Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond is a British fictional character, created by H. C. McNeile and published under his pen name "Sapper". Following McNeile's death in 1937, the novels were continued by Gerard Fairlie and later Henry Reymond.The Bulldog Drummond stories of H. C. McNeile follow Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, DSO, MC. Drummond is a member of "the Breed", a class of Englishman who were patriotic, loyal and "physically and morally intrepid". Drummond is a wealthy gentleman, formerly an officer in the fictional "Royal Loamshire Regiment", who, after the First World War, spends his new-found leisure time looking for adventure. McNeile first wrote the Drummond character as a detective for a short story in The Strand Magazine, but the portrayal was not successful and was changed for the novel Bull-dog Drummond, which was a thriller. a] The character was an amalgam of McNeile's friend Gerard Fairlie, and his idea of an English gentleman, although writer J.D. Bourn disputes Fairlie's claim to be a model for the character, noting that "he was still at school when Sapper created his ... hero
Herman Cyril McNeile MC (28 September 1888 - 14 August 1937) was a British author, who published under the pen name "Sapper". He was one of the most successful British popular authors of the Interwar period; his principal character was Bulldog Drummond. He is mainly remembered as the author of the ten Bulldog Drummond books, the first of which was published in 1920. These stridently anti-Communist spy thrillers brought him public recognition and considerable financial success. Mufti was McNeile's first book to be published (1919) - a year before his Bulldog Drummond series started and examines the social conditions as well as the evolving relationships between men and women in the last 3 months of the First World War.
Although the First World War is over, it seems that the hostilities are not, and when Captain Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond discovers that a stint of bribery and blackmail is undermining England's democratic tradition, he forms the Black Gang, bent on tracking down the perpetrators of such plots. They set a trap to lure the criminal mastermind behind these subversive attacks to England, and all is going to plan until Bulldog Drummond accepts an invitation to tea at the Ritz with a charming American clergyman and his dowdy daughter. Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937), commonly known as Cyril McNeile and publishing under the name H. C. McNeile or the pseudonym "Sapper", was a British soldier and author. Drawing on his experiences in the trenches during the First World War, he started writing short stories and getting them published in the Daily Mail. As serving officers in the British Army were not permitted to publish under their own names, he was given the pen name "Sapper" by Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail; the nickname was based on that of his corps, the Royal Engineers. McNeile's war stories were seen by reviewers as honest portrayals of the war, with British and American reviewers in the mainstream press praising his realism and avoidance of sentimentality in dealing with his subject matter. Reviewing Men, Women, and Guns for The Times Literary Supplement, Francis Henry Gribble wrote that "Sapper has been successful in previous volumes of war stories ... When the time comes for picking out the writers whose war fiction has permanent value, his claim to be included in the list will call for serious examination." The reviewer of Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E. for The Atlanta Constitution reminded its readers that McNeile "has been called the foremost literary genius of the British army." Jaillant observes that once McNeile moved from war stories to thrillers, with the concurrent re-positioning of advertising and marketing by Hodder & Stoughton, the reviewers also treated him differently, and presented him as "a writer of thrillers, without any pretension to literary seriousness". When reviewing Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back for The New York Times, the critic observed that "if you like a good knock-down-and-drag-out yarn with excitement and violence on nearly every page, you can't go wrong on Bulldog Drummond"; for the novel Bulldog Drummond at Bay, the reviewer considered that "as a piece of fictional melodrama, the book is first rate". In the British market, The Times Literary Supplement also characterised him as a mass-market thriller writer, which contrasted with its consideration of his earlier works.
Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond, conceived in 1920, was the original daredevil adventurer and a prototype for all the slick sleuths which followed. McNeile himself having served in the Royal Engineers in the war, as well as being awarded the Military Cross, envisioned Drummond as a demobilized officer, who in the first novel gives an ad in the papers where he "welcomes diversion", because he's "finding peace incredibly tedious". There is only one condition: excitement essential
