To the Devil – a Daughter, by Dennis Wheatley
Back in 2014 I revisited an author I’d rather liked as a teenager: Dennis Wheatley. Returning to old favourites is always a bit high risk but Wheatley stood up pretty well and I thoroughly enjoyed his classic The Devil Rides Out. There’s good reason Wheatley sold bucketloads in his day.
Daughter isn’t quite in the same league, but it’s still a lot of fun if you can get past the reactionary politics and archaic gender attitudes (and if you can’t Wheatley’s probably not the author for you). Satanists, Black Magic, damsels in direst distress, a plucky young hero and an experienced but still game older one, the terrible threat of international Communism and its links to devil-worship… What’s not to love?
Daughter opens with successful thriller writer Molly Fountain working away at her home on the French Riviera. Like Wheatley himself Molly spent the war years in Intelligence, and after her husband’s death used her practical knowledge and skill at writing reports to learn her trade as a moderately successful novelist. Interestingly Wheatley uses Molly to make a fair few observations on the writing trade, and I’ll excerpt a few choice quotes after the main piece as they’re not relevant to the story but are fascinating as an insight into Wheatley’s method.
Despite her best efforts to focus on her next book Molly becomes distracted by the curious question of her next door neighbour, a young woman named Christina Mordant who receives no visitors and never seems to go out, save occasionally after dark when she ventures forth by moonlight to who knows where. When Molly visits she discovers that Christina is in hiding, placed there by her father to protect her from some threat he didn’t explain.
Naturally concerned, Molly recruits her visiting son John to look after Christina, though not before John delivers a completely story-irrelevant diatribe on the then Labour government and how its policies are beggaring Britain. You have to accept that sort of thing with Wheatley, his characters have a habit of occasionally sermonising from a very right-wing perspective though thankfully in his better books it doesn’t happen too much.
The mystery is why and from whom is Christina (which it turns out isn’t even her real name) being hidden? She’s an odd girl, innocent and charming by day but at night wild and sensual (she even kisses a man she’s barely met!). Dogs recoil from her (“‘animals always take a dislike to me on sight'”) and churches repel her so violently that she can’t even look inside one without wanting to vomit. Troubling stuff, but it’s when John takes Christina on a night out to a Monte Carlo casino that the true danger starts to reveal itself. Christina is recognised.
At the casino is her father’s friend Canon Copley-Syle, a non-practising clergyman. All Christina’s childhood he’d taken an interest in her, though despite being her godfather that interest never extended to any religious tuition. The encounter seems to be pure chance, but what worries Molly is that the Canon was at the casino with the Marquis de Grasse, “one of the most evil men in France”.
Soon the Marquis’ son, Count Jules de Grasse, is courting Christina and making her part of his fast set. Molly and John believe she’s in the gravest danger, that Jules’ interest is at his father’s urging and that Canon Copley-Syle may be part of whatever Christina’s father was hiding her from. The difficulty is keeping Christina from them, because as Molly reveals after unexpectedly throwing a crucifix to Christina and observing her cry of pain when it touches her:
‘Every night when darkness falls, you become possessed by the Devil.’
Molly is (mostly) a likable heroine, so it’s something of a shame that as soon as the action heats up she takes a back seat. She calls in her old friend from her secret service days Colonel Verney and he and John set out to rescue Christina from the clutches of the villainous De Grasse’s and the malevolent Canon Copely-Syle.
Daughter has some great set-pieces. At one point John has to sneak on to Jules’ yacht unobserved to try to rescue Christina, knocks a man out when discovered and then is faced both the with difficulties of the rescue and escape and the fear that he may have killed a man. Verney is a likable older character providing the wisdom John lacks and the two make a good team. I’d rather Molly had been more a part of that team, but for Wheatley she’s more of a back-room sort.
The plot explores the links between Satanism and Communism, the latter being here a tool of the former. Christina is vital to some nefarious plot of high-ranking Satanists, a plot that must be stopped if she is to be saved and if the West is to prevail against a Godless Russia.
You must have read at some time that in the old days the Devil was often referred to as the Lord of Misrule. The object of these high-up Satanists is to deliver the world up to him, and the only way they can do that is to cause the breakdown of good rule so that misrule may take its place. With that as their goal they do everything they can to foment wars, class-hatred, strikes and famine; and to foster perversions, moral laxity and the taking of drugs. There is even reason to believe that they have been behind many of the political assassinations that have robbed the world of good rulers and honest statesmen, and naturally Communism has now become their most potent weapon.
