Showing results by author "John Buchan" in All Categories

John Buchan takes us back to Edwardian Britain on the eve of the First World War in the modern thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. An inexplicable murder drives the innocent Richard Hannay, on the run from a manhunt that never seems to end, to hide in remote Scottish moorland. Disguise and deception are his only weapons, as he struggles to decode the clues left by the murdered man to prevent the theft of naval secrets by an unfriendly foreign power.

Published in 1927, Scottish writer John Buchan's Witch Wood is set in a rural parish located in the Scottish Borders during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The story centers around newly ordained minister David Sempill's arrival in Woodilee in the wake of the Church of Scotland's acceptance of the Solemn League and Covenant and explores themes and issues surrounding religious tolerance and seventeenth-century Calvinism. With pagan rituals, an outbreak of the plague, and rumors about fairies and the devil, Witch Wood also delves into the supernatural and occult.

Joined by Peter Pienaar, the old Boer Scout; John S. Blenkiron, the American determined to fight the Kaiser; and Sandy Arbuthnot, adventurer Richard Hannay travels across war-torn Europe in search of the grotesque Stumm and the evil beauty of Hilda von Einem. This espionage novel set during the First World War features thrilling disguises, despicable plots, and some of the most devious spies in literature.

Richard Hannay, returned colonial mining engineer, is thoroughly bored with life in London, and only a day away from taking the next boat back to the Cape. But then he encounters mysterious American spy Franklin P. Scudder, on the run from foreign agents seeking to prevent him from revealing an assassination plot designed to throw Britain into war with Germany. And when Scudder is murdered in Hannay's flat, Hannay finds himself on the run from both the police and Scudder's enemies - and bound in honour to pursue the dead man's work and save his country from disaster....

Diplomacy by other means may, at times, sound heroic. A fight for principles and ideals carried out by young men armed to the teeth and directed by older men in pursuit of their own version of glory for themselves and their Nations. Right will triumph over wrong. But war can be an illusion, stirred up by schemers and opportunists to take something from other nations that may or may not be right. As blood and limb are sacrificed the true cost is seen but often set to one side as the dispute becomes embedded in emotions and reason falls away.

Billeted away from the trenches for a week, Private Peter Galbraith suddenly finds himself separated from his retreating regiment and marooned in the town of Ypres in the face of the German advance. With the army gone, law and order has broken down in the town and looting and fighting is rife. Private Galbraith takes it upon himself to re-establish the rule of law in the town, and before long he becomes the acting provost and recognized King of Ypres. But he realizes that his conduct is likely to be seen in a different light by his superior officers.

Twelve years on from the events of The Three Hostages, Sir Richard Hannay begins to fear that his idyllic existence with his family in their Cotswolds home is a little too comfortable, merely the placid acceptance of encroaching old age. But then echoes of a past adventure during his days in Africa, and an old oath to protect the son of the man whom he saved then, draw him—along with son Peter John and old friend Sandy Clanroyden—into new danger, and a showdown on the remote Island of Sheep....

When Richard Hannay returns to London after an action-packed life in Rhodesia, he finds life unbearably dull. He is on the point of leaving the city in search of adventures, when mystery and intrigue turns up at his door in the shape of Franklin Scudder, Hannay’s neighbour, who turns out to be a spy trying to escape the clutches of a shady international organisation, bent on sparking a European war. When Scudder is mysteriously murdered and all the evidence seems to point to Hannay himself, he escapes to Scotland, bearing Scudder’s cryptic coded notebook, which he struggles to decipher.

This classic thriller, set in England prior to World War II, involves murder, mystery, a country-wide chase, espionage and international intrigue.

In the days before the First World War, the measured routine of barrister and accidental Member of Parliament Edward Leithen is disrupted when Charles Pitt-Heron, an Oxford contemporary and now the husband of Leithen’s old flame, abruptly goes missing. As he investigates the mystery, Leithen is soon pitted against the murderous forces of “the Power-House,” an international network of anarchists, and its chilling leader.

John Buchan himself stated that he set out to write a book in the style of the ubiquitous American “Dime Novel”. What he actually succeeded in creating was a relatively unique and new genre for British literature, the Spy Novel. Those thrilling elements of the fleeing innocent man hunted through the wilds by sinister and undefined dark forces have been explored countless times in books and on screen ever since.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It first appeared as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form in October that year by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It is the first of the five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of tricky situations.

Richard Hannay’s boredom is soon relieved when the resourceful engineer is caught up in a web of secret codes, spies, and murder on the eve of WWI. This exciting action-adventure story was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 classic film of the same name. John Buchan (1875-1940) was Governor General of Canada and a popular novelist. Although condemned by some for anti-Semitic dialog in The Thirty-Nine Steps, his character’s sentiments do not represent the view of the author who was identified in Hitler’s Sonderfahndungsliste (special search list) as a "Jewish sympathiser." View...

As war looms in Europe, Richard Hannay returns from Rhodesia to his home in London. His neighbor, an American freelance spy named Franklin Scudder, claims to know of an assassination plot to destabilize Europe. When Hannay finds Scudder dead in his flat, he is drawn into a fast-paced labyrinthine adventure that takes him from the hills of Scotland to an unassuming location by the sea.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It first appeared as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form in October that year by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It is the first of the five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations.

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is an adventure novel in the espionage genre by the Scottish author John Buchan. A classic of the genre, it is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an action hero with a knack for getting himself out of difficult situations. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a prototypical "innocent man on the run" adventure. Hanney lets a neighbor stay with him, who is being followed by an anarchist gang trying to steal British military plans. Then the neighbor is murdered in his apartment....

Questa spy-story, che si è guadagnata il ventesimo posto nella classifica dei migliori cento romanzi gialli di tutti i tempi stilata dalla Crime Writers' Association, è il primo romanzo della serie dei thriller che vede come protagonista Richard Hannay, ingegnere minerario in Sud Africa che decide di cambiar vita e si trova spinto in una nuova carriera di agente e patriota inglese.

John Buchan (1875-1940) was a Scottish writer, barrister, and member of Parliament and later become Baron Tweedsmuir and governor-general of Canada. While he was most famous for adventure stories, such as "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "The Kings of Orion". "The Kings of Orion" is a classic tale of adventure set in the outer reaches of the British Empire.

A mesmerizing collection of 30 wonderful stories by great classic writers. 1. The Invisible Man by G. K. Chesterton 2. At the Farmhouse by E. F. Benson 3. The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 4. The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan 5. Query by Seamark 6. The Man of the Night by Edgar Wallace 7. The Earl, the Warder and the Wayward Heiress by J. S. Fletcher 8. Afterward by Edith Wharton 9. The Murderer by Perceval Gibbon 10. The Idiot by Arnold Bennett 11. Oh Liberty by W. Pett Ridge

A fabulous anthology of some of the finest stories ever written.