John Buchan

John Buchan was born in 1875 in Perth, Scotland, and grew up between the Presbyterian discipline of the manse and the border country that furnished the landscapes of his fiction. At Glasgow and Oxford he became a formidable scholar, but his career quickly spread into publishing, law, politics and public service. He wrote constantly, often between official duties, with the speed and clarity of a man accustomed to briefing others.

During the First World War Buchan worked for British wartime information services. That experience did not make his novels documentary records, but it gave them their networks of secret work, misinformation, difficult travel and decisions made far from the battlefield. The Thirty-Nine Steps, published in 1915, established Richard Hannay as an unwilling but capable amateur drawn into international conspiracy; Mr. Standfast returned him to a wider wartime Europe.

Buchan later served as a Member of Parliament and, from 1935, as Governor General of Canada, where he took the title Lord Tweedsmuir. He died in Montreal in 1940. His thrillers are often remembered for their pace, but their enduring invention is the ordinary landscape made suddenly strategic: a road, a country house or a stretch of moor becomes part of the plot.