Experimenting with the genre: Green and the Confidential Agent

His villains were almost always foreigners and foreigners, more often than not, were villains. Teutons, dagoes and Jews were the foreigners that The Breed particularly disliked. The Drummond books, right from the start, had foreign villains who were trying to smash England.1

RICHARD Usborne's deservedly well-known account of the world of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and "Sapper" (H. C. McNeile), the popular thriller writers of the 1920s and 1930s, offers a short route into one of the contexts for Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent (1939). It is worth knowing something of the thriller genre as Greene found it in order to understand the effects he produced by his variations of this popular form. However enjoyable, a wide reading of our recent thrillers would not be helpful. A great gulf divides the world of John Le Carre or Len Deighton from that of Yates and "Sapper." More than anyone else, Greene is responsible for that gulf.

Writers of early twentieth century British thrillers largely catered to the expectations of their readers within familiar conventions. Most of these novels offered a simple moral framework. On the one side were decent upper-class Englishmen. On the other were their devious and alien adversaries, moral nihilists driven by loathing for the British Empire (Englishmen "should realize that foreigners will always, through jealousy, want to bring England to her knees"2). By and large, thrillers of the period celebrated the triumph of straightforward goodness over sophisticated evil. Such evil was externalised, since thriller heroes did not experience mixed motives or serious temptations. They were healthy-minded young men, like Richard Hannay in John Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps (1915) or Leithen and Chapman in his The Power House (1913), athletic former public-school boys, possessed of private incomes. They knew the right people, belonged to the best clubs and had all the appropriate instincts.

Claud Cockburn, in his study of popular literature between 1900 and 1939, suggests that the prevalence in many of these books of "hypothetical anarchist plots" and exotic villains "wielding immense international power"3 were a means to displace the anxieties readers felt at the industrial and political troubles of the times. Complex and disturbing issues might be tidied up into a manageable scheme in which decent English values and the right kind of people were able to triumph. Such a refusal of complexity, of difficult problems or issues that could not be readily comprehended, is certainly implied in one feature of the pre-1939 thriller. Suspicion of the intellect in itself is widespread in these novels. Leithen, the hero of Buchan's The Power House which so impressed the young Greene when it appeared in book form ("who will forget that first thrill in 1916?"4) has "never had the gift of the gab."5 He feels there is a "morbid charm" in intellectual discussion "of which one is half-ashamed." On meeting the villain Lumley (a secret foreigner) he is struck by his "restless intelligence which was at once attractive and disquieting" (32). Leithen really dislikes Lumley's "superior and Olympian" (40) smile as he talks of the vulnerability of civilization and Britain (virtually synonymous terms) to a vast international conspiracy of superior brains. Fortunately, Leithen's suspicions have already been aroused. Lumley's servant is "very unlike the conventional butler" (17) since his eyes are "quick with intelligence." At the end of a tortuous and exciting narrative Lumley is outmaneuvered. Reproached by the victor ("You fear nothing and you believe nothing ... Man, you should never have been allowed to live" [100]), he reaffirms his own sinister creed: "I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man."

The dated, even absurd, features of these old thrillers are easy to see. It is more useful to understand what drew Greene to the form he revolutionized. His comments on Buchan's Sick Heart River (1940) offer a clue. In Greene's view, Buchan and those who imitated him realized "the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men."6 Murder in an atmosphere of "simplicity and stability" was far more unsettling than Gothic horrors, or romantic feuds. In this sense, Richard Hannay or Sir Edward Leithen were more striking than Stevenson's the master of Ballantrae. The conventional hero, shaken out of his comfortable life by an unexpected and terrifying assault, raises disturbing issues, moral, political or perhaps religious. Greene approvingly quotes Leithen's comment on his own ordeal.

Now I saw how thin is the protection of civilization. An accident and a bogus ambulance - a false charge and a bogus arrest there were a dozen ways of spiriting one out of this gay and bustling world.

The thriller could be used to explore the individual's moral relationship to society or the world in a particularly sharpened form. It could reveal the nature of his inner resources (if any) when all props were pulled away. It might show the nature of society itself when suddenly and forcibly viewed from another angle, through the eyes of one ejected from its protective or delusive conventions, hunted or on the run.