Wheatley’s villains particularly shine here. The de Grasse family are motivated more by money and general foreign untrustworthiness than anything more malefic but are fun all the same. Canon Copely-Syle by contrast is a black magician of the highest caliber and his scheme is dizzying in its ambition (and ludicrous, but let’s not dwell on that). In another great scene Verney pretends to Copely-Syle that he’s also an accomplished sorcerer and gets Copely-Syle to reveal his monstrous plan while Verney struggles to conceal his loathing. Wheatley takes this as an opportunity to tie his books together with Copely-Syle’s commenting on his fellow sorcerer Mocata, the villain in The Devil Rides Out: “‘Poor Mocata; he too fell by the wayside through attempting too much.”
Alas, hubris is ever the failing of arrogant maltheist warlocks. I suppose it would be.
As with The Devil Rides Out, Wheatley persuades in large part through meticulous attention to detail, as in this description of a strange redoubt our heroes discover late in the book:
Of these, the thing that first sprang to the eye was a great five-pointed star. It was formed of long glass tubes, all connected together in the same manner as strip-lighting designed to show the name over a shop; and through their whole length glowed electric wires that gave off the cold blue light. Five tall white candles were placed in the points of the star; but these were unlit, so evidently there only against an emergency failure of the electric current. Behind them were placed five bright, brand-new horseshoes. In the valleys of the star were five little silver cups half full of water and some bunches of herbs. More faintly seen were two thick circles that had been drawn in chalk on the floor. The inner, which was about seven feet across, connected the valleys of the star; the outer, which was very much bigger, connected its points. Between the two were chalked a number of Cabalistic formulae and the signs of the Zodiac.
Daughter was good spooky entertainment. It has its flaws: John’s political asides are tiresome and Molly becomes bizarrely and casually bloodthirsty near the end, keen at one point to kill some cultists just so she can see how some of the weapons she’s collected over the years while researching books work in practice (call me a pinko liberal, but I do think wanting to shoot someone just to see how a gun handles is a tad off). The flaws though aren’t so terrible that I won’t read the sequel also featuring Molly and the Colonel even if I did miss the Duc de Richlea and his chums (the heroes from Rides Out).
I’ll end with one final quote, on the challenges and opportunities faced by sorcerers when it comes to purchasing real estate:
‘It is extremely difficult to acquire a comfortable house which has adjacent to it an altar that was consecrated for many centuries; … As it was the abode of quite a number of elementals, I got it for a song.’
Those of us living in London in 2016 would I think be happy to put up with any number of elementals to get any house for a song, whether it had a handy adjacent altar or not.
Other reviews
Two online I thought interesting. This one from the Pretty Sinister blog makes the good point that the heroes here are humanly flawed and the villains are smart and don’t make stupid mistakes and I think that’s right on both counts. This review from Skulls in the Stars is much more critical. I actually agree with every point Skulls makes, I just enjoyed the book even so but the issues Skulls raises are completely well founded. My review of The Devil Rides Out is here.
Comments on writing
I thought I’d include at the end here three quotes from the book about being a writer, simply as they seemed so likely to reflect Wheatley’s own views and practice:
As a professional of some years’ standing she knew that work must be done at set hours and in suitable surroundings. Kind friends at home had often suggested that in the summer she should come to stay and could write on the beach or in their gardens; but that would have meant frequent interruptions, distractions by buzzing insects, and gusts of wind blowing away her papers.
…
Very soon she found that her war-time experiences had immensely improved her abilities as a writer. Thousands of hours spent typing staff papers had imbued her with a sense of how best to present a series of factors logically, clearly and with the utmost brevity. Moreover, in her job she had learned how the secret services really operated; so, without giving away any official secrets, she could give her stories an atmosphere of plausibility which no amount of imagination could quite achieve. These assets, grafted on to a good general education and a lively romantic mind, had enabled her agent to place her first novel without difficulty. She had since followed it up with two a year and had now made quite a name for herself as a competent and reliable author.
…‘That’s a popular illusion that the public have about all authors,’ Molly smiled. ‘Except for a handful of best-sellers, writing is one of the worst-paid jobs in the world;
Decades later, that last quote remains all too true.
Filed under: Horror Fiction, Wheatley, Dennis Tagged: Dennis Wheatley
