THE READING RHEUM: GATEWAY TO HELL (1970)

About fifty pages from the end of GATEWAY, the character of Rex makes this pronouncement on his friend the Duc de Richleau:

I know that on many questions you’re a real old-fashioned die-hard. You’d like to see Britishers still running a third of the world, and playing polo in their off-time, with a Two-Power Navy to back them up. But you’ve liberal views where human relations are concerned.

After one reads GATEWAY TO HELL, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that author Dennis Wheatley was intentionally projecting his own sociological outlook upon the leader of his “Four Musketeers. Appearing in 1970, GATEWAY was the last-published in Wheatley’s “Musketeers” series, and though Wheatley claims that the action of the novel begins in 1953, it’s obvious that he wrote it during the 1960s. He mentions a “Doctor Luther King,” even though MLK wasn’t on the political map until 1955, when he lead the Montgomery bus boycott. Further, the heroes’ Satanic adversaries this time round have organized a movement called “Black Power,” which group advocates the violent overthrow of White Culture as did the more extreme movements of the sixties—none of which were seriously active in the 1950s. Even the name “Black Power” is clearly indebted to a political slogan that didn’t gain general acceptance until the decade of the sixties (though Richard Wright did author a book titled “Black Power” in 1954). Clearly, Wheatley took material from events of the 1960s and back-dated it so that he could show his heroes fighting Satanic evil when they were still relatively hale and hearty—unlike the author, who passed seven years after GATEWAY’s publication.

The “Musketeers” series consisted of eleven books, and only the three I’ve reviewed on this blog were outright occult adventures, the rest falling under the “espionage” rubric. I’ve still read no biographical material on the series’ author, though I’d encountered one or two assertions of his conservative politics even before beginning this review-project. Initially I tried to give Wheatley the benefit of the doubt in my review of THE DEVIL RIDESOUT, choosing to read the book’s multi-cultural villains as being an indicator of the author’s cosmopolitan sentiments. However, STRANGE CONFLICT  made this interpretation untenable, and in GATEWAY Wheatley apparently takes great pleasure in depicting his multinational cabal of Satanists to represent almost every culture on the map except those from France, Britain and the U.S. To be sure, some of the villains are Caucasian—particular a leftover German Nazi, who still nurses grudges against the Allies. Still, Wheatley seems a little too pre-occupied with how many of his walk-on villains are of mixed race.

In DEVIL, three of the musketeers have to rescue one of their number when he’s seduced into Satanism. In GATEWAY the author basically repeats this trope. American Rex Van Rijn apparently embezzles funds from the family bank and flees to join a Satanist group in South America. This supposedly explains the alliance of the leftover Nazi with the Satanists, though it’s a little off-putting that the author expects readers to accept a Nazi who allies himself to a “Black Power” movement. To be sure, the aim of the Satanist leader is to incite massive anti-white riots around the world purely to foment suffering, not to empower people of color, and thus it’s implicit that all of the “colored people” in the evil group are basically selling their kindred down the river.

Before exploring the novel’s politics further, I’ll note that there are some decent thrill-sequences here, though far less than STRANGE CONFLICT, which also showed Wheatley emphasizing politics over metaphysics. The pace is much slower, as the heroes make slow progress tracking down their law-breaking buddy, and Wheatley lets the action bog down several times, particularly in a time-wasting sequence where two of the good guys have to go on trial for murder. Where occult theory is concerned, Wheatley does try to be cosmopolitan, as there are a number of arguments set to prove the existence of both ‘good pagans” and “good witches.” But often the author interrupts the action so that his well-educated characters can descant about this or that topic for pages at a time. Like the voodoo-villain of STRANGE CONFLICT, the villains here are one-dimensional blackhearts. I suspect the reason that DEVIL’s bad guy was so persuasive was that Wheatley based Mocata in part on the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley.

In contrast to STRANGE CONFLICT, there are no attempts here to justify negative racial characterizations; all the evildoers, light or dark, are defined by their resentment of the people who are currently in charge. As one sees in the above quote, Wheatley assures his readers that the book’s heroes are basically respectful toward people of all religions and ethnicities. Still, though the author takes pains to acknowledge the many ways that people-of-color have suffered in White Culture, he’s never passionate about those injustices, as he is about his fears of a massive race-war.

I certainly do not disagree with the logic of Wheatley’s assessment about the wasteful stupidity of any sort of race-war, and the concomitant stupidity of anyone who advocates such a position, be it Stokely Carmichael or the morons who greenlighted the script of BLACK PANTHER. Yet, because Wheatley conflates this particular extremist position with the bugaboo of Satanism, it’s impossible to believe that he’s made a genuinely moral assessment of the subject. In the final analysis, despite his attempts to ameliorate his conservative sentiments, he’s just as much of a clumsy manipulator as his political opposite Spike Lee. But in contrast to Lee, at least Wheatley can address more than just one monotonous subject.