Tuesday 31 October 2006
He wrote over 70 books and sold over 50 million copies of them; he served his country with distinction in both wars; he sold fine wines to the crowned heads of Europe; but he counted a conman and a murderer among his closest friends and was a keen student of the occult and the black arts.
Dennis Wheatley was labelled the prince of thriller writers by the critics, but less than 30 years after he died, he is largely neglected. In this programme, friends including the actor Christopher Lee and experts including Wheatley's biographer Phil Baker, summon him back to this world and reconsider him as the inheritor of the mantle left by Alexandre Dumas and Rider Haggard - which he himself passed on to the likes of Ian Fleming, George MacDonald Fraser and even Clive Barker.