Dennis Wheatley was a black magic novelist and occult thriller writer who sold 50 million copies worldwide before Stephen King was born. Born on January 8, 1897, in Streatham, London, he inherited the family wine business at 21 and ran it successfully until the Great Depression forced its sale in 1931. He turned to writing at 34, an age when most novelists have either already established themselves or given up. His debut, "The Forbidden Territory," published in 1933, was an immediate bestseller. He went on to produce over 60 novels mixing espionage, supernatural horror, and aristocratic swagger in roughly equal proportions. His occult series, beginning with "The Devil Rides Out" in 1934, featured the character Douc de Richleau battling Satanic cults across Europe. The books were vivid, fast-paced, and thoroughly researched in their depictions of black magic rituals, which Wheatley studied extensively. He was also far more than a pulp writer. During World War II, he served as a member of the London Controlling Section, the deception planning unit that orchestrated strategic misinformation campaigns including some aspects of the D-Day deception. His war work involved crafting detailed false invasion plans designed to mislead German intelligence. He brought the same narrative skills to military deception that he applied to fiction. After the war, he resumed writing prolifically, producing several novels a year well into the 1970s. His books were enormously popular in Britain and the Commonwealth but less known in America. He died on November 10, 1977, in London. His influence on British thriller and horror fiction was substantial, though his aristocratic politics and racial attitudes have aged badly.