Whether we believe the genre started with Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (1971) or reach back to Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903), the core plot is always the same. The nation is under threat from external forces and the hero or heroes must take action to thwart them. The nature of the menace may change—for Edwardian Britons, it was Germany; in the seventies, it was shadowy assassins; in the eighties, Russian spies; most recently, Islamist terrorists—but the task of the protagonist is clearly conservative: he must preserve the status quo.