Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

During the Second World War Wheatley  worked at on secret ops with Ian Fleming the future creator of James Bond.Wheatley  had created his own secret agent Gregory Sallust who is similar in many ways to the future Bond and who featured in a series of thrillers set during the war.Wheatley has his hero meet various real historical persons in these stories such as Hermann Goering and Hitler.After the war Dennis Wheatley continued his prolific output down  the 1970s.His books are exercises in pure escapism within a realistic 20th century setting (apart from the historical).Like most pulp fiction the message is conservative with heroes coming from the upper class and living the good life.His lost world stories are his most fantastic with visits to Atlantis, another to a lost Atlantean civilisation in the Antartic ,a lost civilisation of 17th century English cavaliers in the Sargasso sea and a visit to Mars by flying saucer.These stories are all mixed in with struggles against the Nazis in World War II and the Communists in the Cold War.His chief claim to fame however is his novels which combine conventional thrillers with Black Magic and Occult themes.