of foreign reprints – The Snake was printed in an Argentinian magazine in 1942.

I have also added two relatively recent media mentions of DW to the relevant section:

First, and thanks to Mary Gallacher, I have added an article that appeared in 'Thanet News last summer on DW's use of the Isle of Thanet as a location for some of the action that takes place in 'Contraband'

Second, in May this year 'FandomWire' had a rather good article on 'The Nine Unmade Alfred Hitchcock Movies You Never Got To See', which includes 'The Forbidden Territory' within the nine.

Finally, but far from least, I've added details and the programme for the 2021 Convention - our fourteenth - to the Conventions section of the website. The Convention will take place on Saturday 16th October, and will once more be 'Zoom only' due to Covid. If anyone hasn't yet registered their interest and would like to join in, please contact me. All with an interest in DW are welcome.

The site is sufficiently large that sometimes I lose track of what is already included or not included on the site. A case in point occurred recently when an enthusiast asked me if I had a list of the original titles of DW's novels where the final titles were different.

The answer was that I had, but that I had never loaded it on to the website. I'm rectifying the omission now, and I hope that you will enjoy the list. If you have anything to add which I have overlooked, of course please contact me!

I find in collecting, a curious law of nature seems to operate. When you want to find something, somehow it usually turns up. And not just for me. I was speaking the other day to a collector of a really obscure brand of early motor car, and he has experienced exactly the same thing.

In my case, having written about it in the February update, with the help of a little inspired digging, I have managed at last to locate the only known (although there ought to be a second) copy of DW's unpublished work on stamps, 'Scenes and Portraits'.

It turns out that the book was written to accompany and explain the contents of a 'stamp table' which DW gifted to his step daughter Diana and her family in 1962, the best part of two decades after she had gone to live in the United States. It showcases, as one might expect, the depth of DW's knowledge of history, and I would like to express my considerable gratitude to the Wheatley family for allowing me to include on the website a complete transcript of the work.

A short while ago, in connection with 'Unpublished Wheatley', I was corresponding with my friend Darren Nugent about DW's film script for 'An Englishman's Home', an invasion themed film made just before WWII, of which DW was one of the script writers. Darren commented about how this might have left DW singularly well placed when the following year he was asked by chance for his suggestions on how the country might best resist a real-life, and probably imminent, invasion.

Darren's comments set me thinking, and the result is a new page, 'Fortune favours the well-prepared' in the Room in the Museum covering DW's career in World War Two.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that DW had prepared himself as much as any mortal could for the chance which the Gods threw his way when the official charged with seeking ways to help Britain defend itself in its darkest hour just happened to be allocated DW's wife as his taxi driver.

For bibliophiles, I've added an additional note about the dedication page in 'The Black Baroness'. It appears that some early readers may have mis-understood it.

For those who enjoy 'The Museum', I've put the full 1927 'Wine Scroll', which has occasioned a couple (so far) of very entertaining and informative lectures at Conventions from Declan Leary, online.

I have also added to the final room some updates on DW's burial plot at Brookwood Cemetery, for which I would like to express my thanks to Anna Mannion.

To the new suite on 'Unpublished Wheatley' and 'Unlocated Wheatley', I have added a third (and probably final) section, on the topic of 'Important disposals of Dennis Wheatley material'. I hope you will enjoy it.

I have also added a couple of snippets to the 'Book Notes' section.

First, that on a preliminary page of 'The Launching of Roger Brook', DW noted that his earlier Duke de Richleau novel 'Codeword Golden Fleece' had been based on actual events. Despite enquiring of various specialists of the period, I have been unable to discover any further information about this. If any readers are military specialists of the period, if they can assist in researching this further, it would be greatly appreciated.

I have also added on the same page that the motto under the coat of arms on the first edition of 'The Launching of Roger Brook' contains a couple of apparent mistakes. Curiously, while the book trade often picks up on one of these (that 'Sorsque' should read 'Forsque'), they never seem to pick up on the other. Perhaps, like Roger Brook, they dozed off in their Latin classes …and perhaps they were far from alone !

This month I have created a new heading on the main Contents page to act as a nexus drawing together all the mentions of unpublished DW material on the site under the heading 'Unpublished Wheatley'. The individual descriptions of pretty much all of these items remain exactly where they were, but they can also now be accessed from this central point, so those interested in 'Unpublished Wheatley' can also see all these items listed together in a single location.

Away from written material, I have also done the same with a new launch section covering important physical objects associated with DW of which the whereabouts have now been lost. Hopefully it may serve as a prompt to get them rediscovered.

I very much hope you will find these new sections of interest.

Our first update for 2021 is the report on our thirteenth Convention, which took place on Saturday 31st October last. We wondered how it would go, as we had never attempted a 'virtual Convention' before, but we need not have worried. We had a record number of attendances, including several 'new faces', all of whom clearly enjoyed the event.

What we will do Convention-wise in 2021, it is too early to say, other than to say that there will be one. If it is physical, we will aim to offer a 'virtual option', but if the circumstances are such that it has to be purely virtual like last year's, I think we can confidently predict another success.

My very best wishes to all the site's contributors and to all those who visit it; especially to those who provide (or have provided) kind feedback.

Whatever trials and tribulations we may face, I hope all my fellow aficionados have a healthy and enjoyable New Year.     Charles