The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Three Hostages Book

Reread Dec 2016. Including "Island of Sheep" and "Courts of the Morning"

Buchan is such a lovely way to pass time. Enjoyed all of them immensely, except, perhaps, for "Courts of the Morning" which got really boring when the talk was all about fictional politics and war, and didn't really have Dick Hannay in it except as an introduction. The "Four Hostages" is my second least favorite. It's sort of a conspiracy theory/bad guy effort at world domination and it's not where Buchan shines.

However, at the spy thriller, he does excel. "The Thirty-Nine Steps," "Greenmantle," and "Mr. Standfast" go together...all revolving around the first World War. They all have some still-applicable truisms about socialism and other things going around at that time. Conversely, they also have some marks of their time, such as a bit of anti-Semitism and a few "N" words. While I do not love such things, I also do not condemn Mr. Buchan for being a product of his time.

Some thoughts from these 3 books that give just a little taste of the personality of the author and time:

"I may be sending you to your death, Hannay'Good God, what a damned task-mistress duty is!'If so, I shall be haunted with regrets, but you will never repent. Have no fear of that. You have chosen the roughest road, but it goes straight to the hill-tops." (Mr. Standfast)

"Them and their socialism! There's more gumption in a page of John Stuart Mill than in all that foreign trash. But as I say, I've got to keep a quiet sough, for the world is gettin' socialism now like the measles. It all comes from a defective eddication." (Mr. Standfast)

"It's easy enough to be brave if you're feeling well and have food inside you. And it's not so difficult if you're short of a meal and seedy, for that makes you inclined to gamble. I mean by being brave playing the game by the right rules without letting it worry you that you may very likely get knocked on the head. It's the wisest way to save your skin. It doesn't do to think about death if you're facing a charging lion or trying to bluff a lot of savages. If you think about it you'll get it; if you don't the odds are you won't. That kind off courage is only good nerves and experience…Most courage is experience. Most people are a little scared at new things….You want a bigger heart to face danger which you go out and look for, and which doesn't come to you in the ordinary way of business. Still, that's pretty much the same thing'good nerves and good health, and a natural liking for rows. You see…in all that game there's a lot of fun. There's excitement and the fun of using your wits and skill, and you know that the bad bits can't last long. …But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. One of the men here was speaking about that kind, and he called it 'Fortitude.' I reckon fortitude's the biggest thing a man can have'just to go on enduring when there's no guts or heart left in you. …the head man at the job was the Apostle Paul." (Peter Pienaar in Mr. Standfast)

"Why, women aren't the brittle things men used to think them. They never were, and the war has made them like whipcord. Bless you, my dear, we're the tougher sex now. We've had to wait and endure, and we've been so beaten on the anvil of patience that we've lost all our megrims." (Mary in Mr. Standfast)

"You keep your mind on the game and forget about yourself. That's the cure for jibbers." (Mr. Standfast)

"The Three Hostages" is set after the war and is more a giant conspiracy theory. It's fun to read because it's well done, but it's not on par with the others. There are a couple of interesting character studies though.

(Speaking of the press) "They are masters of propaganda, you know. …Have you ever considered what a diabolical weapon that can be'using all the channels of modern publicity to poison and warp men's minds? It is the most dangerous thing on earth. You can use it cleanly….but you can also use it to establish the most damnable lies." (The Three Hostages)

"But hate soon becomes conceit. If you hate, you despise, and when you despise you esteem inordinately the self which despises." (The Three Hostages)

"Pessimism, you know, is often a form of vanity." (Can't remember which)

"The Island of Sheep" is set about 14 years later. This is an interesting one because it's sort of a Norse saga/revenge tale being spun out in the second generation. So there's quite a Northern feel to it, the scenery is great. It's loads of fun to read.

I found it interesting that for some reason Buchan tries to make Sandy Arbuthnot (Lord Clanroyden) the mysterious hero of both this story and the "The Courts of the Morning" and sort of bombs it. In "Greenmantle" Sandy is a fascinating character. But he just falls a bit flat in these two. Which doesn't mean the books fail, it just means we like the other characters so much more. I love Buchan's down-to-earth, semi-self-depreciating heroes more than this James Bond/Indiana Jones/The Saint-ish guy. I like him, but he's a bit to glamorous and mysterious for me.

