Between Ourselves Text 1

PREVIOUS PAGE	January 22nd. 1939
	By
	DENNIS WHEATLEY
	Noted author and man about town, who today takes over our Personality Page
	Between Ourselves
	...So you asked yourselves, why is Dennis Wheatley writing this page? Yes, I guessed you did. There’s nothing very surprising about it, really. After all, my books are about people. People are the novelist’s stock-in-trade.
	I Like People
	I like people. Interesting people. I like talk. Good talk. I like going out. Going about. Going places. You see, Im what you would call a social individual – and a hard-working one. I work every weekend and often 100 hours a week – that’s when I’m writing a new novel, and I have written 17... Yes, I know I am talking about myself. But then, doesn’t everyone, given the chance? That’s what makes people so interesting.
	I Inherit Friends
	As a matter of fact, I inherited more acquaintances than most people make in a lifetime. You see, when my father died I was left sole owner of a big Mayfair wine business. I bought old cellars: Yquems from the Empress Eugenie, Tokays from the Kings of Saxony....glorious old sherries, ports and madeiras from the stately home of England.’ Price was no object if the goods were right. I have sold old brandy at 11½ guineas a litre and tawny ports at 25s a bottle. But they were unique – unrepeatable. I paid 350 per pipe, f.o.b. Oporto, for that particular lot of port – a price which far exceeds anything ever paid by any other merchant. And all the time I was meeting people.....interesting people.
	Rajahs and Millionaires
	Among my customers were the Kings of Italy, Rumania and Egypt; a score of Princes (including his present Majesty King George VI); another score of Ambassadors and Dukes. Rajahs and millionaires, cabinet ministers and film stars all came to buy those lovely things in which I specialised.
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	Yes, it was a good life – while it lasted. But the real drama of my life was to come...and it came with the slump. The great slump caught me with thousands of pounds’ worth of old brandies and rare wines, many of them still unpaid for, and which none of my rich customers would buy anymore at any price.
	A Desperate Year
	There followed a desperate year, in which I fought and fought – while bad debts piled up all around me. But after another three months I succeeded in arranging an amalgamation. Those fifteen months left me ill through nervous strain. What was more, it left me a junior director of a firm with seven others.....with my work of little more importance than that of a salesman’s ledger-clerk. My income was one-sixth of what it had been.....and two years salary would not have wiped out the private debts which my pre-crash mode of living had left me with. Believe me, I was up against it. For the wonderful support given me at that time by my wife and friends I can never be sufficiently grateful. My wife and I could not afford cinemas; even our drinks and smokes were rationed. But paper is cheap and you get a lot of lead pencil for a penny (I never write with anything else now!) and so my wife persuaded me to try writing. That was the start of my real career.
	My First Novel
	In January 1933, Nash’s and Cosmopolitan magazines paid me jointly 75 for the first short story I ever wrote. In the same month, Hutchinson’s published The Forbidden Territory’, my first novel. It was reprinted seven times in seven weeks. Then I was well and truly off my mark.
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	In six years I had written 17 books and my work is now published in 19 languages. Some of them, you may remember, The Devil Rides Out’, They Found Atlantis’, my first crime dossier, Murder Off Miami’ and The Golden Spaniard’.
	A New Constellation
	But I’m telling you too much about myself. Let’s talk of someone else. Have you ever heard of Nancy Kelly – no? But, believe me, you will. She was on the screen at two years old, but quit when she was eight. Since then, she has not even been tried out in a single picture and she is now 17. It happens, though, that Mr Zanuck believes in Nancy. She goes straight to stardom in her first film Submarine Patrol’, and it cost three hundred thousand – not dollars, pounds.
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