In an interview on The Great British Thriller

We’re starting with Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler.

A lot of people really like Eric Ambler and he’s a wonderful prose stylist – he’s a serious writer. This is a claustrophobic story set on a ship full of German spies and the hero is an English spy. It’s set in World War II and what’s amazing is that it was written in 1940 and he didn’t know what the outcome of the war would be. We know Germany lost and everything was OK, but if you were writing in 1940 you’d think: ‘Cripes, these people look very scary and good and we don’t really look very good at all.’ It’s like all those Cold War thrillers that look very different now that we’ve won, but if you go back and look they were very frightening. This book is like George Orwell writing a thriller – it was the start, really, of the thriller as a literary genre.

What is it that makes it better than other thrillers of the same kind?

Well, it’s the sense of foreboding and tension, I think. The claustrophobia and, of course, a brilliant central character. Two of my choices are set on ships, so I suppose it’s that they are closed room stories about current events – the enclosed space. The thriller has always been a very political genre, a kind of snapshot in time. If you want to know what people were really thinking at that time in politics, read a thriller.

There’s a wonderful bit in one of John Buchan’s books where the hero, Hannah, is having a very casual conversation with someone about the battle of the Somme. We think of it as the worst carnage in human history but at the time there seems to have been quite a casual attitude to it: ‘The boys gave the Bosch a good bashing.’