ABSTRACT
J. Bowyer Bell discerns a correlation between the production of the thriller and broader structures of British propaganda and influence over the last thirty years: 'in some strange small way the thrillers on Irish matters may have played a part in the British campaign to restore order, if not justice, to Ulster. In bold strokes of black and white, they have painted the jolly ploughboy, the Irish rebel, the romantic gunman, as a terrorist, futile, brutal, at best, misguided, at worst a callous killer. Surely the British could ask for no more' (1978, 22).l However, as established in the introduction, the political unconscious of popular fiction offers a means of refuting the dismissal of popular culture as sheer mass deception, and thereby of negotiating the relationships between official propaganda or policy and the British Troubles' thriller in their full historical complexity. The application of a reductive Frankfurt School methodology of mass culture as self-affirmatively 'identical' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 121) to a British-Irish colonial binary2 constitutes the subjectivity producing and superintending this body of texts as a unitary British self-presence.
