Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Mike Ripley 2017

Foreword copyright © Lee Child 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Mike Ripley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008172251

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008172244

Version: 2019-03-04

Dedication

For Len Deighton,

who has a lot to answer for.

‘That’s one of the reasons I wrote my first crime novel, because my father was reading Alistair MacLean. I didn’t want to write Dubliners. I wanted to write something he would read’

Ian Rankin

‘Indispensable and destined for awards’

Maxim Jakubowski

‘Ripley produces funny lines as often as most people breathe’

The Times

‘[Ripley] reduced me to tears of laughter with some of his deadpan summaries of the period’s lesser lights’

Daily Telegraph

SPOILER ALERT

There will be spoilers. Live with it. Many of the thrillers referred to here were published fifty years ago.

You’ve had time.

THRILLERS

‘A book, film, or play depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense.’

Collins English Dictionary

‘What exactly is a thriller? The term seems to cover a multitude of sins and quite a fair proportion of virtues.’

Margery Allingham, 1931

‘You after all write novels of suspense – if not sociological studies – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.’

Ian Fleming in a letter to Raymond Chandler, 1956

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Praise

Spoiler Alert

Thrillers

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1: A Question of Emphasis

Chapter 2: The Land Before Bond

Chapter 3: Do Mention the War

Chapter 4: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, Spies. But mostly journalists.

Chapter 5: End of Empire

Chapter 6: Travel Broadening the Mind

Chapter 7: Class of ’62

Chapter 8: The Spies Have It, 1963–70

Chapter 9: The Adventurers, 1963–70

Chapter 10: The Storm Jackal Has Landed – The 1970s

Chapter 11: The New Intake

Chapter 12: Endgame

Appendix I: The Leading Players

Appendix II: The Supporting Cast

Notes & References

Acknowledgements & Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Also by Mike Ripley

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

Some time ago Mike Ripley e-mailed and asked if I would write a foreword for his new book. I knew roughly what it was about: Mike and I bump into each other a couple of times a year, at industry junkets, and like writers everywhere we always ask about works in progress – secretly hoping, I suppose, that the other guy is having it even worse than we are. So I knew the project was a survey of British thriller fiction during the two golden decades between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Seventies. Knowing Mike, I knew the scholarship would be meticulous; I knew the writing would be pleasantly breezy, but always willing to seize passionately upon a point, and render a clear and acute conclusion, without fear or favour. It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for – so why not get it early and free? So I said yes.

Mike is a slightly older codger even than I, so there was no immediate e-mail response to my response. I got the impression he treats e-mail like the country squire he pretends to be, reads the post, perhaps once a day, perhaps in the early morning, at the breakfast table. I spent the rest of my own day writing a newspaper article commissioned by the New York Times. I was never quite sure what they wanted, but it seemed to require a retrospective mood, even elegiac, starting right back at the beginning, which in my case meant growing up in provincial post-war Britain. I polished the piece and sent it off.

Then – bing – the attachment arrived from Ripley.

For the New York Times, I had started, ‘Objectively I was one of the luckiest humans ever born.’

Ripley’s preface started, ‘I am of the luckiest generation.’

He’s a couple of years older than me, which makes us a typical older brother–younger brother age pairing right in the middle of the luckiest demographic in history. For the Times I said we were a stable postwar liberal democracy, at peace, with a cradle-to-grave welfare system that worked efficiently, with all dread diseases conquered, with full employment for our parents, with free and excellent education from the age of five for just as long as we merited it. We had no bombs falling on our houses, and no knocks on our doors in the middle of the night. No previous generation ever had all of that, not in all of history, and standards have eroded since. We were very lucky.

But, I said, it was very boring. Britain was grey, exhausted, physically ruined, and financially crippled. The factories were humming, but everything went for export. We needed foreign currency to pay down monstrous war debt. Domestic life was pinched and austere.

We escaped any way we could. Reading was the main way. Thrillers were the highest high, and British writers were never better than during our formative years. But finding out about them was entirely random. Obviously there was no Internet – electricity itself was fairly recent in some of our houses – and it was rare to meet a fellow aficionado face to face, and enthusiast bookshops were inaccessible to most of us, and so on. We blundered from one random find to another. Some of us had older brothers blazing the way, and really that’s exactly what this book is – the perfect older brother, equipped with 20/20 hindsight, saying, ‘Read this, and then this, and this, and this.’

