Stranger than fiction

'This is true story of a story-teller who was enabled to turn his natural imagination and story-telling genius to the fields of statecraft and strategy and to join in fellowship with those who were to become great.' So Air Marshal Sir Lawrance Darvall describes these War Papers which made Dennis Wheatley a new kind of 'best seller' with the smallest readership that any author can ever have had; for the circulation of the Papers at the time of their writing was confined to the Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet, and to His Majesty King George VI, who read them all with the greatest of interest. With neither special information nor privilege, Dennis Wheatley wrote of the problems that faced our war leaders in a fashion which was fresh and challenging and so eminently sensible that his views achieved an influence out of all proportion to his own expectations. The fourteen Papers range diversely from Resistance to Invasion, filled with ingenious, unorthodox and extremely practical suggestions for repulsing an invading host, to the penetrating appreciation of what was to face us After the Battle. And so remarkably sound and useful were they that in the result Wheatley became the only civilian ever to be commissioned directly into the Joint Planning Staff. Those who have never read a Wheatley novel-and there must be few who have not-will be surprised indeed at the shrewdness and versatility of the author. Wheatley devotees, and they are legion, will not be at all surprised by the way in which he turned his mind to bringing pain and grief to our enemies. And every reader, of course, will enjoy this very remarkable behind-the-scenes story of the war.