As is the site’s custom, this month’s update has a Christmas theme.

In the ‘cards sent to DW’ section I have added a card sent to DW by Oliver Stanley, the man who recruited DW into Deception Planning and under whom DW first served in uniform in World War Two.

Oliver Stanley was an eminent figure. When DW met him, he had already served as Secretary of State for War, and he has since been ranked as ‘One of the best Prime Ministers we never had’. Stanley had a reputation for a keen intellect and for not suffering fools gladly; so his recruitment of, and friendship with DW says a lot.

Under the Christmas theme I am also incorporating into the main Christmas section a copy of ‘Murder off Miami’ in special Christmas packaging. This copy travelled a long way - it was sent out to Mexico for Christmas 1936! This copy comes courtesy of Hillebrand Komrij.

October saw some fresh performances of Colin McCourt’s musical version of ‘The Devil Rides Out’, and a group of us travelled to Manchester to see it. I’ve written a review; click on the link on the right to read it.

Elsewhere, having unveiled my limited edition of DW’s first ever novel ‘Julie’s Lovers’ at the October Convention, I am starting to update various parts of the website to take this ‘new’ novel into account.

My thanks to all the supporters of this site for the interest and support they have given me in this and previous years, and my best wishes for a happy and prosperous Christmas and for 2023

Our Fifteenth Convention was held at Dartington Hall in Devon on 14th-16th October. To see the Convention Report, please click on the link on the right.

To see the Convention Memorabilia, please click on the second link on the right.

The Sixteenth Dennis Wheatley Convention is likely to take place on Saturday 21st October 2023. The venue has yet to be confirmed, but is likely to be either The Manor, Elstree, or Dartington Hall. Please watch the Conventions section of this site for further announcements.

A Field Trip to Traben-Trarbach is also under consideration for July 2023.

I am pleased to say that feedback on the start of the latest special exhibition - giving more details of DW's activities in World War Two - has been very encouraging.

This month I am continuing the exhibition with two more pages; one on the origins of British WW2 Deception (at least, as written about by Wheatley and Wingate), and the other on DW's induction course at Uxbridge. This I found particularly amusing, and the information and exhibits on this page have never before been made public.

This month, I am making a start to a special exhibition in the site's Museum giving further details of DW's unique contribution in World War Two.

Since DW considered this the most important part of his life, and since his work had considerable historic significance, it seems appropriate to enhance what is already displayed with some additional exhibits.

Hardly anyone who has written about DW has searched for material about his World War Two activities in The National Archives, so I began by commissioning a professional historian to see what he could find there, and I am grateful to that institution for allowing me to reproduce the best part of thirty documents, many of historic interest.

I am supplementing these with large tracts of hitherto unpublished data from DW's two earliest accounts of his war-work which never reached 'The Deception Planners', and with some of the voluminous correspondence that took place both during and after the war between DW and his wartime colleagues. None of this has been seen before by more than two or three people.

Because of their quantity, I will be adding these exhibits to the Museum over a number of months, so those interested can either see them as they go up in stages, or wait and view the exhibition as a whole when it is finished.

Suffice to say, whichever way you choose to view this material, I hope you will enjoy it, and that it will bring to life the Top Secret work that DW and his colleagues did so effectively to mislead the enemy and to minimise Allied casualties during the conflict.

First this month I am adding two 1930s/1940s Dutch covers, both courtesy of Hillebrand Komrij, to whom I am most grateful. One - that of an early 'Forbidden Territory' has one of my favourite jacket illustrations for the title.

Secondly, I am adding nine further entries to the list of DW's speeches in the 'Bibliography of all things Wheatley' section, including a further five speeches that DW gave on behalf of the war effort in early 1939. All come thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Steve Wheatley, to whom I am always most grateful.

In this update I'm making two additions to the exhibition in the Museum on DW's remarkable library; of books by already-featured authors which have recently come on the market.

The first is a finely inscribed copy of Baroness Orczy's 'The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel' in a rather wonderful dust jacket, while the second is a copy of James Hilton's 'Knight Without Armour' with a very nice inscription showing how much Hilton enjoyed DW's first novel.

The first of these is shown courtesy of Peter Harrington, who are currently offering it at £4,500. The second was recently sold by Peter Harrington for £1,500.

I have also taken this month as an opportunity to update some of the material in the 'Bibliography of all things Wheatley' section so that it remains in synch with all the other sections.

Once again, with thanks to Nic Minas, I am able to add a further Australian edition to the 'Wheatley Around The World' section – a 1964 Australian edition of 'Quiver of Horror'.