I can follow my own snail-trail across the landscape that Ripley so comprehensively describes. I can pick my way from A to Z, book to book, zigging and zagging. I can remember the joy of escaping, and the thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world, and wanting to do it again and again. In that sense this book feels like my own personal memoir, and inevitably it will to thousands of others too, with their own unique zigzag snail-trails, and as such it seems of great sentimental value, like a long-lost diary, like a list of the way stations that carried us through a time that promised to be forever grey.

It’s also sad, in a way. We all missed so much. Zigging and zagging are all very well, but must always conspire to pass by most good things, simply by the law of averages. But what’s done is done. Instead we should treat this book like a catch-up manual, and fill in what we didn’t read the first time. Some of it might be really good. Some of it might recapture the feeling.

Which would be worth something. A book I might pay for, indeed.

Lee Child

New York

2016

NOTES

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

PREFACE

I am of the luckiest generation, the one which avoided National Service and enjoyed a fee-free university education – they even gave you a grant for going.

I spent my early teenage years, and all my pocket money, reading thrillers. It was the first half of the 1960s and I could, by haunting second-hand bookshops and market stalls, usually pick up two, sometimes three, recent paperbacks for the same price as a ‘Top Ten’ 45 rpm vinyl single, which seemed a far better use of my limited disposable income. At least that was my thinking until I discovered girlfriends, and the Rolling Stones recorded Beggar’s Banquet.

I was brought up in a house where a large pile of library books, all fiction, were refreshed every fortnight. Even in a small coal mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, there was a public library attached to the infant school which was open two or three evenings a week and allowed four books to be borrowed on each library ticket. My father was a voracious reader of Westerns whilst my mother’s passion was for historical novels. I read thrillers and I knew exactly what I meant when I said that then, although today I would differentiate and describe myself as having started out on adventure thrillers and then moved on to spy thrillers. Unlike many of my peers, science fiction did not entice and detective stories or ‘whodunits’ to me were stale and unappetizing (with the singular exception of Raymond Chandler).

A thriller would offer excitement and almost certainly a connection to WWII. This was a familiar and important reference point as the comic books I had been brought up on as a young lad did not feature Batman, Superman or a Hulk, but soldiers – invariably British or Commonwealth troops – fighting on land, sea, and air against implacable German, inscrutable Japanese and unreliable, if not cowardly, Italian foes. These 64-page book-format magazines were published, rather grandly, as ‘Libraries’. There was War Picture Library, Battle Picture Library, Air Ace Picture Library and, from a rival stable, Commando. They cost a shilling (5p) each and were, as far as I could tell being a bit of a military history buff, pretty accurate when describing the campaigns of World War II.

Why the obsession with WWII? I do not come from a military family, had no career aspirations in that direction (not even the Boy Scouts), and the war itself had ended more than seven years before I was born. Yet it somehow dominated my childhood. The headmaster of my village primary school was a former Royal Navy chief petty officer, the village priest had been a Chaplain with the 14th Army in Burma, I had an impressive collection of toy soldiers, and war films always seemed to be on television – mostly proving that no prison camp could ever hold plucky British escapees when they set their mind to it. When the minor public school I attended took the revolutionary step of starting up a Film Club, the first feature it showed was The Guns of Navarone. (The Headmaster who sanctioned the formation of that Film Club also prohibited any boy from going to the local cinema to see Lindsay Anderson’s If … in 1968. He was clearly a man who understood the power of film.)

It was inevitable that I would discover Alistair MacLean’s wartime classic about the Arctic convoys, HMS Ulysses, and although it is (honestly) more than fifty years since I read it, I can vividly recall incidents from it, not least the scene in a snowstorm when the ship’s pom-pom guns are fired whilst their metal muzzle covers are still in place.

This was a war novel, but it was a tense, dramatic and thrilling story with lashings of suspense and mystery. Not ‘mystery’ as in ‘whodunit?’ but rather ‘how can they survive this?’ The next MacLean I tried, South by Java Head, was also set during WWII but with more skulduggery than actual combat. Other MacLean books were devoured in quick succession and these were not war stories, yet the heroes were resourceful and brave, the stakes life-and-death, the settings ranging exotically from the South Seas to Greenland, and the action fast and furious. These were not only ‘what is really going on?’ mysteries but also ‘how do they get out of this?’ adventures.

