Friday, October 21, 2022

THE READING RHEUM: TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1953)




I've reviewed all three of Dennis Whealtey's occult novels starring his characters "the Three Musketeers," but Wheatley had other serial heroes cross swords with evil magicians. Another series, consisting of just two novels, focused upon a middle-aged former espionage agent, Colonel Verney, and both of his exploits involved Satanic evil. It's of some interest that the publication date for the first Verney outing, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, is 1953, the same time that Wheatley claimed the last Musketeers novel took place, though the author almost certainly wrote that story in the 1960s.

Middle-aged British thriller-writer Molly Fountain gets a taste of real danger when a young woman, Christina Mordant, moves in next door. Nosy Molly finds it odd that Christina seems utterly isolated save for occasional visits from her father, so Molly offers herself as a sounding-board. What Christina reveals moves Molly to summon help, first that of her strapping grown son John, and then that of her former espionage colleague Colonel Verney. 

In brief, Christina's father consecrated his daughter to the Devil, and there's a Satanic cult waiting until the young woman reaches the age of 21, at which time it will be propitious to sacrifice her. The heroine doesn't actually know that this is her fate, but she does suffer a schizophrenic nature, seeming virginal and innocent by day but sexually rapacious by night. Molly for the most part fades from the main story as Verney and John Fountain join forces to keep Christina from falling in Satan's hands.

Though the basic plot sounds unremarkable, Wheatley devotes quite a bit of effort to showing all the detective work Verney and John must do to ferret out the truth, as well as showing the many stumbling blocks that impede their efforts. John handles most of the action-scenes, partly justified by the fact that within a few days of knowing Christina the two fall in love. Most of the romance-elements are routine, though I did like an early scene in which on the first meeting of the two youths, each one begins thinking about the physical shortcomings of the other-- which is meant to denote their resistance to their initial attraction.

In contradistinction to Wheatley's 1934 DEVIL RIDES OUT, the book that made him famous for occult thrillers, there's no advanced occult theory propounded, nor are there any mentions about non-Christian religions that are on a par with the Christian religion. DAUGHTER seems firmly entrenched in British interpretations of Catholicism and its "Church of England" analogues, in that the reason Christina can be promised to Satan is that her father deliberately fails to have her baptized. Also, spinning off from the belief that a Black Mass can only be performed by a defrocked Catholic priest, the leader of the Satanists is a canon of the Church of England, but not a practicing priest. To be sure, this character, Augustus Copley-Syle, is fully conversant with modern theories of Magick, and he and Verney descant learnedly on one of Wheatley's favorite topics, Aleister Crowley. Also, the villain's main scheme isn't just a standard Satanic ritual. Rather, the master plan involves animating an artificial creature, the "homunculus," an occult notion that had been in the wind at least since Somerset Maugham's 1908 novel THE MAGICIAN. 

In keeping with Wheatley's penchant for black-hearted villains, Copley-Syle is surely one of his best, and proves in many ways more memorable than any of the good guys. In addition to all the thriller elements, Wheatley devotes a great deal of attention to the theme of Christian redemption, exemplified by the heroes' successful attempt to redeem Christina's Satanist father. At the same time, the author goes the extra mile by coming up with novel settings. Instead of staging the climax in the usual abandoned church, the ritual takes place in a hell-like series of underground caverns, "the Cave of the Bats," rumored to have been a site of sacrificial rituals from pagan times.

I have not read the second Colonel Verney novel, but I have the impression that it dispenses with John Fountain and introduces a new young swain to do the heavy lifting for Verney. There's a marginal crossover-element introduced during the conversation between Verney and Copley-Syle when they discuss "that business with Mocata"-- Mocata being the villain defeated by the Three Musketeers in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. Said business would have taken place about nineteen years before DAUGHTER, but I don't know if Wheatley ever again intimated connections between his various serial universes.


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