Like other Francis novels, To the Hilt is as much an adventure story as it is a detective novel or whodunit, and therefore it has a kinship with Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, which Francis has acknowledged as having read. His portrait of Alexander Kinloch, a solitary hero pursued by villains, is in the tradition of John Buchan, whose Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), also set in a sparsely populated area of Scotland, is a classic of the crime genre, and Geoffrey Household, whose Rogue Male (1939) and A Rough Shoot (1951) follow the Buchan pattern. There also are echoes in To the Hilt of John Wellcome's espionage novels—such as Run for Cover (1958), Stop at Nothing (1960), and Hell Is Where You Find It (1968), which include sophisticated chases, the hero as narrator, and horse racing, and multiple venues.