The only seasonal addition that has come to light this year - which illutrates how uncommon such things are - is a Christmas card from broadcaster Jack di Manio

Elsewhere however I am adding a rather charming period etching of Lansdown Passage, the location of one of the Duke de Richleau's tiffs with German Intelligence in the The Second Seal, to the other photos of the passage - this latest addition courtesy of Franklin Johnson

Finally in this update I am including a paperback reprints of two books by members of DW's extended family - a 1957 paperback of The Hammersmith Maggot, by his son-in-law William Younger, writing as William Mole, and a 1962 paperback of Dominant Third, a book by William Younger's wife Elizabeth writing as Elizabeth Hely.

Plans are already afoot for some new sections to the website which I hope will interest you in 2017.

Very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all aficionados of Dennis Wheatley and all he stood for.

Charles

This month's update comprises the Report on the 2016 Dennis Wheatley Convention.Highlights included speeches by John Runter, Anna Mannion, Colin McCourt of 'The Devil Rides Out - The Musical' fame and a group playing of Dennis Wheatley's 1950s board game Alibi.

Please note that next year’s Convention – our tenth - will take place slightly later in the year , on 10/11 November 2017, so we can commemorate the 40th anniversary of DW's death on the Friday evening.

This month we see a few more foreign finds – a Dutch edition of The Man Who Missed The War with variant boards discovered by Hillebrand Komrij, a rather charming Swedish edition of The Devil Rides Out dating from 1951 discovered by Steve Whatley, and a 1975 Swedish reprint I came across of To The Devil – A Daughter.

Do send in any more finds you may come across, please !

This month brings a miscellany of new, and in some cases strange items.

First of all we have, courtesy of Hillebrand Komrij in the Netherlands, a third edition of the Dutch reprint of Murder Off Miami. Previously we only knew of the original Dutch 1936 version. Hillebrand has also provided dates for some of the other early Dutch editions.

Secondly we have, courtesy of Steve Whatley, a prize competition held by Hutchinsons for the best 250 word review of Red Eagle (knowing Steve, he will now be trying to locate the winning entry !)

Third we have, courtesy of Kevin Pearce, a rather curious copy of Murder Off Miami with the middle section blank – you can see it in the reprint section for Murder off Miami just before the 1979 edition. It was annotated ’Rough Copy’ on the inside, but I don’t know in whose handwriting. Anyway, it seemed to me sufficiently interesting to record on the website

Best wishes to you all for your summer holidays !

Having spent the last two updates dealing with DW’s newspaper serialisations, I was looking the other day in some of the late and wonderful Bob Rothwell’s box files, and I found some further copies of the Daily Mail serialisation of The Devil Rides Out. From these, I am adding another eight episodes from the serialisation.

I have chosen these because they all have rather fine illustrations, but perusing Bob’s copies, some interesting things emerge. First, not quite all the episodes were illustrated, and second, several illustrations were used more than once – pictures of the Duke, Rex and Richard, for example.

Doubtless on a thorough analysis many more interesting things will emerge. Just as a taster, as the eagle eyed will see, the blurb at the top right of the page on the first day of serialisation (31^st October 1934) states

“Startling ! Provocative ! Romantic !

Satanists at work in London.

A Sabbat in the West Country

The Devil’s mass in Scotland …”

The last line looks strange, but reflects the state of the story in an early manuscript version. In that manuscript, the final struggle between Light and Darkness took place in Scotland rather than in Northern Greece, which is where it happened in the final version.

If anyone has further copies – and particularly for the serialisations for which we currently have no illustrations at all on the site, please let me know.

Building on last month’s theme of newspaper serialisations, I have added another five issues of the serialisation of The Devil Rides Out, and another five issues of the serialisation of They Found Atlantis to the new section.

Interestingly, all of the episodes of The Devil Rides Out seem to have been illustrated with rather fine artwork, while only the initial pages of They Found Atlantis which introduced the characters seem to have been illustrated – but that theory will be put to the test as more episodes come to light or are looked at in archives.

If anyone has any further material to add to this new section, please let me know. As you will see, we have complete gaps for Contraband and Blue Murder (better known as Uncharted Seas). If anyone has anything on these, it would be particularly welcome.  

For those of you living in the U.K., we live in interesting times – I wonder what DW would have made of them - ? That, perhaps, is a theme for the Library.

