Richard Hannay

Sapper's Drummond is written directly on the Hannay pattern, four years later and with the war just over: a demobilised officer, bored, wealthy enough to please himself, who advertises for adventure and gets a conspiracy. The structure is Buchan's throughout, including the master criminal with international backing, the chase across English countryside and the amateur who beats a professional organisation because he is fitter and luckier. The two were reviewed together at the time and Drummond was widely treated as the coarser imitation, which is itself the evidence: contemporaries recognised what it was copying.

Household is writing the Buchan pursuit, stripped of its comforts. The Thirty-Nine Steps invented the shape: a competent gentleman amateur, wrongly hunted, moving across open country by his own wits with the authorities and the enemy both behind him. Rogue Male keeps the shape and removes the club, the friends and the explanation. The hero is unnamed, his motive for stalking a European dictator is left deliberately unclear, and the last third has him living underground in a Dorset hedge like an animal.

Fleming was deeply influenced by Buchan's "shocking-headed" thrillers. He borrowed the trope of the lone, resourceful British gentleman forced to save the realm through sheer endurance and physical grit.

Kim is where the spy novel's basic materials first appear together: the Great Game named as such, an agent who passes as a local, a network of informants, and espionage treated as an imperial administrative activity rather than as a crime. Buchan knew Kipling's work well and The Thirty-Nine Steps takes the parts that suit a thriller: the hunted man crossing country, the disguises, the assumption that the enemy is competent and everywhere. What he drops is Kipling's interest in the boy himself. A MEDIUM weight because this is a genre debt within a generation rather than a borrowing Buchan set down on the record.