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John Buchan was born on August 26th 1875. After a brief career in the legal profession he began a twin career as writer and politician. He was a prodigious writer not just of fiction but of such acclaimed works as a 24 volume history of World War I. It was during the war, where, as a sideline writing propaganda, he wrote his most famous work, ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’. Its hero, Richard Hannay, continues his story in other Buchan novels, most notably Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919).

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

Reluctantly posing as a pacifist, Richard Hannay infiltrates an anti-war league to capture an unimpeachable German spy. The only instructions he's given are to take up his old identity as a mining engineer from South Africa and pose as a staunch pacifist. As Hannay himself puts it: "To go into Germany as an anti-British Afrikaner was a stoutish adventure, but to lounge about at home talking rot was a very different-sized job."

Perhaps more than any other book The Thirty-Nine Steps has set the pattern for the story of the chase for a wanted man. And, of the many writers who have attempted this kind of thing since Buchan, only a very few, like Graham Greene, have managed to sustain the tension in the same way. The story's extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name.

Richard Hanney is an ordinary man, drawn into mysteries he does not understand, and no one is willing to help him. In these 2 suspense novels written by the father of the modern spy thriller, Hanney must outwit villains in unnerving situations that lay bare the thin veneer separating civilized man from the barbarian.

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.

A year after the adventure of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Major Richard Hannay is plucked from the trenches of the Western Front, and sent on a perilous journey through the very heart of the German empire, to Constantinople. There, he and his small band of missionaries must frustrate a plot to ferment an uprising in the Islamic world aimed at dealing a crushing blow to Britain's interests in the East, and winning the war for Germany.

Five BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of John Buchan’s espionage thrillers featuring gentleman spy Richard Hannay. The forerunner to James Bond, Secret Agent Richard Hannay is a thoroughly British action hero, pursuing ruthless villains, foiling deadly plans and risking life and limb for his country. This gripping collection encompasses all five of Hannay’s adventures, adapted for radio with superb casts including Tom Baker, Clive Merrison, Stuart Milligan, Jasmine Hyde and Patrick Malahide.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. Whether they hail from the Lowlands or the Highlands, to be a Scottish author is to part of a quite an extraordinary band of authors and its literary traditions. These beguiling stories example the full range and majesty of their talents and the subjects they explore.

A third adventure for Sir Edward Leithen, in which Leithen befriends young Vernon Milburne, a man haunted by an annually recurring dream in which some dark and mysterious challenge moves year by year closer. After the war, as the culmination of Vernon’s dream approaches, both men meet – and take an instant dislike to – Miss Koré Arabin, a young Englishwoman who has inherited a remote Greek island from her disreputable father.

Three gentlemen not wholly useless to their country—a lawyer, a banker, and a cabinet minister—have suddenly fallen into a state of profound ennui. Each seeks to rediscover the comfort of their lives through ‘the tonic of difficulty': adopting the nom de guerre of ‘John Macnab', they take to poaching in the Highlands of Scotland, issuing challenges to three landowners and declaring their intention to take a salmon or a stag on their lands between specific dates. But can they overcome the challenges they have set themselves, and escape with their reputations intact?

The world since earliest times has always had spies. Information is a valuable commodity and even more so in times of war or tension. Many authors and poets have had real life incarnations as spies from Christopher Marlowe and Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe. But it’s a dangerous game. Working in a murky, secretive world where any trust given could be at the expense of your life.

For an atheist it’s a great deal, though it does suggest atheism may have a weak point. For those of faith it’s a matter of jam now and purgatory tomorrow. A bargain many artists feel is something they can live with. For agnostics it’s usually a question of can the afterlife really be that bad, would workplace regulations reach all parts of heaven and hell. However, in this volume the terms are agreed and the Devil pays his fees and the character his dues, each happy to wait a few decades for the eternal payback.

In seventeenth-century Scotland, religious struggles run rampant. Here, Young David Sempill, a moderate Presbyterian minister, pleas with his sect to have compassion for the remnants of King Montrose’s defeated army, who are being harried and slaughtered by religious extremists. But as pre-Christian nature worship and its accompanying black magicks seep forth from Melanudrigill Wood, Sempill himself disappears.

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.

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.