The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - Dennis Wheatley’s Writing Technique

Numbers of chapters and word counts

Examples of the different numbers of chapters in DW's books: The Devil Rides Out [33] ( left); The Quest of Julian Day [25] (centre); and Bill For The Use Of A Body [15] (right)

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Note: The spike in the middle is 'The Haunting of Toby Jugg', where there are no chapters as such, but where the action takes place on just under fifty, mostly consecutive, diary dates.

Books with very different total word counts
Come Into My Parlour (151,800 words)
and
Gateway To Hell (100,000 words)

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One matter that DW does not address in his interviews and autobiography is the mundane but important matter of the number of and lengths of his chapters, and the total word counts of his books.

Perhaps these were not glamorous and therefore unworthy of mention, but they are considerations of importance to the writer's craft, and in DW's case, the word counts were of particular importance because his publishers would often quote the word count of his latest book in their promotional material to demonstrate to the public that they were getting good value for money when they purchased the book.

Given the above, it is perhaps surprising that the number of chapters in his books, the number of words in each chapter, and the total number of words in DW's books all varied enormously.

Even ignoring 'Bill For The Use Of A Body', which was DW's shortest book¹ and which he wrote as an additional book to pay for an unexpected tax demand, the chapter counts of his books vary enormously from 35 in 'The Golden Spaniard' through 33 in 'The Devil Rides Out' and 29 in 'The Man Who Killed The King' to 25 in 'The Quest of Julian Day', 21 in 'Unholy Crusade' and 'The White Witch of the South Seas', and to 19 in 'Curtain of Fear'.

The word counts of the chapters are similarly varied, and a smaller number of chapters does not necessarily imply that the chapters will have a correspondingly longer word count. Indeed, within a book, the lengths of the chapters would vary enormously. To take an example, in 'Come into My Parlour', the shortest chapter is 2,000 words long and the longest chapter (with 14,100 words) is over seven times as long.

A similar variation is to be found in the total word counts of his books, as the table below shows for a selection of his books:

*Source: DW's own word counts

This is all the more interesting because as he wrote, and as can be seen from the second set of exhibits above, DW kept a careful track of the word counts of both the chapters as he was writing, and of his completed books.

The conclusion from all this is perhaps that while he was an exceedingly well-organised writer, DW was above all a story teller, and he made his books and the chapters within them of whatever length he found appropriate for the best telling of his story.

Note 1: Readers may well not have noticed the relative shortness of this book because the printers kept the book to DW's habitual thickness by means of a subtle increase in the font size.