![]() ![]() Childers played on people’s fears, making the threat of conspiracy seem possible and even likely. The case sparked the literary imagination with novels exploring the idea of threats to national security. The real turning point came in the 1890s with the Dreyfus Affair in France, which questioned the importance of the state and its interests versus individual liberty… not to mention justice. Think of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), for instance. ![]() The spy thriller genre had already been explored in the 19th century but the stories had more of an adventurous feel to them. Although it wasn’t the first story ever written about spies, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service by Erskine Childers can be described as the blueprint for subsequent writers in the genre including John Buchan, William Tufnell Le Queux and Somerset Maugham, all of whom wrote novels focusing on the period around World War I and warned of the growing likelihood of German invasion. ![]()
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