Strange Conflict

Phil Baker

From Shelf: A whistle stop tour of the history of horror

A gripping biography of a pulp fiction legend...

Dennis Wheatley is one of the all-time greats of popular fiction, selling over 50 million books in his lifetime. His novels became part of the 1970s zeitgeist, their covers and contents richly confirming the enduring appeal of 'black magic' and Satanism within popular culture. Strange Conflict, the first biography of Wheatley, follows its subject from his much earlier Victorian roots to reveal Wheatley the English gentleman, a man who lost a fortune in the Depression and won it back by writing, and whose Establishment connections led to a 'stranger than fiction' wartime career dreaming up covert schemes to confound the enemy.Phil Baker looks at Wheatley's interest in the occult and examines the real-life prototypes for his characters in the people he knew. Aleister Crowley became Mocatta in The Devil Rides Out, while the Reverend Montague Summers, a debauched priest and scholar of demonology, became the memorably evil Canon Copely Syle.Wheatley had a powerful sense of good and evil, but in private he was above all a hedonist and connoisseur, a man whose politics inclined him to the belief that living well is the best revenge. Highly readable and full of fascinating insight, Strange Conflict is about the idea of the occult, about English social class and sexuality in the twentieth century, and about the serious business of writing best-sellers.

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