The caption on the cover of the first book says it all: “Detective, patriot, hero, and gentleman.”






















The cold-blooded, coolly-calculating, cerebral types are all right, but the reading public craves a two-fisted, hot-blooded man with common sense, a man capable of and willing to meet out summary justice and set things right.


The Great War is finally over, and the people are ready for a detective who is “all man.” They want a man like Bulldog Drummond.

He is a type of ideal gentleman, one who is comfortably acquainted with his social inferiors, especially a group of former comrades in arms who aid him in his adventures. He is patriotic, loyal, morally and physically courageous. He is a big, impressive, but not particularly attractive, man.


Hugh Drummond is a wealthy gentleman, formerly an office on the western front. His wartime exploits have equipped him with confidence and the hunter’s skill of stealth. He is also an expert boxer and a crack shot, and can handle himself in any physical confrontation. He can kill quickly, economically, and without a second thought.

PTSD was called “shell-shock” after the Great War, but it was seen as a weakness rather than as an illness. The muddy carnage of trench warfare may have taken the glamour from combat, but it did not detract from the valor of the men who contested in it. Drummond may have been brutalized by the war, but it only made him stronger. He knew things—had done things that others had not, and it equipped him with the skills and demeanor to solve problems and right wrongs. If ever a man was born to cut the Gordian Knot, it was Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond.

In the general disillusionment following the First World War, there was a great appeal among readers (and movie goers) for a character like Hugh Drummond. He was a gentleman adventurer with the courage of a war hero and the solid common sense of the average man. The former officer had carried out his own solo sorties in the hellish no-man’s-land between the trenches. When he came back to civilian life, and found it boring. He advertises in the newspaper that he is looking for adventure—and soon finds it.



With that ad, Sapper (H.C. McNeile) introduces Drummond and the “hard-boiled” detective genre.




Sherlock Holmes had his Moriarty, and Drummond has his nemesis, Carl Peterson. He also has a second nemesis, Peterson’s wife, the femme fatale Irma Peterson.