I was no longer reading war stories, I was reading thrillers and then, at the age of 12, I discovered James Bond and found there was more than one type of thriller out there.

With the benefit of half a century of hindsight I realise that there was a real purple patch of British thriller writing in the Sixties and into the Seventies and I had been hungrily reading my way through it. The ‘Golden Age’ of the British detective story (usually accepted to be the Twenties and Thirties) had well and truly lost its lustre by the Swinging Sixties, but a new generation of thriller writers had emerged after the war, appealing to a much wider audience. Thanks to the expansion of public libraries and attractive, mass market paperback editions British writers dominated the national and international bestseller lists. Nobody, it seemed, when it came to action-adventure heroes, secret agents, or spies, did do it better.

After the dull, austere post-war period as Britain declined as a world power, its thriller fiction had – like British pop music and Carnaby Street fashion – moved from black-and-white to Technicolor. The thrillers just kept coming: bigger, brasher, and more fantastical than ever. The early death of Ian Fleming in 1964 did nothing to slow the rush of would-be successors to Bond, in fact it accelerated the flow as did the success of the Bond films. New voices joined in, establishing a school of more realistic spy fiction born in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and more films followed. The year 1966 seemed to have been a peak year, with twenty-two spy or secret agent films released in the UK – admittedly several of them spoofing the genre and only a few of which have stood the test of time.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang attempts to be a reader’s history – specifically this reader – of that action-packed period around the Sixties when, having lost an Empire, Britain’s thriller writers and their fictional heroes saved the world and their books sold by the million. It was very much a British initiative and it only faltered in the mid-Seventies when American thriller writers began to flex their muscles, different types of thriller emerged, and the detective or crime story began to enjoy a renaissance.

This book concentrates unashamedly on the British spies, secret agents, and soldiers, and their creators and publishers, who saved the world from Nazis, ex-Nazis, proto-Nazis, the secret police of any (and all) communist country, super-rich and power-mad villains, traitors, dictators, rogue generals, mad scientists, secret societies, ruthless businessmen and even, on one occasion, an ultra-violent animal protection league which kills anyone who kills animals for sport! I will shamelessly ignore the fictional heroes of other countries and concentrate on British authors, with the exception of a handful of Irish, Australian and South African writers, whose primary publishers were in the UK.

It will also limit itself to thrillers rather than ‘detective stories’ or ‘whodunits’. This means that some famous names hardly feature at all, those authors who may well have dipped a toe into the thriller pool but are far better known for their crime novels; for example, the wonderful and much-missed Reginald Hill. Similarly, I will down-play one of my favourite writers, that supreme stylist P. M. Hubbard, who wrote novels of suspense on a domestic, almost micro, level. The thriller-writers taking centre-stage here are those who worked on a broader canvas with sweeping brush-strokes and who came to prominence in the period 1953 to 1975. Some who had established themselves before the Second World War were still writing and experienced something of a ‘second wind’ in the Swinging Sixties.

I should insert here a warning: fans of Eric Ambler (1909–98) and Graham Greene (1904–91) will feel themselves short-changed. Both these authors were immensely influential on the form and tone of the thriller genre (novels and films); indeed, their surnames became adjectives frequently used by reviewers. It was high praise indeed for a thriller to be called ‘Ambler-esque’ and everyone knew exactly where ‘Greeneland’ was. Yet neither of these giants were a product of the period under scrutiny as they had cemented their reputations two decades previously, although both were still producing work of high quality, notably Ambler’s Passage of Arms (1959), The Light of Day (1962) – famously filmed as Topkapi, and The Levanter (1972); and Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), and The Comedians 1966). Their legacy and importance in the genre will be acknowledged, though not in enough detail to satisfy their dedicated fans. I have also relegated Leslie Charteris and Dennis Wheatley to the pre-war era for, although ‘The Saint’ was an immensely popular figure on British television in the early Sixties, Charteris had ceased to produce full-length novels and Dennis Wheatley’s novels in the period under scrutiny tended towards the historical or the occult stories with which he had made his name in the Thirties.

