The novelist and short story writer Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977) was one of the world’s most successful, and prolific, authors in the 1960s to the 1970s, with his work selling a million copies a year at the peak of his popularity. He was particularly renowned for his works on Satanism, some of which were turned into films, many of which remain in print. Born in London, he had briefly attended a prep school in Margate, but was expelled from Dulwich College. This was apparently forming a secret society, though the sole source for this is his own words. After service in the navy during the First World War, he took over management of his family wine business. Only when that folded in the early 1930s did he start to write.
One of Wheatley’s creations was the Geoffrey Sallust series, a precursor to the James Bond of Ian Fleming. The 1936 novel, `Contraband, ’ the second in the Sallust series, is part of this, and features scenes through the Isle of Thanet. One of these is Quex Park, the home of the novel’s anti-hero, Lord Gavin Fortescue, the acme of treachery to the establishment that the author’s own political opinions was to be so supportive of (Whatley was a fierce critic of what he called `state socialism’ in ways that would not have appeared out of joint for the alt-right today). Sallust is led to this place after meeting a mysterious, beautiful woman in a casino in Deauville (the appeal to Fleming becomes clear very early on!) Fortescue is the tenant of the place, for, as one figure explains, it is Major Powell-Cotton who is the actual owner:
`A fine gentleman and a great hunter, so they say. There’s a museum next to the house where he keeps his trophies, lions and tigers and all sorts of fearsome-looking beasts, though stuffed of course. He and his wife shot every one themselves, and they’re away now in some un-Christian place looking for white leopards, if you’ve every heard of such a thing.’ (Wheatley, `Contraband,’ Arrow Edition, London, 1960, 96).
Percy Powell-Cotton was indeed in real life the founder of the museum, which still exists to this day at the Park, just outside Birchington in its own pleasant gardens and grounds. As `Contraband’ states later:
`The two tall windowless buildings behind the conservatories in the west, which Geoffrey [Sallust] had though might be squash or tennis courts proved to be the Museum holding the magnificent collection of Major Powell-Cotton… Vast cases, occupying in some instances the full length of the walls and twenty feet or more in height, contained jungle scenes where the great stuffed beasts, elephant, rhino, sable, antelope, baboon, kudu, giraffe, an countless other varieties of wild beasts were mounted in life-like postures, plunging through tall grass or wallowing in mussy streams.’ (102)
This is much as the museum remains to this day. Into this environment, Sallust exposes what initially looks like a smuggling ring, but turns out to be something far more sinister – a campaign to destroy the British state from within. The climax occurs in the region around Quex House, and on the Isle of Thanet. Perhaps it is the way this area figures so much as the frontier between the island of Britain and the continent that appealed to Whatley and inspired him to set this there. A few years later, of course, the threat and the actual attacks, particularly in this area, would become real.