Great Game Thriller
myth:great_game_thrillerThe genre was born of the Great Game: Kipling's Kim, the boy who plays at spying across British India, often called the first true spy novel; Childers's Riddle of the Sands and its amateur yachtsmen sniffing out invasion; and Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps, which set the pattern of the innocent man hunted across country, a secret in his keeping. — genre history