One limitation is not self-imposed, and that is the absence of women writers. Adventure thrillers and spy stories tended to be what is known in the book trade as ‘boys’ books’ or, pejoratively, ‘dads’ books’ and were to a very great degree, written by men – some might say men who had never grown out of being boys. A notable exception was Helen MacInnes, a Scot based in America, whose first novel had appeared in 1939. By the Sixties, she was a well-established and popular writer and had three notable bestsellers in that decade, but she, like Ambler and Greene, was not a product of that period when Britain ruled the thriller-writing waves and so gets an honourable, but passing, mention here. And it should not be forgotten that it was in the Sixties that some rather talented female writers, notably P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, were laying the groundwork for a revival in the British detective story and crime novel.

It is difficult to pin-point the exact end of this ‘Golden Age’ (or purple patch) of dominance by British thriller writers. One option would perhaps be the death of Alistair MacLean – the biggest name in the adventure thriller market – in 1987, or alternatively the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which threatened to put many a spy-fiction writer out of business. In truth, the writing was on the wall (if not the Berlin one) from roughly the mid-Seventies onwards as the Americans, slightly late as usual, entered the fray.

The beginning of the boom is rather easier to identify. The 1950s were grey and austere for a supposedly victorious wartime nation whose empire was starting to crumble. You might say Britain had been expecting you, Mr Bond …

Chapter 1:

A QUESTION OF EMPHASIS

You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control centre of the Dolphin that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction … they had eyes for one thing only – the plummeting needle on the depth gauge.

Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I’d never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived.

Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra

Was it a Golden Age or an explosion of ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ pulp fiction which reflected the social revolution – and some would say declining morals – of the period? Both are reasonable explanations, depending on your standpoint, for the extraordinary growth in both the writing and reading of British thrillers, between 1953 and 1975.

Popular fiction, as opposed to literary or ‘highbrow’ fiction was always, well – popular; but suddenly the thriller seemed to be out-gunning all other forms. Writing in the middle of the Swinging Sixties, in his economic history Industry and Empire, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that since 1945, ‘that powerful cultural export, the British detective story, has lost its hold, conquered by the American-patterned thriller.’ Professor Hobsbawm was certainly correct in that the traditional British detective story had been replaced by the thriller as a cultural, and in fact economically valuable, export but wrong in suggesting they were ‘American-patterned’. This was a very British boom.

The British, or probably more accurately the English detective story had flourished in the period, roughly, between the two World Wars, a period which earned the epithet ‘Golden Age’ and was characterized, often unfairly, as the era of ‘the country house murder mystery’ or the ‘whodunit?’ It had given rise to the concept of ‘fair play’ whereby the reader was presented with clues to solving the puzzle presented, ideally before the fictional detective did, and the puzzle element was very important. There were even ‘rules’ (fairly tongue-in-cheek ones) on what was and was not allowed in a detective story, and a self-selecting, totally unofficial, Detection Club of the leading practitioners of the art to set the standards of good writing – or just standards in general.

After WWII tastes changed and readers began to demand something other than an intellectual puzzle. Cynics may say that the launch of the board game Cluedo in 1949 was an ironic final nail in the coffin of the ‘whodunit?’ – all those fictional cardboard characters being reduced to actual pieces of cardboard. Of course, it wasn’t the end; it was a period of cyclical dip and transition. Readers were looking for exotic settings, not country houses; indeed, thanks to death duties and wartime requisitioning by the government or military (most famously of Bletchley Park), there were fewer of them to go round. The fashion was for heroes and heroines who often acted outside the law rather than plodding policemen; suspense rather than a puzzle; more realistic violence rather than a ridiculously over-elaborate murder method; and, above all, action and excitement at a time when, in the Sixties, everything seemed exciting and moved much faster.

For a period of more than two decades the British thriller delivered on all counts, and on a truly international level. It may not have been a Golden Age but it was certainly a boom time.

