ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that the spy thriller is a symptom of crisis in social imperialism and that the fortunes of the spy thriller are intimately tied to the task of managing and resolving this crisis in the popular imagination. It characterizes three aspects of this break in the field of popular fiction: the mutation of the adventure novel; the emergence of the 'thriller' or 'shocker'; the chapter distinguishing among several sorts of amateurs in the popular fiction of the early decades of the century, to try and account for their different meanings, and for the instability and contradictory character of the Buchan hero. The Drummond stories come from the period immediately after the First World War and their plots are an attempt to resolve a host of ideological confusions. For Drummond is an important popular construction in a period of intensified class struggle, in a land which was indeed flowing with strikes and profiteers.