III.

The Thriller in England

Although the term “thriller” had been current for some years, Edgar Wallace, author of The Four Just Men (1905), is claimed to be the first true thriller writer in English fiction. Wallace was a top reporter on the Daily Mail.The Four Just Men incorporated the newspaper's “fast-breaking story” style of narrative, and also its reliance on sales gimmicks (Wallace offered a £500 prize to any reader who could come up with the correct solution as to how Philip Ramon, secure in his locked and guarded Downing Street office, was assassinated). Wallace went on to write 173 novels, of which about half qualify as thrillers. Wallace became known to his admirers as the King of the Thrillers and “the human book factory”. He was hugely popular with readers of his time. In the 1920s, it is estimated that 25 per cent of the books sold in England were by Wallace.

The genre which Wallace had pioneered went significantly up-market with the clubland thrillers of Dornford Yates (the pseudonym of Cecil W. Mercer), which centred on the gentleman crime-buster William Chandos and his partner, Jonah Mansel. The first in the series was Blind Corner (1927). Yates's exaggeratedly upper-class Chandos (who owes much to a Dorothy L. Sayers character, the aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, introduced to the reading public in 1923) popularized the debonair, dinner-jacketed thriller hero. Chandos was recycled as Leslie Charteris's Saint (Simon Templar), John Creasey's Toff, and, most successfully, in the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, with their ritual insistence on the hero's discernment about such things as brands of tobacco and the proper way to mix a martini.

A different kind of hero originates with the influential thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), by John Buchan. Richard Hannay (who also featured in six subsequent thrillers) is a hearty hero—strong, silent, tweed-clad, and given to manly country pursuits such as shooting and fishing when not saving England from caricatured foreigners: dastardly villains with thick accents, narrow-set eyes, sinister designs on English maidens, and abominable manners. Buchan's popularization of the international intrigue theme was further developed in E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation (1920), a thriller which did notably well in America, and set the author on a career of over a hundred best sellers.

Another hearty hero was Bulldog Drummond, hero of a series of thrillers by “Sapper” (the pseudonym of H. C. McNeile), of which the first came out in 1920. Like Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond is in the business of saving England from foreign enemies. Where Hannay had been excessively manly, the beer-swilling, pathologically xenophobic, ex-officer Drummond was a middle-class lout, but he appealed to the popular taste of the time. Sapper's thrillers, like Buchan's, were successfully adapted for the cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, giving the authors a wider American exposure than Wallace had enjoyed.

After Edgar Wallace's death in 1932 (he was working on the Hollywood production of King Kong, at the time), his role as King of the Thrillers was taken by another prolific British author, Dennis Wheatley, whose Black August (1934) introduced the series hero, Gregory Sallust, who combined aristocratic characteristics with the hearty manliness exemplified by Hannay and Bulldog Drummond. By 1940, Wheatley was prominently advertised by his publisher (Hutchinson) as “Public Thriller-Writer No. 1”. For all his sales and the brio of his narratives, Wheatley's narrative style was as crude as Wallace's and Sapper's (both of whom he acknowledged as direct influences).

The thriller was raised to a more creditable level of literary achievement by Eric Ambler, who produced his first Ruritanian spy thriller, The Dark Frontier, in 1936 (Ruritania is a fictional European country invented by Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda, 1894). Ambler developed a distinctive line in international thrillers (drawing on growing European apprehension about the imminence of World War II) of which the most successful was The Mask of Dimitrios (1939; retitled in the United States A Coffin for Dimitrios). Ambler is a thriller writer who made thrillers intellectually respectable (as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton made the detective story similarly respectable during the same period). Once described by the English novelist Graham Greene as “our [by which he meant Britain's] greatest thriller writer”, Ambler clearly influenced other up-market international thriller writers, notably Greene himself (in what he called his “entertainments”, that is thrillers such as The Ministry of Fear, 1943), Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. Ambler's international themes were successfully developed for late 20th-century readers by Frederick Forsyth (like Edgar Wallace, originally a newspaperman by profession) in best-selling action thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972), and The Devil's Alternative (1980).