This is not a work of literary criticism or comparative literature; it is a reader’s history of one specific category, or genre, of popular fiction – the thriller – over a particular period when British writers dominated the bestseller lists at home and abroad. There will be little, if any, discussion of heroic mythology, social individualism, the atemporality of the appeal of the thriller, the symbiotic relationship between hero and conspiracy, or genre theory. Those debates are left to others on the grounds that, to paraphrase E. B. White: dissecting a thriller is like dissecting a frog – few people are really interested and the frog dies.1

But there has to be some attempt to define the term ‘thriller’, a term used as loosely in the past as ‘noir’ is today (‘Tartan Noir’, ‘Scandi Noir’, etc.) to describe an important segment of that exotic fruit which is generally known as crime fiction. Whether it matters a jot to the reader who simply wants to be entertained is debatable, but again, it probably does. Crime fiction is a recognised genre, just as horror, science fiction, romance, fantasy, westerns and supernatural are all genres of popular fiction and genres tend to have dedicated followers.

The idea of genre fiction evolved in the late nineteenth century and blossomed in the Thirties with the advent of cheaper, paperback books with crime fiction among the first instantly identifiable genres thanks to the famous green covers used by Penguins and logos such as the Collins Crime Club’s ‘gunman’. Dedicated readers were steered to genres they liked and genre readers appreciated the guidance – though they did not want to read the same book again, they did want more of the same.

Within a genre as big as crime fiction, which could be described as a broad church (albeit an unholy one) readers tended to specialise often to a slightly frightening degree. There are those who only read spy stories (and some who only read spy stories set in Berlin), those who only read the Sherlock Holmes canon, those who refuse point blank to read anything written after 1945, those who only want to read about serial killers, those who always prefer the private eye novel, those who disparage the amateur sleuth preferring police detectives, and these days there are those naturally light-hearted optimistic readers of nothing but Scandinavian crime fiction.

Thankfully only a few crime fiction readers go as far as some science fiction fans and attend conventions dressed as their favourite fictional heroes but all like the security of identifiable categories and so some attempt must be made to define the terms used in this book.

As a recognisable genre, the thriller is certainly as old if not older than the detective story which, casually ignoring the interests of students of eighteenth-century literature and languages other than English, is generally dated from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. With reluctance, the honours could also go to America, with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826) for the earliest examples of the spy thriller and the adventure thriller.

Already the dissection of the term ‘thriller’ has begun, yet by the time the British had flexed their writing muscles things were becoming clearer. Both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), published in the same decade in which Sherlock Holmes took his first bow, were fully-formed adventure thrillers. They were adventure stories which thrilled and distinctly different from the detective story, which could of course be thrilling but in a different, perhaps more cerebral, way. If that was not confusing enough, the 1890s saw the early days of the spy novel – albeit in the shape of a string of xenophobic potboilers which revelled in the fear of an invasion of England by Russia, France, or even Germany.2 They were certainly meant to be thrilling, if not hysterical, but a quality mark was soon achieved with Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and the work of John Buchan, seen by many as the Godfather of the quintessential British thriller, although he preferred the term ‘shocker’ presumably in the sense that his stories were electrifying rather than revolting.

When the Golden Age of the English detective story dawned, it suddenly seemed important that the thriller was publicly differentiated from the novel of detection which offered readers ‘fair play’ clues to the solution of the mystery, usually a murder. At least it seemed important to the writers of detective stories, who saw themselves as, if not quite an elite, then certainly a literary step up on the purveyors of potboilers and shockers.

The Golden Age can be dated, very crudely, as the period between the two world wars, beginning with the early novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers (when it actually ended is still a matter of some debate – an often interminable and sometimes heated debate). Although a boom time for detective stories, it was also a boom time for spy thrillers. Donald McCormick in his Who’s Who in Spy Fiction (1977) claims that the years between 1914 and 1939 were the most prolific period of the spy thriller, the public’s appetite having been whetted by the First World War and real or imagined German spy-scares. ‘The spy story became a habit rather than a cult’ was his polite way of saying that this was definitely not a Golden Age for the thriller except in terms of sales. Names such as Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Sydney Horler and Francis Beeding (Beeding’s books were publicised under the banner ‘Breathless Beeding’ or ‘Sit up with …’ after a review in The Times had declared that Beeding was an author whose books made ‘readers sit up [all night] until the book is finished’) are now mostly found in reference books rather than on the spines of books on shelves, whereas certain luminaries of the Golden Age of detective fiction, such as Christie, Sayers, Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley and John Dickson Carr are still known and respected and, more importantly, in print somewhere.3

Back in the day though, the fact of the matter was that the Oppenheims and Breathless Beedings et al were the bigger sellers. Edgar Wallace’s publishers once claimed him to be the author of a quarter of all the books read in Britain (which even by publishing standards of hype is pretty extreme) and they were to inspire in various ways, often unintended, a new generation of thriller writers. In 1936, a debut novel, The Dark Frontier, arrived without much fanfare marking the start of the writing career of Eric Ambler, who was later to admit that he had great fun writing a parody of an E. Phillips Oppenheim hero.4 Two decades later, the eagle-eyed reader of a certain age could spot certain Oppenheim traits in another new arrival, James Bond. In fact, the reader didn’t have to be that eagle-eyed.

