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the townsfolk defenceless. He turns back, hoping to round up a posse of townsfolk to help defeat the gang. But the people are so cowed that they dare not help. Just like some of the villagers in The Magnificent Seven, they would much rather Kane left them, in the appeasing hope that trouble might be avoided. Amy herself, as a Quaker, refuses to have anything to do with bloodshed and leaves for the station to catch the same train. Suspense mounts, as clocks tick away the two hours, and Kane finds no one to support him. At last a distant whistle is heard from across the plain. The train approaches. Miller disembarks to join his gang and the four men swagger into the now-deserted town looking for a showdown with the solitary hero. The gun battle begins and Kane manages to kill first one of his opponents, then another. But finally he is trapped in a building, its exits covered by Miller and the other outlaw. It seems all is lost and he is at their mercy. Then a miracle takes place. A shot rings out from across the street, and a third villain lies dead. At the last minute Amy has jumped off the train and returned to town, and she is standing at a window with a smoking gun in her hand. Frank Miller seizes her, pushes her out in front of him into the street and tells the hero that, unless he comes out to surrender, she will be killed. As Kane emerges, Miller pushes Amy aside to fire; but bravely she jogs his arm, giving the hero a chance to get his shot in first. All four outlaws are dead. Hero and heroine embrace as the shamefaced townsfolk emerge from their hiding places to cluster round their saviours. The loving couple can at last ride happily off together to start their new life.

Beneath its comparatively modern trappings (guns, the train) there is nothing about this story which could not have been presented in the imagery of an ancient myth or legend: with the little town as a kingdom threatened by the approach of a terrifying dragon, and Kane as a princely hero who, against all odds, finally slays the monster - although, like Theseus, he only manages to do this with the help of a loving `Princess, who unexpectedly comes to his aid just when all seems lost.

The thriller

Another genre of story usually shaped by the Overcoming the Monster plot is the thriller: and here again we see how often thriller writers unconsciously fall back on the age-old stock of `monster imagery, as they look for the kind of language which will help them to build up their hero's chief antagonist into a shadowy figure of immense menace and evil.

In that early thriller-adventure story Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844), the action centres on the long struggle between the hero D'Artagnan and the evil Lady de Winter, who lures the hero's chosen `Princess, the beautiful young Madame de Bonancieux, into her clutches. When we look at the imagery used to describe Lady de Winter, whose sinister influence extends all over France, we see her not only characterised explicitly as `a monster' who has `committed as many crimes as you could read of in a year, but as a `panther, a `tiger, a `lioness' and several times as `a serpent'.

When in The Final Problem Conan Doyle wished to create a villain who was at last a worthy match for the powers of his hero Sherlock Holmes, he conjured up the `reptilian' Moriarty, like Dracula `a fallen angel', a man of `extraordinary mental powers' who has perverted them to `diabolic ends. `For some years past' says Holmes, `I have been conscious of some deep organising power which stands forever in the way of the law'. He realises that it is the shadowy Moriarty, eternally elusive, a master of disguise, `the most dangerous criminal in Europe', who:

`sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of his web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he well knows every quiver of them.'

The thrillers of John Buchan made lavish use of similar imagery. In The Thirty Nine Steps, for instance, the hero Richard Hannay learns of the materialising of some vast, shadowy threat to `the peace of Europe': `behind all the governments and