Back in February 2014 Darren Nugent discovered, in a trawl through the archives of the British Library, that a DW novel had been serialised in Farmers Weekly – perhaps an unlikely publication to include a DW novel. Thanks to Kevin Pearce’s researches, we now know that it was The Forbidden Territory, which the magazine serialised in the middle of 1934, over a year and a half after its original publication. Weird. Kevin has tracked down three of the episodes, and as well as updating the ‘Bibliography of all things Wheatley section’, I have now created a new sub-secti of the website to deal exclusively with serialisations. I am starting it off with entries and will add more as they come to hand. If everyone would keep their eyes open for further material I can record here, I would be most grateful.

Elsewhere, over the years, the excellent James Hallgate of Lucius Books has provided me with many an exciting DW find. This year is no exception. This time he has come across a superb publicity postcard for DW’s wife Eve Chaucer’s book ‘No Ordinary Virgin’, nicely inscribed by DW himself, which is now on display in the Hutchinson Publicity Material section.

For those who track down foreign editions, the greatest prize is to discover a hitherto unpublished language or country of printing, and Steve Whatley has had the accolade of achieving this several times.

He has done this once again – tracking down the first known publication of DW in Rumania, of ‘Contraband’, which has the bonus of a rather elegant cover illustration.

He has also discovered a 1968 edition of ‘The Dark Secret of Josephine’ in Spain with a similarly appealing cover.

Elsewhere, I had the considerable pleasure of meeting noir novelist Kathi Unsworth at PFD’s recent Dennis Wheatley / John Creasey blogging event, and she mentioned to me that Paul Willetts has recently published an immensely readable account of one of Maxwell Knight’s anti-espionage operations for MI5 in World War Two with the eye catching title of ‘Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms’. It’s a very good read, and DW figures frequently in the book. I’ve just finished the book and it is highly recommended.

And finally, but by no means least in this month’s crop, I have the pleasure of thanking one of our and my friends in the U.S.A., Jim Devlin, for very kindly sending me a photo of DW at a book signing, which I am exhibiting in the virtual Museum, in the Room on covering DW in the post War period.

This month’s first update is the Official Report on the Eighth Dennis Wheatley Convention, which was held on 31st October last year. Apologies it took a while to publish; there were a few things I needed to sort out first.

We all look forward to the Ninth Dennis Wheatley Convention, on 29th October 2016.

My thanks go to Steve Whatley for providing me with the fresh discoveries I’m displaying this month.

In ‘Wheatley Around the World’, thanks to Steve, I am re-ordering the Portuguese entries as we come to better understand their chronology, and adding some additional publication details.

In Turkey, Steve has located Volume 2 of the 1967 edition of ‘Curtain of Fear’.

Finally, in Finland, we now have a colour photo of the cover of ‘Black August’ and a photo of its rather nice endpapers, a photo of the illustrated cover of ‘The Eunuch of Stambul’, and a photo of the illustrated cover of ‘Contraband’. Personally, I think the latter is really lovely, and like many of the pre-war / wartime foreign reprints, I think it would easily win awards in a dust jacket design competition. So many are so beautiful.

Up in the present, you may be interested to know that Dominic Wheatley and I were guests at a Crime Classics blogger event held at the Groucho Club on Saturday last; part of a series of events designed to re-awaken interest in Dennis Wheatley and other classic authors. After the opening pleasantries, I had the pleasure of sharing the podium with John Creasey’s son Richard, and giving a short talk on Wheatley. It was a charming event, the bloggers were highly interesting people who were a delight to talk to, and the authors that were paired together were rather well chosen – as John Creasey and DW knew each other, and as DW was on one of the panels which gave JC an award.

The first update of 2016 is a minor domestic mystery. Towards the end of last year my correspondent Christopher Chadwick pointed out to me a copy of 'Roger Brook in the French Revolution' with a strange dust jacket on eBay.

It was sufficiently strange that I bought it, and I am displaying it on the website. The jacket is very plain, and has no price and no blurb on the flaps. I have never seen one like it. Perhaps it is some kind of publisher's pre-production cover. Comments please, if anyone has seen anything similar.

To start the New Year we also have a new, green, variant of the 65th Thousand of Who Killed Robert Prentice ?, courtesy of Kevin Pearce, and a new discovery from Czechoslovakia – a serialisation of The Fabulous Valley dating from 1939, with a curiously 'cowboyish' cover – this courtesy of our expert on all things foreign, Steve Whatley.