Anyway, fun, got the set of 6 books on kindle for .99 cents so it kept me busy through the holidays. Good times.


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See my review to "Prester John" for more info on the author, John Buchan.

This review also includes "The Island of Sheep" which is the 5th book to the Richard Hannay series.

John Buchan is a master of the short adventure novel. These books a total delight from beginning to end, in fact, you don't want them to end. Number 3, "Mr Standfast" is particularly good, powerful, in fact.

Richard Hannay is a mining engineer who spent a lot of time in South Africa. If I remember right, In "The Thirty-Nine Steps" he's only been home a short while when he becomes accidentally embroilled in international intrigue and comes out of it with high honor. After that he becomes a general in WWI, but is most often working on special missions. The entire character cast is excellent, finely drawn, and believable. Buchan was not a fan of socialism or communism and so many of his comments are actually very applicable for today.

His heroes are always humble, hardworking, industrious, courageous and upright. I love it.

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Continued article about books for boys that I promised to paste here per my review to "Beau Geste."

The great tradition - books and authors that promote family values

National Review, April 18, 1994 by Digby Anderson

AFTER what John Buchan calls a "star turn" at Arras, General Hannay is ordered back out of the trenches of the Great War to England. He is to become Cornelius Brand. His orders are to pose as a pacifist and to mix with pacifists, the "shirkers," in order to find among them those who are betraying their country to her enemies. Buchan's views on the pacifists are, shall we say, robust. Hannay must "sink into the life of the half-baked . . . people who split hairs all day and are engrossed in . . . selfish little fads . . . and nauseous follies?' He finds these people not in proper old English manors but "gimcrack arty little houses" in a town called Biggleswick.

Among them are the Weekses, "three girls who lived in a house so artistic that you broke your head whichever way you turned in it. It was their fashion never to admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty woman, but to find loveliness in things which I thought hideous .... They hadn't much use for books, except some Russian ones [especially:] Leprous Souls." They had a novelist friend, "the worst sort of blighter [who:] considered himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support... He sought 'reality' and 'life' and 'truth,' but it was hard to see how he could know much about them as he spent half the day in bed .... Tuberculous in mind and body [he took his joy in:] making jokes about the war."

There was Dr. Chirck, who lectured on" 'God'... a new name he had invented for himself [and:] a terrible woman who had come back from Russia with what she called a 'message of healing.'"

Hannay is to join with a U.S. agent, John S. Blenkiron, to find the evil genius at the center of a spy ring giving secrets to Hun submarines. The adventure takes them to Glasgow among both treacherous socialists ("Them and their socialism. There's more gumption in a page of John Stuart Mill than in all that foreign trash") and the decent working men who "hate three things, the Germans, the profiteers, and the Irish." Then on to the Scottish isles, hidden messages, mysterious submarine landings in secluded bays, and chases across the hills, a change of disguise into an ordinary soldier, and flights and fights across Europe until the traitor is nailed.

John Buchan's Mr. Standfast is one of more than a dozen adventure novels he wrote, including the better known Prester John, Thirty-Nine Steps, and Greenmantle, and the less known Courts of the Morning and Prince of the Captivity. They are books essentially of the Twenties and Thirties but they stand in a much longer tradition.

Arguably, it starts with Harrison Ainsworth and G. A. Henty's historical novels in the mid nineteenth century, for instance Windsor Castle and A Cornet of Horse. A slightly later figure is Robert Louis Stevenson, with such stories as Kidnapped; another, Conan Doyle and The White Company. But it got into full swing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The key figure who is said to have influenced the Thirties writers was Anthony Hope (Rupert of Hentzau, The Prisoner of Zenda, and some ten others). Then came Rider Haggard, who was much more prolific than readers of King Solomon's Mines and She know, and Baroness Orczy, author of at least 25 and best known for her Scarlet Pimpernel novels.

