Transcribed by Susan Bergeron. Geo. News Chronicle Saturday, February 8th, 1941 Our Cradle Tales were Thrillers When I read of the death of Marie Connor Leighton this week my memory went back to the nineties of last century when a small boy was reading a novel called "Convict 99" with his heart beating like the engine of a motorbicycle. It was the beginning of a life of which a considerable portion was to be spent in reading sensational fiction. Or was it the beginning? After all, even in the nursery we had a special affection for stories that made our flesh creep - stories like "Little Red Riding Hood," with its terrifying climax when the wolf, dressed up as the grandmother, utters the never-to-be-forgotten sentence, "The better to eat you with, my dear." .. We enjoyed the luxury of being afraid, again, when our own grandmothers, aunts and nurses told us stories of ghosts, body-snatchers and kidnappers. Why human beings should like to be scared it is hard to say; but even the timid cannot resist paddling on the shores of danger with their imaginations. Stevenson was evidently right when he spoke of "the bright eyes of danger." Danger in strict moderation fascinated. That is why children used to pass a finger hurriedly thorough the gas-flame and why small boys in the streets risked their limbs in playing such games as Last Across. The thriller probably owes its popularity largely to the fact that it enables us to revel in danger while sitting in a chair in perfect security. As we read we are plunged into a world dominated by men wickeder than any we have ever known, devils in human form, forgers, blackmailers, international crooks, coloured men with sinister scars on their faces; and when the world is at peace, the sheltered lives of our neighbours seem tame in comparison. Pious people used to frown on the reading of thrillers (or shockers, as they were once called,) but that may have been because they themselves had no need of them. To them the world was already sensational enough owing to the incessant activities of Satan - a far more terrifying figure than the head of any gang of jewel-thieves or foreign spies. The wickedness of the most sinister figure in a fur-lined coat who remains in the background leading an apparently respectable life as he sends his henchmen out to burgle a ducal mansion pales in comparison with wickedness such as his. He is the chief of all villains, in comparison with whom LONG JOHN SILVER himself seems merely a manufactured toy. .. Most people, however, are not content with a villain on the supernatural plane. They like their villains to be human - men whom you might see driving along Regent Street in luxurious motor-cars, or sitting round the tables at Monte Carlo. Wicked men become more sensationally exciting to us if they are our contemporaries. The villain in a Roman toga can never for most of us be quite so sinister a figure as a villain in evening dress. It is, I admit, difficult to define a "thriller." There is a sense in which "Hamlet" is a thriller with a king for a villain. I think, however, the word "thriller" can be properly applied only to books, plays and films to which sensationalism is the main object of the writer. Everything must be subordinated to the purpose of making our flesh creep. That is what Edgar WALLACE did so magnificently in "On the Spot." I think, too, that a thriller should have a happy ending. As we read it, we should feel as if we were watching an intensely exciting neck-and-neck race between good and evil and all the time we should know at the back of our minds that, however great the odds against it at some point may seem, good is going to win. In reading a true thriller, we know that the hero who is locked in a air-tight cellar into which water is being flooded will be rescued before the water has got beyond his chin. We know that the lovely heroine, as she lies gagged and bound in a remote house in the marshes, surrounded by an impenetrable fence of electrified barbed wire, is due for release before very long even if the house is guarded day and night by armed men looking like gorillas and followed about by savage bloodhounds. In Paris in modern times they invented a new kind of thriller associated with the Grand Guignol Theater - a thriller which was often a mere exploitation of horror and in which the end was utterly painful. The Grand Guignol thrill, however, was the entertainment, not of the normal many, but of the abnormal few. .. To the normal man, indeed, the thriller is simply a modern fairy-tale for grown-ups, in which the villain takes the place of the ogre and the hero and heroine are the all-venturing youth and the captured princess. And who would read fairy-tales if the giants always killed Jack and if the princess invariably failed to escape from the ogre? Hence the art of the thriller, like the art of the fairy-tale and the art of the melodrama, demands as a rule a happy ending. Life is not always like that, as tragic literature bears witness; but it is probably sometimes like that, and it is pleasant to have it demonstrated once more that it is safer in the end to be a beautiful, innocent young woman than a criminal in a fur-lined coat. It has probably become more so since the world became filled with police and detectives without whom the modern thriller could never have come into being. .....