Editing H. C. McNeile (section)

{{short description|British soldier and author (1888–1937)}}
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[[File:(Herman) Cyril McNeile by Howard Coster.jpg|thumb|right|250px|McNeile, 1930s <br />Portrait by [[Howard Coster]]]]

'''Herman Cyril McNeile''', [[Military Cross|MC]] (28 September 1888 – 14 August 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 [[World War I|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 [[Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe|Lord Northcliffe]], the owner of the ''Daily Mail''; the nickname was based on that of his corps, the [[Royal Engineers]].

After the war McNeile left the army and continued writing, although he changed from war stories to [[Thriller (genre)|thrillers]]. In 1920 he published [[Bulldog Drummond (novel)|''Bulldog Drummond'']], whose [[Bulldog Drummond|eponymous hero]] became his best-known creation. The character was based on McNeile himself, on his friend [[Gerard Fairlie]] and on English gentlemen generally. McNeile wrote ten Bulldog Drummond novels, as well as three plays and [[Bulldog Jack|a screenplay]].

McNeile interspersed his Drummond work with other [[List of works by H. C. McNeile|novels and story collections]] that included two characters who appeared as protagonists in their own works, Jim Maitland and Ronald Standish. He was one of the most successful British popular authors of the [[Interwar period|inter-war period]] before his death in 1937 from throat cancer, which has been attributed to damage sustained from a gas attack in the war.

McNeile's stories are either directly about the war, or contain people whose lives have been shaped by it. His thrillers are a continuation of his war stories, with [[upper class]] Englishmen defending England from foreigners plotting against it. Although he was seen at the time as "simply an upstanding [[Tory]] who spoke for many of his countrymen",{{sfn|McNeile|Trewin|1983|p=xi|ps=: as quoted in {{harvnb|Jaillant|2011|p=163}}}} after the Second World War his work was criticised as having [[Fascism|fascist]] overtones, while also displaying the [[xenophobia]] and [[Antisemitism|anti-semitism]] apparent in some other writers of the period.
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