Wheatley has himself told the story of how he set about changing all that.[1] Soon after his father's death he installed a mahogany-panelled office for himself and a stock of two hundred different liqueurs and a wine list with nothing on it less than thirty years old (and some going back to the eighteenth century). He expanded into the cigar trade and the wholesale trade, supplying restaurants and night-clubs (notoriously bad payers), and characteristically added penurious friends to his so-called staff, for he was the most generous of men. Already aware that the finest stock in London will not sell if nobody knows of its existence, he entertained lavishly - and the more he sold, the more he was owed and the more he owed. His friends, of whom I was one, did nothing to discourage him; on the contrary, we made full use of our membership of 'the club that never closes' and 26 South Audley Street became the most congenial of meeting places. In Wheatley's own words, 'a good time was had by all'.

It was the Depression, he believed, that brought about the inevitable crash but his competitors, whose friends were more prudent, managed to survive it. One thing we could do was to shield Wheatley from its more painful effects and it was not long before he realised that the wine trade had taught him all he needed to know of business life and he returned to story-telling. Within two years he was on the way to becoming a best-seller. Within four years a chance remark of mine over the divine Wheatley hock at his home in St. John's Wood (there had been plenty of salvage from No. 26) was taken up and the 'Crime Dossiers' were born. After the third one had been published, 'DENNIS WHEATLEY PRESENTS . . .' in one-and-a-half-inch lettering had been on every bookstall in the country for three years and he really was a best-seller. Forty or fifty books later he was selling a million copies a year.

How was it done? Modern jargon would call it 'good marketing of a good product'. Not the Dossiers, which sold on their novelty alone (Wheatley never wanted to be a crime writer and never wrote another detective story). But everything else he wrote showed the gusto and energy that marked his whole life and which, once a book was completed, he devoted to ensuring that it was sold. Wheatley's son, Anthony, in his foreword to the first new Century edition of The Forbidden Territory has emphasised his father's insistence on an authentic background. It is true that before writing Wheatley studied the period and country of his characters, and while writing lived with them in both; once done, he was able to forget it all and return to the present until it was time to move a century forward or backward, and rejoin a group of familiar characters he had left to themselves for years.