The novel that invented the modern chase thriller — one innocent man, two sets
of pursuers, and four hundred miles of Scottish moor.
Richard Hannay is bored with London when an American journalist turns up at his
flat claiming to know of a conspiracy to trigger a European war. Days later the
American is dead on Hannay's floor, the police believe Hannay killed him, and
the conspirators want him too.
He runs north.
What follows — through railway carriages, across heather, into shepherds'
cottages and country-house libraries — is paced with the efficiency of a man who
had been bedridden long enough to think through every detail. Buchan wrote it in
1914 while convalescing, and it became the template for almost every chase story
since. Hitchcock filmed it in 1935. Ian Fleming's Bond owes Hannay a debt the
size of Scotland. Lee Child has said that without Buchan there would be no Jack
Reacher.
It is short, and this is a short recording — you can hear the whole of it in an
afternoon, which is close to how Buchan meant it to be taken.
Includes a new foreword by Alexander Kross and a biographical essay on Buchan.
