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Genre<br />

fiction<br />

399<br />

(1915), which has been filmed several times. These novels reflect the<br />

preoccupation with the genuine threat of chaos in a disintegrating world.<br />

As Buchan put it in the first of his ‘shockers’, The Power House (serialised<br />

in 1913), ‘you think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation<br />

from barbarianism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.’ It<br />

is interesting to note that this was written before ‘the war to end all<br />

wars’, before the sense of things falling apart became a common concern.<br />

With the ending of all certainties, the fragmentation of the world was of<br />

interest to writers in every genre, serious and popular.<br />

Novels of spying and adventure have become a mainstay of twentiethcentury<br />

fiction. The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by the Hungarian-born<br />

Baroness Orczy was one of the earliest successes of the genre; a more<br />

overtly political kind of thriller is found in The Riddle of the Sands (1903)<br />

by Erskine Childers, who was shot by a firing squad in 1922 as a result of<br />

his work for Irish republicans. This novel involves German plans to invade<br />

England. This kind of threat to stability (and English authority) is vital to<br />

the genre. Later masters of the thriller included ‘Sapper’ (Herman Cyril<br />

McNeile), with his hero ‘Bulldog’ Drummond; Ian Fleming, who created<br />

James Bond; and John Le Carré, whose ‘cold war’ novels such as The Spy<br />

Who Came In From the Cold (1963) have taken the genre forward to the<br />

status of major novels, according to many critics.<br />

Since the development of the detective story from Wilkie Collins to<br />

Arthur Conan Doyle, it has become one of the most popular of all<br />

genres. Agatha Christie, ‘the Queen of Crime’, has been the most<br />

successful of all crime writers. From The Mysterious Affair at Styles<br />

(1920) to Poirot’s Last Case (1976) she wrote over sixty detective novels<br />

featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple as her sleuths. Some of her<br />

works are considered classics: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)<br />

and Murder on the Orient Express (1934) in particular. Her play The<br />

Mousetrap has been running constantly in London since 1952.<br />

Dorothy L. Sayers with her detective Lord Peter Wimsey introduces<br />

the popular upper-class sleuth in novels such as Murder Must Advertise<br />

(1933) and The Nine Tailors (1934). J.I.M. Stewart, an academic and<br />

critic, brought the highbrow, academic detective story to high peaks of<br />

achievement, writing as Michael Innes: from Death at the President’s<br />

Lodging (1936) to Hamlet, Revenge (1937), A Night of Errors (1948) and<br />

Lament for a Maker (1938) (based on Dunbar’s late mediaeval poem).<br />

The novels of Buchan, Bennett, Christie, Galsworthy and Wells

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