ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the certain aesthetic of the serious thriller, and then looks at how they are manifested in the stories, first, in the change in the amateur hero, and second, in the new relation between the narrator and the characters. In the history of the thriller, a central mutation in the genre occurs with the early stories of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene in the 1930s. In the case of Ambler, Greene and Maugham, what they call the 'serious thriller', this aesthetic had three basic components: 'realism', moral and literary seriousness, and popular front politics. The first part of the solution is named 'realism'. Just as Hitchcock writes that Ambler's books are made of the 'material of reality', so Ambler sees Maugham's breakthrough as one towards realism. Realism functions with different meanings and in different ways in many aesthetics. Finally, the 'realism' of these thrillers is intertwined with their anti-fascism.
