Diemert traces Greene's adaptation of nineteenth-century romance thrillers and classical detective stories into modern political thrillers as a means of presenting serious concerns in an engaging fashion. He argues that Greene's popular thrillers were in part a reaction to the high modernism of writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, whose esoteric experiments with language were disengaged from immediate social concerns and inaccessible to a large segment of the reading public. Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s investigates some of Greene's best-known works, such as A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock, and The Ministry of Fear, and shows how they reflect the evolution of Greene's sense of the importance of popular culture in the 1930s.

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"Conscientious and perceptive, Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s engages theoretical and generic concerns that Greene scholarship has never before probed so fully." Keith Wilson, Department of English, University of Ottawa. "Diemert has new and interesting things to say about Greene's use of thrillers and other popular modes of fiction as models for his art." Bernard Bergonzi, Department of English, University of Warwick.

"Conscientious and perceptive, Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s engages theoretical and generic concerns that Greene scholarship has never before probed so fully." Keith Wilson, Department of English, University of Ottawa.
"Diemert has new and interesting things to say about Greene's use of thrillers and other popular modes of fiction as models for his art." Bernard Bergonzi, Department of English, University of Warwick.