DW wrote six more novels after he left ‘Grove’ – Evil In A Mask (1969; Roger Brook), Gateway To Hell (1970; The Duke de Richleau); The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware (1971: Roger Brook), The Strange Story of Linda Lee (1972), The Irish Witch (1973; Roger Brook) and Desperate Measures (1974; the final book in the Roger Brook series).
At the end of this period, he had ‘killed off’ or otherwise concluded the lives of three of his main fictional heroes.
He had killed off the Duke de Richleau in 1965 in ‘Dangerous Inheritance’*, left Gregory Sallust and the love of his life Erika to ‘live happily ever after’ in 1968 in The White Witch of the South Seas, and in the final paragraphs of Desperate Measures Roger Brook and Georgina are consigned to their next lives.
Interestingly, DW had the Roger Brook saga carefully mapped out. In Lars Nylander’s copy of ‘The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware’, he wrote ‘Two more to come’, and whenever he wrote ‘The Lusty Youth of Roger Brook’ – probably in the mid 1960s – he had already worked out the exact circumstances in which Roger and Georgina would meet their deaths – with the theme of reincarnation mixed in.
Of his main characters, only the fate of Julian Day remains uncertain. DW had originally intended to write six books about Julian in which Julian destroyed each of his six enemies in turn, but because Julian did not prove as popular as the other heroes, only three of the books were written. More is the pity !
* People occasionally ask me if the Duke actually died in ‘Dangerous Inheritance’, and the answer is a definitive ‘yes’. I wrote to Dennis Wheatley on this point at the end of 1970 after ‘Gateway to Hell’ was published. DW replied saying ‘it is true that the Duke died in DANGEROUS INHERITANCE, but there are many gaps in his life about which I have not written, so I thought that, from time to time, I would fill them in.’
References : ‘Drink and Ink’ p 266
Phil Baker p 594
Provenance : Private collection
