Virtually all the central protagonists in great thrillers and popular dramas tend to belong to the same handful of professions.

The most notable exceptions are those heroes with “special powers”, although of course some of them, like Clark Kent himself, have professional day jobs. (For Clark it is being a “mild-mannered reporter”, which has always struck me as a contradiction in terms).

So, if we take out those with “special powers”, from Batman to the Six Million Dollar Man, what would be the ten most frequently used professions for the heroes and heroines of thrillers and dramas?



Policemen and women inevitably get a good showing because they inhabit exactly the right terrain, dealing with baddies on an hourly basis and solving crimes like the rest of us solve Sudoku puzzles. From the Scandi Noirs to the mean streets of NYC and downtown LA, the dreaming spires of Oxford to the golf club in Midsommer, the principles are the same. The cops are in at the beginning of a drama and stay to the end.

Doctors. They have always been a trusty mainstay. They are the ones who have to deal with the murder victims as well as the critically ill, inevitably becoming involved in the personal crises of other characters.

Soldiers. Obviously, from Flashman to Biggles, they get centre stage in any war drama or thriller, but then there are all the peace-keeping tensions for them to sort out too, from Irelandto the Middle East.

Amateur and Private Detectives. From Philip Marlowe to Sherlock Holmes, from Miss Marple to Monsieur Poirot, they have all the skills of the professionals but the dramatic advantage of leading lives more like our own – sort of.

Lawyers. From solicitors to judges they have the same access to crime and dramatic tales of conflict and justice as the police and the doctors, plus they can wear smart suits and funny wigs.

Secret Service Operators. From Bond to Bauer, the Man from Uncle to John le Carre and Homeland, they get to run the biggest, scariest plots in town, (apart from the superheroes of course).

Medical Experts. These are all the folks who inhabit the same dramatic landscape of sickness, violence and death but aren’t doctors. They are the nurses and midwives, pathologists, criminal psychologists and forensic experts.

Reporters and Journalists. Almost by definition they have access to the best stories and they get to go where the action is; plus they have the added drama of looming deadlines.

Wealthy businessmen and women. These are the guys who run big corporations, (think Richard Gere in Pretty Woman). They fly around in private planes and run dysfunctional families in places like Dallas and in shoulder pads like Joan Collins. They are mostly morally dubious but they get to wear even better suits than the lawyers.

Authors and Ghostwriters. Here’s where I get to confess a personal interest.

I happen to think that ghostwriters are in a similarly fortuitous position to many of the above when it comes to being at the centre of thrillers and dramas. Like all the above their lives tend to be episodic; they receive a commission; they are led into some strange and interesting world that they previously knew nothing about. 

The ultimate tale with the ghostwriter as protagonist must be The Ghost by Robert Harris, later turned into a film by Roman Polanski, with Ewan McGregor at the centre of the plot. I have used the same device myself. In Secrets of the Italian Gardener the narrator is a ghostwriter who finds himself trapped inside the palace of a Middle Eastern dictator as a revolution brews outside the walls. In Pretty Little Packages, recently published by Thistle Publishing, the ghostwriter is drawn into the worlds of people-trafficking and modern slavery when a girl called Doris asks him to write her story because “someone has stolen her beautiful new breasts”.

I guess it is partly the lure of all these fictional adventures which attracts so many of us to follow paths into the professions. Then, when real life turns out not to be quite as exciting as the authors and dramatists led us to believe, we have the books and films to escape back to once we get home from the office.