Must Read

Roger Kimball has an essay on John Buchan in the latest New Criterion.

Buchan is most famous for his Richard Hannay spy thrillers (a genre he basically invented). But Kimball shows that he did much more than write a few popular novels.

Like other great Victorians, Buchan's energy puts us to shame. He wrote something on the order of 130 books. He also was a publishing executive, colonial administrator in South Africa, war correspondent, Director of Intelligence during part of WWI and Governor General of Canada. Not bookish, Kimball notes that "one is not surprised to discover that Buchan was an avid, almost a compulsive walker. Ten, twenty, thirty miles a day—like Richard Hannay or Peter Pienaar, he also clambered over hill and dale, scouring the horizon, registering the lay of the land. "

I also liked this passage from Kimball:

It is clear that Buchan admired Haldane. It is also clear that he regarded him as a sort of object lesson in the dangers of Teutonic intellectualization. “A man who has been nourished on German metaphysics,” Buchan observed, “should make a point of expressing his thoughts in plain workaday English, for the technical terms of German philosophy have a kind of hypnotic power; they create a world remote from common reality where reconciliations and synthesis flow as smoothly and with as little meaning as in an opiate dream.” This is an observation that aspiring graduate students in the humanities ought to memorize and repeat three times daily before breakfast.

In a way, Buchan invented the classic Hitchcock plot of an innocent man caught in intrigue and chased by both the criminals and authorities (North by Northwest, etc.). No surprise, then, that Hitchcock filmed a version of the Thirty-Nine Steps early in his career.

The Hannay novels are the best sort of boys literature. Not only do they have the sort of action and adventure boys like, but they offer heroes who are brave, modest, daring, and principled.