In my review of Dennis Wheatley's 1934 novel THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, I mentioned that the book struck me as being more "cosmopolitan" than some pop-fiction of the period. For instance, the ensemble of the first book included Rex Van Rijn (American), Richard Eaton (a presumably Christian Brit), Simon Aron (Jewish Brit), and the Duc de Richleau (Frenchman). One of DEVIL's support-characters, Eaton's Russian-born wife Marie-Lou, becomes a de facto addition to the "four musketeers," who during Wheatley's career were equally known for battling both foreign intrigue and supernatural evil. Yet I also had a dim memory of some dodgy racial aspects to the next of Wheatley's supernatural outings, the 1941 STRANGE CONFLICT, though I hadn't read it in over twenty years.
I've now finished re-reading CONFLICT, and my negative memory of the novel's racial politics were more than justified. It must be said that, to the extent that one can put aside an awareness of those politics, CONFLICT is nevertheless a suspenseful action-adventure story, though not as involving, or as symbolically inventive, as DEVIL RIDES OUT.
CONFLICT takes place in 1941, when England is suffering under the impact of the Blitz. Though the Duc and his friends are not directly involved with the British military, they're nevertheless enlisted for a special mission. It seems that the German forces have been continually attacking British naval positions with uncanny accuracy. Since there seems to be no physical way for German agents to have gained such intelligence, the Duc searches for metaphysical solutions. Sure enough, when the Duc and two of his friends unleash their astral bodies-- something that was old-hat in Wheatley when Doctor Strange wasn't even a gleam in Steve Ditko's eye-- they do indeed find that an evil adept has been spying on British naval positions, and transmitting said info to the Nazis. The "five musketeers" must then track down the adept and block his attempts to help the Axis forces.
In DEVIL RIDES OUT, Wheatley devoted considerable energy to researching the purported occultism-theories of his time, and he wrought an imaginative tapestry from that raw info, producing one of the best "occult detective" novels of the 20th century. There are some inventive touches in CONFLICT, but Wheatley is not nearly as interested in metaphysics this time around. Instead he's advocating a sociological theme that might be considered out-of-step even in his own era: the idea that "people of color" need to keep their place.
In today's political climate, it's also impossible to distinguish a "racial myth" from a genuinely racist myth. All sociological myths have some elements of chauvinism, and thus I've defended various authors, from Sax Rohmer to Margaret Mitchell, from the charge of "active racism." I cannot, however, make any such defense of Dennis Wheatley, because I think he's actively pushing the idea that European and American colonizing forces should never have ceased their dominion over what President Taft called "our little brown brothers."
Though the Nazis are the proximate cause of England's sufferings, somehow Wheatley never manages to address what modern readers consider the Third Reich's defining characteristic: an attempt to extol the Aryan Race above all the so-called "mongrel hordes." Despite the fact that one of the musketeers is Jewish, there's no mention of Jews suffering in concentration camps. Wheatley saves all of his anger for the maltreatment of other Europeans, such as French and Polish peoples. Wheatley's concerns are so Eurocentric that he never says much of anything about the Pacific conflict, though one unnamed Japanese agent has a minor role in CONFLICT. Wheatley does call the agent a "Jap," but the author shows no overt animus toward Orientals, and the enemy spy even gives a half-decent account of himself, using judo against the Herculean American Rex. Apparently Wheatley saved up all of his resentments for persons of the Negro race, showing no awareness that the Nazis shared similar sentiments.
About a hundred pages into the novel, the Duc and his aides encounter the enemy adept and fight him on the astral plane, where all of them change their shapes continually. At one point the adept assumes the form of "a brawny Negro," which turns out to be a half-truth at best. The adept escapes the heroes, but they find a clue that leads them to the adept's home base in Haiti. The quintet travels to Haiti, and on the way they pick up an apparent ally, a mute young woman named Philippa. At this point, the reader has no real evidence of any animus toward Negroes, not least because Philippa is presented as a perfectly comely young woman, despite being an "octoroon."
However, once the travelers arrive in Haiti, they're given constant evidence that the country is a cesspool, one that badly needs European or American oversight to be run properly. To be sure, most of these negative observations stem from an apparent benefactor, a very educated "Mulatto" named Doctor Saturday, who's perhaps not above prejudice when he claims that mulattos are inevitably smarter than pure Negroes. Nevertheless, one suspects that Wheatley is making Saturday the vehicle for his own sentiments, while allowing his sturdy Brit heroes to rise above such invidious statements. In addition, since Saturday regales the travelers with copious stories about the practice of voodoo, only a very dim reader would not suspect that Saturday is actually the mystery adept, who showed his "true color" on the astral plane by making himself look like a Negro man. Though there are a few instances in which the heroes encounter Haitians who don't fit the stereotypes of laziness or stupidity, Wheatley clearly puts his thumb on the scales to show that black people cannot self-govern. And even the "octoroon" Philippa is actually one of Saturday's pawns, in that she's actually a zombie whom Saturday assigned to keep tabs on his enemies. Despite being mute, she would seem to be the most high-functioning zombie in all literature.
The only positive thing one can say about Doctor Saturday is that, in order to make him a real threat, Wheatley can't avoid depicting him as a brilliant opponent to the musketeers. That said,, he's still a pretty flat figure in comparison to an impressive "racial myth" character like Rohmer's Fu Manchu. His entire motivation comes down to his having been rejected by his British Caucasian father, and this instills in him the desire to see the British people wiped out by the Axis forces. Neither he nor any other character points out that his Nazi masters might want to see his race similarly wiped off the face of the Earth. It's hard to believe that Wheatley was unaware of Nazi racial theories, and so I suspect that he didn't want to say anything that would palliate his message. Indeed, even Wheatley's gods share the author's prejudices. In one sequence, Saturday conjures up the goat-god Pan to use his power against the Duc. Pan, however, considers himself a European god, and in due time he manages to turn the tables on the "half-caste" sorcerer, driving him to his death with a "Pan-ic attack."
With the possible exception of the early "Bulldog Drummond" novels, STRANGE CONFLICT may be the most relentlessly Anglophilic novel of the 20th century. It ends with the Duc pronouncing an encomium on the so-called "Anglo-Saxon race," claiming that it is "the last Guardian of the Light" and "the Bulwark of the World." After the publication of CONFLICT, Wheatley wrote five more "political intrigue" novels with the musketeers, concluding the series with one last "supernatural adventure," published in 1970 even though it dealt with the heroes in the 1950s. It will be interesting to see how the author reacted to the complete dissolution of the colonial world that he advocated.
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