To the Devil, a Daughter by Dennis Wheatley

Wheatley's work is firmly fixed within the white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant imperialism of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Smith once displayed shelves of his titles, now there are none. However, forty years on, his books have all but disappeared from bookshops and public libraries.

Wheatley also edited two major collections of short stories for Hutchinson as well as the series of paperbacks, ‘The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult’, and wrote innumerable articles.ĭuring the 1960s and 1970s Wheatley's work had phenomenal sales. There are ten non-fiction titles two collections of short stories four crime-dossiers and ‘out of series’ titles of which there are eighteen. These series novels are: Duc de Richleau Gregory Sallust Roger Brook and Julian Day. There are the series novels, books that involve the same central character or characters more than twice. Wheatley's literary legacy falls into a number of distinct categories. Negotiations took place to turn some of his books into a TV series. A Daughter was the last film released in Hammer's classic period in 1976. The Devil Rides Out and The Lost Continent (adapted from Uncharted Seas, a novel Wheatley reportedly confessed he couldn't remember writing) were released in 1968. Hammer Studios made adaptations of three of his novels. In the UK alone he sold over 1,000,000 copies of his books a year during the 1960s. He continued writing prolifically after the war and his sales rocketed. He worked in counter-intelligence and 'black operations' during WW2. His work in the thirties seemed to be perfectly in tune with the spirit of the age, enforcing the virtues of imperialism in which he totally believed, and countering the rising threat of communism.

His most enduring characters were those of the Duc de Richleau and his friends, who were to become Wheatley's most popular inventions. He began writing novels after WW1 service and a decline in the fortunes of the family business. Dennis Yeats Wheatley (8 January 1897 – 10 November 1977) was born in London, inheriting a family wine business.

To the Devil, a Daughter by Dennis Wheatley