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

The born storyteller

Sketches from DW's notebook at Skelsmergh (circa 1905-1909)

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'Julie's Lovers', written under shellfire in 1917/18 and finally published in 2022

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DW often said that the key attribute which enabled him to become a best-selling author was his ability to tell a story, and his fledgling efforts at doing this started early in his life.

DW used to amuse his fellow students at Prep School by telling them instalments of an 'endless serial' after 'lights out' every night, and his compulsion to tell a story was present even under shell-fire at Ypres in World War Two, when, at the age of twenty, he wrote the bulk of his first novel 'Julie's Lovers'. In the atrocious conditions in which he was writing, DW may have had little expectation that he would live to finish his novel, but it must have helped keep his mind off the horrors through which he was living to put down on paper the fictitious experiences of some people living through the same thing in rather more style.

It is clear that DW was not exaggerating when later, over a decade before he became a best-seller, in 1921 he wrote to his friend Hilda Gosling and told her that he felt a conviction that he was born to write.