Following our traditional Christmas motif, while no new Christmas Cards of DW’s have come to light, if you click on the link to the right or on the icon on the left hand side of the Contents page, a new item has been added to the ‘Christmas section’- DW’s Christmas list of what he was going to give his friends and loved ones in the midst of World War II in 1943.

This month I am also logging two newly discovered reprints – a 20th Thousand of Mediterranean Nights discovered by collector Kevin Pearce, and the 1956 reprint of The Devil Rides Out.

I wish a very happy Christmas and New Year to all the site’s visitors and to all friends of its cause.

Charles

This month’s update is a report on the 2013 Convention, our sixth - held at the Laura Ashley Manor Hotel in Elstree, and attended by record numbers.

Bloomsbury Publishing are starting their rollout of Dennis Wheatley books. They are re-publishing ‘The Forbidden Territory’, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and ‘To The Devil – A Daughter’ in paperback, and rest of his novels in e-book format.

To coincide with this, there has been some good Press coverage. The Daily Express had a two page spread on DW on 12th October, and The Mail on Sunday ran a short piece on the re-discovery of the English and Arabic versions of DW’s ‘lost’ novel ‘Of Vice & Virtue’ on 27th October.

In the same connection, Dominic Wheatley and I appeared on the BBC World Service’s Weekend programme on 13th October to talk about his ‘revival’.

This month’s additions are the first Thai edition of a Dennis Wheatley book we’ve come across – a 1986 edition of ‘The Quest of Julian Day’, courtesy of Steve Whatley,

Joan Wheatley’s copy of the Hungarian edition of her first book, ‘No Ordinary Virgin’, courtesy of YesterYear Books and Steve Whatley,

and the only known copy of the auction catalogue of DW’s home from 1945 to 1968, Grove Place, Lymington.

This month I’ve started a new sub-section in the Conventions and Field Trips section to catalogue Convention memorabilia, moving some out of the Hutchinson and other Publicity material section.

Thanks go to Steve Whatley in particular for creating so many of the exhibits.

This month I’m returning to ‘Wheatley around The World’, and completing the assemblage of foreign film posters I started in October last year – how time flies !.

It includes a further French film poster courtesy of Steve Whatley, and film posters from Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Thailand (our first Thai entry !) and the USA.

If anyone has any other foreign film ephemera lurking in their attics, please let me know !

This month sees two additions to the 'Hutchinsons Publicity Material' section – a promotional card for 'Red Eagle' (1937), and a promotional brochure from the 1960s for the Roger Brook Saga.

I am indebted for both of these to Steve Whatley, who has also sent me a couple of new photos for the ‘Broadcasts’ page – see if you can spot them !

Elsewhere, in the Museum section on DW’s Homes, I’ve updated the section on Clinton House, where DW lived from 1913 to 1922, to record the fact that what was left after the ravages of squatters was gutted by fire on the 21st May.

A sad end to another of DW’s houses. It’s reminiscent of Grove Place, which was allowed to fall into a state of extreme disrepair, and then demolished in the cause of modern re-development.

This month sees an update to the Museum’s special exhibition section on DW’s Homes, and more particularly, on other places of DW interest.

The page on Kenley has been augmented, thanks to Ian Sayer, with pictures of the exact location of the cesspit into which Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe’s body was thrown.

Thanks to Stephen Gregory, I have added a new section on Scarborough, showing the location of the Bar Hotel, where Gordon-Tombe’s murderer Ernest Dyer died of gunshot wounds in a scuffle with the police who were trying to apprehend him in connection with a completely different case.

Finally, I have added a new section on Heytesbury, where DW was billeted in the summer of 1916, on which he drew when he was writing ‘The Devil Rides Out’, and which was the subject of our 2012 Field Trip.

Just a brief interim update to thank Tony Gosling for pointing out that links to DW's interviews with John Ellison (1966) and William Hardcastle (1971) can now be downloaded again from the BBC website

First, and thanks to Steve Whatley, I've recorded the August 1936 edition of Picturegoer magazine, which has a piece about the filming of ‘The Secret of Stamboul’.

Second, and thanks to Steve for another contribution, I’m adding to ‘Wheatley Around the World’ two early Dutch editions of ‘Who Killed Robert Prentice’

Third, in the Special Exhibition section of the Museum on DW’s Homes, I’ve added the picture of a bombed out 8 St Johns Wood Park and a link to the 2011 Field Trip to the section on Grove Place. More updates to this section will follow shortly

Finally, in the Museum, I have just realised that the Duke of York, to whom DW wrote enclosing a copy of his debut novel ‘The Forbidden Territory’ in January 1933, was none other than that great admirer of his books King George VI. I have amended the entry accordingly.

The main feature of this month is an update to the Introductions and Forewords section. New inclusions include a jacket for the first edition of Penry’s ‘Character from the Face’, the wrap-around band with an endorsement by DW on the first edition of Frederick Cowles’s ‘The Night Wind Howls’ (now a most valuable book), the endorsement on the flap of ‘This is My Life’ by Dame Agnes Hunt of the Red Cross (now a little known figure), and the endorsement on the cover of ‘My Name is Michael Sibley’, John Bingham’s first novel. John Bingham’s real name was Lord Clanmorris, and he is said to have been the inspiration for Le Carré’s George Smiley.

Also, thanks to Steve Whatley for pointing out that an article about DW by another friend of this site, Roger Dobson, appeared in the Autumn 2012 edition of ‘Wormwood’ magazine.

This month's update is the report on the 2012 Convention, held at the Edgewarebury Hotel in Elstree on 3rd Novemeber.

I hope it will serve as a suitable memento for those who attended, and as a useful briefing for those who wished to, but were unable to attend.

As many of you will be aware, this year’s Convention will be held on Saturday 2nd November, again at Elstree. Further details can be found as they develop by clicking here.

It has taken the best part of a year to assemble, and I hope you will enjoy it. Much of the material appears on public view for the very first time.

As always, I would like to express my gratitude to the Wheatley family for their encouragement, and I would also like to express my thanks to the staff at 360ss.com (particularly Lewis in this instance) who have brought to fruition so admirably the Room I had in my mind.

Thanks go to experts Phil Baker and Ian Sayer for proof reading and commenting on the text, and to all those who have directly or indirectly helped with the exhibits.

Thanks also to Tina Rosenberg for pointing out that there are declassified documents in the UK National Archives that are well worth a look, and to the very helpful staff in the Image Library section of the National Archives, who allowed me to reproduce several of these documents.