Abstract
When (ex-)Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Herman McNeile died, at the age of forty-eight, 1937, he had for more than twenty years been one of Britain’s most popular authors. McNeile, a professional soldier who had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1907, started writing brisk and affectionate stories that featured simple, but plucky and resourceful, Tommies almost immediately after reaching France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1914. His stance of affectionate toughness suggested to the home front the cool dedication it expected of its military representatives abroad, and ‘Sapper’ (the pseudonym was created by Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail) quickly rose to fame. His first collection, Sergeant Michael Cassidy, RE, was published in June 1915 and sold very well indeed (50,000 copies in the first nine months).1
Well, chaps, we’re up against something big …
Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond
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Notes
Ion Trewin, introduction to ‘Sapper’, The Black Gang (London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent, 1983) p. ix.
Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence (London: Methuen, 1987).
Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel - A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972) p. 227.
The page references in the text refer to the following editions: Bulldog Drummond (London, Toronto, Melbourne: J. M. Dent, 1983); The Black Gang (London, Melbourne: J. M. Dent, 1983); The Third Round (London, Melbourne: J. M. Dent, 1984); The Final Count, in Bulldog Drummond: His Four Rounds with Carl Peterson as Described by Sapper (London: Hodder & Stoughton, n.d.); Temple Tower (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951); The Return of Bulldog Drummond (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951); Knock-Out (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951).
Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of aPopular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978) p. 78.
Ibid., pp. 185–9.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., P. 87.
Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 34.
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Bertens, H. (1990). A Society of Murderers Run on Sound Conservative Lines: The Life and Times of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond. In: Bloom, C. (eds) Twentieth-Century Suspense. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20678-0_4
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