<p>Published in 1919, <i><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Standfast</i> is a thriller set in the latter half of the First World War, and the third of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-buchan">John Buchan’s</a> books to feature Richard Hannay.</p>
<p>Richard Hannay is called back from serving in France to take part in a secret mission: searching for a German agent. Hannay disguises himself as a pacifist and travels through England and Scotland to track down the spy at the center of a web of German agents who are leaking information about the war plans. He hopes to infiltrate and feed misinformation back to Germany. His journey takes him from Glasgow to Skye, onwards into the Swiss Alps, and on to the Western Front.</p>
<p>During the course of his work he’s again reunited with Peter Pienaar and John Blenkiron, who both appear in <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-buchan/greenmantle"><i>Greenmantle</i></a>, as well as Sir Walter Bullivant, his Foreign Office contact from <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-buchan/the-thirty-nine-steps"><i>The Thirty Nine Steps</i></a>.</p>
<p>The title of the novel comes from a character in <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-bunyan">John Bunyan’s</a> <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-bunyan/the-pilgrims-progress"><i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i></a> to which there are many references in the book, not least of all as a codebook which Hannay uses to decipher messages from his allies.</p>
<p>The book finishes with a captivating description of some of the final battles of the First World War between Britain and Germany in Eastern France.</p>
In Greenmantle (1916) Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, travels across war-torn Europe in search of a German plot and an Islamic Messiah. He is joined by three more of Buchan's heroes: Peter Pienaar, the old Boer Scout; John S. Blenkiron, the American determined to fight the Kaiser; and Sandy Arbuthnot, Greenmantle himself, modelled on Lawrence of Arabia. The intrepid four move in disguise through Germany to Constantinople and the Russian border toface their enemies: the grotesque Stumm and the evil beauty of Hilda von Einem.
Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot which could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