This month I am also adding a further two books to the list of those where the working titles were different from the published titles; 'The Dark Secret of Josephine' was originally going to be called 'The Secret Marriage', and 'The Deception Planners' was originally going to be called 'Secrets of the War Cabinet' until Anthony Lejeune amended the title. My thanks to James Hallgate of Lucius Books for the first of these two entries.

Finally, I am adding four further speeches made by DW to the 'Speeches' section:

A talk about 'Strange Experiences' for charity at Admiralty House in 1938; a speech at the annual banquet of The Licensed Victuallers Association in the same year; a talk on 'Book Collecting' (DW's choice of subject) to The Eton Literary Society in 1949 (his second speech to them); and a speech that DW gave at a debate at The Oxford Union in 1955.

As can be seen, DW spoke in some pretty impressive places, although I could have preferred for the final two that he had spoken at Winchester and Cambridge !

This month, with my thanks to the excellent staff at 360ss.com, I have finished updating the section on Ebooks. If you find I have missed anything out, please let me know!

Elsewhere, we have a few further foreign editions to add this month and next month. We will kick off with our first ever Bangladesh edition, courtesy of Darren. I am given to understand that if this one is successful, it may be followed by others.

This month, with my thanks to the excellent staff at 360ss.com, I have continued updating the section on Ebooks.

I have also added a hitherto unrecorded reprint of 'Sixty Days To Live' (a '15th thousand') to the entries for that title.

This month I've added to the section on books and articles about DW two excellent private volumes by Jonathan McColl. The first, 'Allusions' is a kind of 'DW Companion', which Jonathan has been compiling and updating over the course of many decades, and which now runs to almost 300 pages. If you want to know what DW wrote in an introduction, or about the background to a historical person, place or event that is mentioned in a DW novel, you can bet with confidence that it will be in there.

Jonathans's latest venture is a similar volume recoding all DW's map endpapers and plans in a single volume.

I admire Jonathan for his never-failing enthusiasm and dedication.

Elsewhere, over the next few months I'll be updating the section on Ebooks; I've let it lag behind a little while I log and preserve older items which might otherwise be lost to posterity.

I am also working on a further special exhibition in the virtual Museum; this time looking at DW's unique work in World War II, and looking in particular at the corroboration by others of what he himself said of his war work. I've accordingly noted that the new room is 'under construction'.

A small collection of letters between DW and autograph collector Eileen Cond came up for auction in November, and in it there was a particularly interesting letter in which DW discussed the 1934 film of The Forbidden Territory.

If anyone watched the film and found it rather hard to follow, we now know why. The original length of the film was 11,000 feet but, that being too long a film for the cinema audiences of the day, it was cut down to 7,000 feet before release; and then when it was shown in the U.S.A., it was cut by a further eight minutes!

The sections on the film have been updated accordingly, and a link is now given in each so you can read DW's own account of the cutting in his letter.

In the same auction there was also an interesting letter about the pre-publication serialisation of 'The Devil Rides Out' in the Daily Mail, which I have added to the relevant page, and which puts the serialisation in nice context.

Elsewhere, I would like to cordially thank Nic Minas for letting me have details of three more Arrow Australia printings, and of a Singapore printing of 'The Australia Devil and all his Works' – our first appearance of that locality!

For many, January is the traditional month when they start to plan their annual (or more frequent) holidays. This therefore seems a good time to add to the Museum a list of DW's travels.

Compiled mostly with access to the largely unpublished final volume of his memoirs, it illustrates how widely DW travelled in the days before mass tourism, and even now there can be few people who can claim to have visited as many countries as DW did – he set foot in a total of sixty-one countries.

And fortunately he did not, unlike us, have to worry about the current vagaries of 'red lists' and of hotel quarantines...

Interestingly, while he used his trips to provide 'local colour' for many of his novels, when DW wrote about countries that he had never visited (Russia in 'The Forbidden Territory', Turkey in 'The Eunuch of Stamboul' etc.), he was still pretty convincing.

To see the list, either click on the top link to visit the relevant page in the Museum, or click on the link to the right to go straight to the list.

I am also pleased to report that Steve Whatley has discovered another illustrated cover for one of DW's foreign reprints; this time the cover for the Spanish edition of 'The Shadow of Tyburn Tree'. But this time, DW may have been a little less pleased than usual; if you look closely, his Spanish publishers have managed to mis-spell his name...

A very Happy New Year to all this site's readership and contributors!