Mr. Standfast.

With the Great War grinding on, John Buchan sends his indomitable Richard Hannay back into the shadows, and the result is one of the finest spy adventures of its age, taut, patriotic and headlong.

What it's about

Mr. Standfast is the third of Buchan's Richard Hannay thrillers. Recalled from the front, Hannay is set a delicate and dangerous task of counter-espionage that carries him in disguise across wartime Britain and beyond, tracking a shadowy and formidable enemy. The pursuit ranges over moor and city and eventually to the battle lines of France, testing Hannay's nerve and endurance to their limits.

Themes

The novel weighs duty and courage against deception and doubt, and it draws its title and much of its spirit from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, whose steadfast pilgrim shadows the story. Buchan explores loyalty and self-sacrifice, the moral seriousness of the war as his generation understood it, and the strange half-world of the spy who must live a lie in a righteous cause.

Why it still matters

Buchan effectively helped invent the modern chase thriller, and Hannay is one of its founding heroes, an ancestor of countless reluctant secret agents since. Beyond its brisk excitement, the book offers a vivid contemporary sense of Britain during the First World War, its anxieties, its idealism and its home-front tensions, from a writer who knew the period intimately.

Who it's for

For lovers of classic thrillers and spy fiction, for readers of Buchan and the Hannay adventures, and for anyone who enjoys a fast, well-made story with a strong moral backbone and a real sense of its historical moment.