The question of what was a thriller, and how seriously it should be taken, seemed to exercise the minds of the writers of detective stories and members of the elite Detection Club, confident in the superiority of their craft, rather than the thriller writers themselves.

One writer closely associated with the Golden Age, though happy to experiment beyond the confines of the detective story, was Margery Allingham. In 1931, Allingham wrote an article for The Bookfinder Illustrated succinctly entitled ‘Thriller!’ trying to explain the different categories then evident in crime fiction. It was a remarkably good and fair analysis of the then current crime scene, identifying five types (and one sub-type) which made up the family tree of the ‘thriller’, which were:

Murder Puzzle Stories – which could be sub-divided into (a) ‘Novels with murder plots’ by writers ‘who take murder in their stride’ (such as Anthony Berkeley), and (b) ‘Pure puzzles’ such as those by Freeman Wills Crofts;

Stout Fellows – the brave British adventurer or secret agent, usually square-jawed and later to be known as the ‘Clubland hero’ type (as written by John Buchan);

Pirates and Gunmen – the adventurers and gangsters as found in the books of American Francis Coe and the prolific Edgar Wallace;

Serious Murder – novels such as Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley) which Allingham put ‘in the same class as Crime and Punishment’;

High Adventures in Civilised Settings – crime stories ‘without impossibilities and improbabilities’ for which she cited Dorothy L. Sayers as an example.

Whether Dorothy L. Sayers was pleased with this somewhat lofty and isolated categorisation is not recorded, but it is likely that she bridled at being lumped, even in a specialised category, in the general genre of thrillers. She was crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times in the years 1933–5 and was not slow off the mark to say that a novel she did not approve of had ‘been reduced to the thriller class’. Responding to a claim, real or imagined, that she had been ‘harsh and high hat’ about thrillers, she claimed to hail them ‘with cries of joy when they displayed the least touch of originality’, whenever she found one that is, which seemed to be rarely and she clearly felt the detective story the purer form. (This in turn provoked the very successful thriller writer Sydney Horler, creator of ‘stout fellow’ hero Tiger Standish, to remark rather acidly that Miss Sayers ‘spent several hours a day watching the detective story as though expecting something terrific to happen’.)5

In fairness, during her time as the Sunday Times critic, Sayers did attempt to provide a working definition of what a ‘thriller’ was and how it differed from the (in her opinion) far superior detective story. Indeed, she had three goes at doing so, which suggests the lady might have been protesting a little too much.

In June 1933 she suggested: ‘Some readers prefer to be thrilled by the puzzle and others to be puzzled by the thrills.’ She refined this in January 1934 to: ‘The difference between thriller and detective story is one of emphasis. Agitating events occur in both, but in the thriller our cry is What comes next? – in the detective story What came first?. The one we cannot guess; the other we can, if the author gives us a chance.’

Now Sayers believed in writing detective stories to a set of rules which gave the reader the chance, if they were clever enough, of guessing the solution to the mystery/problem posed before the author revealed the solution. She did not realise that there were readers out there who did not want the author to give them a chance, they just wanted to be thrilled however outrageous and implausible the story.

Sayers had a third go, in her Sunday Times column in March 1935, where she defined the thriller as something where ‘the elements of horror, suspense, and excitement are more prominent than that of logical deduction’. By that time an intelligent woman such as Sayers must have realised that the fair-play, by-the-rules detective story as an intellectual game was running out of steam and that other types of crime fiction were taking over. She herself effectively retired from crime writing after 1937.

