TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER,

‘There was a coven of Dennis Wheatley’s novels on my parents’ bookshelves. They had the 1964 Arrow paperback, with a front cover featuring a girl entwined with serpents and fire-breathing demons. What, I wondered, were my churchgoing folks doing with this? I finally dared read it – by torchlight, under my bedclothes – when I was eleven and Margaret Thatcher had come to power, an event that caused grave consternation in our household. Within its pages, a character called Conky Bill, who worked for the secret services during WWII, explains the aims of Satanists: “…to cause the breakdown of good rule so that misrule may take its place… they do everything they can to foment wars, class-hatred, strikes and famine…” This both explained the book’s presence in our house and confirmed my suspicions that Margaret Thatcher was a Satanist. Decades later, researching the WWII Bella in the Wych Elm mystery and reading Phil Baker’s superb Wheatley biography The Devil Is A Gentleman (Dedalus, 2009) I discovered Conky

Bill was modelled on spymaster royale Maxwell Knight. A close friend of Dennis and a regular at his highly interesting soirees, Knight spent the conflict infiltrating extreme right wing sects. A similar, large-nosed gentleman appears in my 2018 novel That Old Black Magic as The Chief, investigating the involvement of Nazi spies in the Birmingham Blitz. In it, I recreated a scene from To The Devil A Daughter in homage to the effect of Wheatley’s work on my younger self and the magic of “coincidence”…’