Hannay takes his pocket book and escapes to King’s Cross and thence by train to the Dumfries and Galloway region of Scotland, with a view of staying at liberty till he can return to London and warn the authorities. His neighbour Franklin Scudder accosts him with a cock and bull story about some kind of conspiracy to assassinate the visiting Greek premier which intrigues Hannay enough to let him stay in his flat for safety but, returning a day later, he finds Scudder dead. He’s back from South Africa where he made his pile as an engineer and has returned to the old country. It was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form in October that year. Buchan wrote it in bed while suffering from the duodenal ulcer which was to plague him all his life. Famous ripping yarn, the first novel to feature the dashing hero Richard Hannay, I’d forgotten it is set in the last months of peace before the outbreak of World War I, with Germany the enemy and the threat of war hanging over every sentence.
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