Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s

Diemert traces Greene’s adaptation of nineteenth-century romance thrillers and classical detective stories into modern political thrillers as a means of presenting serious concerns in an engaging fashion. He argues that Greene’s popular thrillers were in part a reaction to the high modernism of writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, whose esoteric experiments with language were disengaged from immediate social concerns and inaccessible to a large segment of the reading public. Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s investigates some of Greene’s best-known works, such as A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock, and The Ministry of Fear, and shows how they reflect the evolution of Greene’s sense of the importance of popular culture in the 1930s.