Thriller Taxonomy

In two years’ time it will be a century since John Buchan published The Thirty-Nine Steps.

The dedication to Buchan’s friend Tommy Nelson is also famous. In it, the creator of Richard Hannay mentions their mutual ‘affection for that elementary type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker” – the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’. John Buchan calls these productions ‘aids to cheerfulness’.
In the time since Buchan’s 39 Steps was first published, this short novel has been called a ‘thriller’, an ‘action novel’, a ‘spy story’ or variations on these. These descriptions are not quite the same thing but the book certainly set the standard for a type of adventure story. I am going to use the expression ‘a fast-moving combination of brain and brawn’.
Buchan brilliantly exploited the image of a respectable man running for his life in a world that appears, at least superficially, settled and civilized.
Of course, since then, thrillers, action novels and spy stories, have moved on. Think how Richard Hannay would get on nowadays. People sometimes do.
In the history of this most capacious genre however other writers brought in developments. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939), for example, shows a hunter trying to shoot a Hitler-like character in revenge for the death of a love who happens, not at all incidentally, to be Jewish. This is at least more WW2 than WW1, less gung-ho, a deal more brutal.

This is not to demean Buchan. In August 1914, my husband’s great-grandfather and grandfather (then 63 and 38 respectively) took a train south from the North of Scotland to join up, and were seriously annoyed not to be accepted, one on the grounds of age, the other because of what was then called ‘a gammy leg’.
I suppose the next real shift was John Le Carré who caught the Cold War greyness, paranoia, muddle and just a touch of romantic morality in The Spy Who Came in from The Cold (1963).
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the book in September this year. What has happened half a century on?
In my own case, four books into the Peter Cotton series (Black Bear comes out next month), I am getting to the stage of understanding a bit more of what I have been trying to do in the genre. I have also understood that the whole genre or classification aspect of publishing is too often misleading the reader. If asked for a quick description of my books I’d say ‘Intelligence stories’.
I say this because Amazon has pre-publication reviews and one of the reviewers of Black Bear says he can see the ‘brain’ but misses the ‘brawn.’ Quite right too. I have to admit I wanted to write a bloodless book. Rather more positively I wanted to concentrate on the insidious violence of so-called ‘truth-drugs’. No, I don’t think I am writing about an objective ‘reality’ but about historical circumstances and stresses in the late 1940s, when what became the Cold War and a stand-off was something of a jostle, full of authoritarian incompetence, misunderstandings and – there’s a certain consistency here – the disposability of people who, wittingly or not, get involved.
Now I can appreciate that physical violence – torture, for example – can cause a degree of turmoil in the reader, but there are other kinds of non-splat violence. My question really is – how do you use your brain when your brain has been affected or attacked by chemical means? At one level you have to know who you are fighting and the arms you have at your disposal.