WHEATLEY, Dennis (Yeats)

(1897-1977)

   UK writer who served in both WWI and WWII, in the latter with the Joint Planning Staff 1941-4. He was a prolific and extremely popular author of many espionage thrillers and historical romances, although the best of his work - and since his death the only category of his large oeuvre to be read at all widely - consists of a number of black-magic tales in which contemporary political knots are unravelled through occult means. Characters tend to appear and reappear from book to book, genre to genre, throughout his work, so that the black-magic books form a quasiseries; they include The Devil Rides Out (1935) - the best of them - and its sequel Strange Conflict (1941), Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts (coll 1943), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil - A Daughter (1953),The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark Forces (1964), The White Witch of the South Seas (1968), Gateway to Hell (1970) and The Irish Witch (1973); a late omnibus is The Devil Rides Out and Gateway to Hell (omni 1992). Closely associated with these are several LOST-WORLD novels, including The Fabulous Valley (1934), They FoundAtlantis (1936), Uncharted Seas (1938) - set in a monster-choked Sargasso Sea and filmed as The LOST CONTINENT (1968) - and The Man who Missed the War (1945), set in the Antarctic; the last 3 were assembled as Worlds Far from Here (omni 1952). DW's black-magic and lost-world novels are neither short nor amusing, though an intermittent story-telling gift sustains readers through passages of political and racial abuse; his remaining sf, unfortunately, was less gifted by his story-telling instinct, nor did his scientific speculations show much acumen. Titles include Such Power is Dangerous (1933), Black August (1934) - the Prince Regent of Englanddefeats the forces of totalitarianism - The Secret War (1937), Sixty Days to Live (1939)-a comet destroys human civilization - and Star of Ill-Omen (1952), about flying saucers (UFOS), the last 2 being assembled with anon-sf novel as Into the Unknown (omni 1960).

   JC

   Other works: A Century of Horror Stories (anth 1935).

   See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ATLANTIS; UNDER THE SEA.