Margery Allingham, who by her own set of definitions wrote most types of thriller, continued writing until her death in 1966 and kept a watchful eye on developments in the genre as a whole. In 1958 she was still wary of the superior status given to the detective story noting that ‘In this century there is a cult of the crime story as distinct from any other adventure story (thriller) – mainly read by people ill in bed.’6 Allingham’s gentle analysis was that the detective story had been an intellectual exercise, whereas the thriller had included adventure stories, almost modern fairy stories – by which she presumably meant Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Now there was the crime story (in which she included the works of Georges Simenon and John Creasey) and the mystery story, a loose term which covered everything from the Gothic to the picaresque. In 1965, shortly before her death, like Sayers she predicted that the mystery story was ‘going out’ and would be replaced by the novel of suspense.

In his perceptive Introduction to the 1960 anthology Best Secret Service Stories, editor John Welcome put his finger on a crucial distinction. ‘However skilfully the writer of a detective story juggles with settings and character, he is still bound to three essentials. There must be a crime (usually violent, usually murder), a search and a dénouement. Thus the detective story creates its own limitations. Whether it is set in the South Seas, Greenwich Village or the library of an English country house, it must still be worked out within that framework. Moreover, that it is in itself fundamentally a puzzle is another factor contributing towards artificiality, (The reader) is being compelled to read on not by the skill of the storyteller but by the urge to find a solution. The detective story is the big brother to the acrostic7 and the crossword. The writer of thrillers, on the other hand, knows no such limitations. He is a storyteller and he is at large …’

To further confuse matters, in 2002 in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction compiled by Mike Ashley (one of the most respected anthologists in the business) Ashley excluded thrillers from his truly mammoth work on the grounds that ‘whilst some crime fiction may also be classed as a thriller, not all thrillers are crime fiction’. For his purposes, Ashley defines crime fiction as a book which involves the breaking and enforcement of the law, which is fair enough, but then he also excludes spy stories and novels of espionage – on the grounds that they constitute such a large field they deserve a study in their own right and even though spying usually involves breaking someone’s laws.

Even excluding thrillers and spy stories, as well as stories involving the supernatural or psychic detectives and anything labelled ‘suspense’ or ‘mystery’ (when describing the mood rather than content of a story), and then only dealing with authors writing since WWII, Ashley’s splendid encyclopedia weighs in at almost 800 pages.

Does any of this soul-searching by people in the business (writers, editors, reviewers) over terminology really matter? Because the field of crime fiction, or what the Victorians would have called ‘sensational fiction’, is now so large – so popular – it probably does, at least if one is trying to make a point about a particular aspect or time period.

To keep it simple, let us say that the overall genre of crime fiction encompasses crime novels (which contain danger, a puzzle or a mystery centred on an individual or individuals, the outcome of which is resolved by more or less lawful means by characters who are usually law-abiding citizens or officers of the state) and thrillers where the perceived threat is to a larger group of people, a nation or a society and a solution is reached by heroic action by individuals taking action outside the law, usually having to deal with extreme physical conditions or an approaching deadline.

Paraphrasing Dorothy L. Sayers, in the crime novel it is what happened in the past (who did the murder? what motive did the murderer have? how did a particular cast of characters happen to come together?) which is important; in the thriller it is what is going to happen next.

A good dictionary will define a thriller as a book depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense, which could, of course, also define the crime novel – accepting that espionage is a crime, or it certainly is if you are caught. So perhaps, to quote Sayers again, it is all a question of emphasis. In the crime novel the emphasis is on the crime and its consequences. In the thriller the emphasis is on thwarting or escaping the crime or its consequences and the thriller usually requires a conspiracy rather than a crime.

The best shorthand definition of a thriller was probably provided by that author of superior spy fiction Anthony Price, when he reviewed Berkely Mather’s With Extreme Prejudice for the Oxford Mail in 1974. He summed up the book – and, succinctly, the genre as: ‘Action, pursuit, violence and villainy.’

P. G. Wodehouse is reputed to have called readers of thrillers ‘an impatient race’ as they long ‘to get on with the rough stuff’ and rough stuff, or action, is certainly more predominant in the thriller, often taking place in a hostile environment – at sea, under the sea, in the Arctic, or under a pitiless desert sun, sometimes cliff-hanging from the edge of a precipice. In keeping with Edgar Wallace’s ‘pirate stories in modern dress’ description (of which Margery Allingham would have approved – she was keen on pirates and treasure hunts), the exotic foreign location became a popular trait of the