Add in P. C. Wren (Beau Geste), Percy Westerman (Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force), Rafael Sabatini (Sea Hawk and twenty-odd more), then later Russell Thorndike (creator of the pirate-parson Dr. Syn ), Dornford Yates with his Bentley car chases across Europe to Transylvania to dig for buried treasure while consuming vast quantities of champague, and Sapper, and you have the main part of the tradition. The last figure is probably C. S. Forester with his Hornblower books.

But what a tradition. The total output must be over three hundred novels, a glittering treasury of reaction, just the thing to form the character of any conservative boy and to reinvigorate conservative men. Girls too may read some of the tradition, but not Henty and Westerman.

What sort of tradition is it? Strong stories--yarns--and adventure: moral adventure. Good against bad. The heroes are brave, truthful, and usually--Dornford Yates is the exception here--self-deprecating. Hornblower has his nervous cough and shyness. The Scarlet Pimpernel's alter ego, the fop Sir Percy Blakeney, is the ultimate in playing down secret manly achievements. The values are patriotism, decency, friendship, honor, and, more than courage, a sort of recklessness in pursuit of duty, but a recklessness that does not put others at risk. Rider Haggard's heroes are always deciding to go on against all odds even when the Kaffir bearers have deserted them, taking away supplies and ammunition. Hornblower is forever cooking up schemes to "cut out" some vessel the Dons have anchored in an "impregnable" harbor. There is much wry humor in the face of adversity.

This combination of strong adventure narrative, morality, and ironic self-deprecation has, as far as I know, no obvious equivalent in American literature.

As a boy, one read them for all this, the adventure and the morality. As an adult too, but for something else as well. For these books are the ultimate in political incorrectness. That is the point of the Buchan quotations above. They are incorrect on gender, class, nationality, progress, and multiculturalism. That does not mean they take the opposite view to the politically correct, or what the politically correct commissars would set up and then denounce as the opposite view. (Incidentally, how like Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety today's PC police are.) Ladies, while decidedly ladylike, are not weak foolish things. They are plucky, jolly loyal, and in Buchan's novels capable of walking across mountains at a steady pace. Hope's Queen Flavia is as much concerned to do the honorable thing as his hero, Rudolf Rassendyl; her duty as Queen comes before her love for Rudolf. Sir Percy's wife, Marguerite, is as plucky as he.

In some books, ladies hardly figure and romance is rare. If you want all fighting and no love-business, the general rule is go for the sea. Girls are not supposed to go on boats, and the pirate-parson Dr. Syn even seems to avoid them on land. It is, however, noteworthy that the only bit of sex I can remember is when Hornblower is on land--but that is with a French lady, which is rather different. Nor are Africans all cowardly Kaffirs. Both Buchan and Haggard have black heroes, of a sort, in Prester John and Chaka. Chaka's Zulu military organization, says Haggard in Nada the Lily, is "the most wonderful in its way the world has seen." Chaka was a "colossal genius" though "a most evil man who slaughtered more than a million human beings" including his mother.

Which author in the tradition is the most incorrect? Buchan is probably incorrect about more things than anyone else. But Baroness Orczy goes further on one topic, one particularly commendable to Americans. She is quite good on the foul mob dancing the carmagnole and singing the everlasting "Ca ira" round the rouged and painted idol of the Goddess Reason. But her supreme achievement is the wonderful episode in which Sir Percy rescues the Abbe Edgeworth. When the foul zealots have set their hand on Louis, the Lord's anointed, it is Edgeworth who confesses him and prays with him at the guillotine. It is Edgeworth who raises the crucifix and cries out, "Son of St. Louis ascend to Heaven," as "the crime that can never hope for forgiveness, the sin against the Holy Ghost," is committed. The Republican mob pulls hairs from their dead king's head and dip them in his blood. And it is only their bloodthirstiness, their eagerness to bid as the executioner auctions off first the breeches for twenty louis, then the coat for thirty, that distracts them from the Scarlet Pimpernel spiriting away the faithful priest to safety.

Mr. Anderson mentioned some of these authors in an earlier review of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues and received many requests for further information on them. This column is a response to those requests.