The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - Champions of Reincarnation: Dennis Wheatley & Joan Grant

'Scarlet Feather' and the later 'far memory' books

The dedication copy of
'Scarlet Feather' (1945)

The printed dedication was 'To Vera Sutherland,
who can answer the question of the Great Hunters.'

The question posed by the Great Hunters was:
"How many people are happier because you were born ?"

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'Return to Elysium' (1947)
and the inscription in Colin's copy

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'So Moses Was Born' (1952)

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While the childrens' book Redskin Morning' re-told the stories Joan was told when she was a child in an incarnation as a native American, the adult side of the same story was published a year later as 'Scarlet Feather'.

That she was the central character is confirmed by the handwritten inscription in the dedication copy. On this occasion the book was dedicated to Vera Sutherland, her very supportive secretary, and the dedication read :

To
Vera
her book
with love
from
Piyanah
&
"Joan Grant"

Trelydan
4 Oct 1945

The Wheatleys and the Grants were still very close indeed, as can be seen from the letter in a previous exhibit in which DW asked for Joan's assistance with the 'technical' side of 'Strange Conflict'. In it, he castigated her for 'chucking up' her 'American story' when she had written 90,000 words of it, because he thought it would be a 'real winner'..

I have not seen the sales figures, but to judge from the number of copies of this that turn up in second-hand bookshops, he was probably right.

One senses that perhaps with her following books, her appeal was waning. Joan's next book was 'Return to Elysium', a Far Memory book about Joan's incarnation in Ancient Greece. It came out in 1947, and Colin's copy again carried an inscription to remind him of his Egyptian incarnation. A few years later came Joan's final published Far Memory book, 'So Moses Was Born', in which Joan was a half-brother of Rameses II, and witnessed the birth of Moses, Rameses' son by a young Hebrew girl.

Jean Overton Fuller was decidedly unimpressed by 'So Moses Was Born', and wondered if Joan was now suffering a 'block' of some sort which prevented easy and accurate recollection. DW may have thought the same, because as a later page shows, in his autobiography he referred to Joan having suffered (perhaps as a result of Charles Beatty's obsession with occult symbols), 'a decline in her direct communication with the Powers of Light.'

References : Overton Fuller pp18,20
Drink and Ink pp 153-4

Provenance: Private collections