It was around 1980 that I caught a production of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages on PBS. The dramatization was a one-off; I don’t think that particular actor ever played Richard Hannay again. But it intrigued me enough to motivate me to read The 39 Steps, the first novel in the series. That made me a lifelong Buchan fan, but oddly enough I never read The Three Hostages until just now.
It’s good. I’d say it’s one of the stronger entries in a classic series.
In The Three Hostages, World War I is recently over. Richard Hannay, British intelligence agent extraordinaire, has settled down on a farm in Oxfordshire with his wife Mary (also a retired agent), and their small son. He looks forward (or thinks he does) to living the quiet life of a country squire. But then he receives an appeal for help. Three people, one of them a small boy, have been taken hostage. There is no clue as to the perpetrator. Reluctantly, Hannay agrees to look into it. Gradually he begins to suspect the last person anyone would suspect – a rising young politician who has endeared himself to nearly every influential person in London. A hopeless-seeming but successful investigation (hypnotism features strongly) is capped by a deadly man-to-man showdown in the Scottish highlands.
I was surprised – once again – by what a fine author John Buchan was. Among all the writers of the English “bulldog” school, nobody came near him when it came to writing readable prose. Richard Hannay is a vivid and likeable character, and all his friends are just as believable (his enemies, perhaps, a little less). He especially distinguishes himself in his descriptive passages, which are wonderfully done (this pleased me especially in the short section set in Norway).
Modern readers will be put off by racial and ethnic slurs which were a normal part of English life at the time. For some reason Hannay makes much of the villain having a round head, which he sees as un-English and sinister. On the other hand, those same readers will appreciate the active part Mary Hannay takes in the action.
If you’re open-minded enough to tolerate temporal diversity, The Three Hostages is great fun.
I may have to check this one out. Reminds me how much I enjoyed British Cloak and Dagger novels back in the day. I was living in London when Len Deighton’s Bernard Sampson trilogy Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match came out. I vacationed in Germany that summer, so I especially enjoyed following the action through neighborhoods in both cities that I knew well enough to find them familiar, but not well enough that they weren’t intriguing. Berlin Game had an especially interesting twist at the end. That led me into LeCarre’s early works with George Smiley. Unfortunately both author’s work deteriorated once they had sapped the Cold War well dry.
Unfortunately, once I tired of LeCarre and Deighton I haven’t found another author who does Cold War spy stories of the same caliber.
Buchan’s less sophisticated than those writers, but good fun.
I remember some years back when I was looking for another spy author in the cloak and dagger whodunit tradition epitomized in many famous British authors. I was struck by how the protagonist in featured by many of the modern American writers such such as Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp tended towards the anti-hero. They were despicable in their violence and ruthlessness but they did it on behalf of our side which somehow made it ok.
Tolkien was a confirmed reader of Buchan — see Carpenter’s biography; and C. S. Lewis cited Buchan approvingly in his essay “High and Low Brows.”