John Buchan, 1915
Read: August 2025
Edition read: Penguin Classics, 2004, 149 pages
Thriller
*Spoilers*
An early thriller novel full of decent chaps and rotten blighters. Whilst reading this I found myself trying to decide on the best semi-archaic synonym for ‘thrilling’, like ‘swashbuckler’, ‘humdinger’ or ‘snortripper’ (I may have invented that one).
The protagonist, Richard Hannay, bored with life in London, is framed for murder. Now a man on the run and not so bored, he proves to be a resourceful fellow, getting to try on lots of new disguises at a relentless pace. With a turn of pace, competence and luck which at times verge on the improbable, he MacGyver’s his way up and down the country, even getting to blow himself up and out of a jail cell at one point.
Hannay is also a fantastic judge of character and doesn’t mind letting you know. The predominance of rural folk and city bigwigs does result in a fair few flat characters, but the Scottish Highlands, however, are wonderfully described (‘Behind me was the road climbing though a long cleft in the hills, which was the upper glen of some notable river. In front was a fat space of maybe a mile. All pitted with bog-holes and rough with tussocks, and then beyond it the road fell steeply down another glen to a plain whose blue dimness melted into the distance.’) Circling back to the decent chaps and rotten blighters, the latter – what with this being set pre-WW1 and published in 1915 – are of course ruthless Germans, conspiring to bring about war (not to forget an unsolicited rant about Jews).
A fun read, the ten chapters set a rapid – although somewhat uniform – pace.
Worth reading? Yes.
Worth re-reading? No, just as there’s not much in the way of subtext. However, the descriptions of the Highlands are great.
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