Word: buchan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Girls, Seldom. In all of this, Buchan is to present-day international-chase writers what Henry Ford was to the mass-produced automobile. Everything he started is still going strong, from the cross-country chase in a purring Bentley to the use of arcane skills (like the ability to get along in colloquial Kurdish) to extricate the hero from a sticky situation. Richard Hannay, an ex-brigadier and a onetime mining engineer first seen in The Thirty-Nine Steps, speaks Afrikaans and German, turns out to be a dead shot with a captured Mauser, describes himself as "tough...
...schoolboy hero of Buchan's The Magic Walking Stick finds a cane that, properly twirled by the owner, twirls him from the doldrums of home to far-off times and places. In The House of the Four Winds (which along with Castle Gay is part of a trilogy about a retired Glasgow grocer named Dickson McCunn), Buchan plunks assorted Britons smack dab in the middle of a palace revolution in Evallonia, a small, turbulent European state north by east from Ruritania...
Boer and ex-Guide Peter Pienaar. who "could track a tsessebe in thick bush" (Buchan readers know what a tsessebe is*), turns out to be most useful in Green-mantle as a messenger. He slithers silently through Turkish lines and brings news of Turkish weak spots to the Grand Duke commanding the Russian forces. Because it is Buchan, the Grand Duke turns out to have hunted lions with Peter on the veld back...
Spoor & Spurn. What is most striking about Buchan's heroes, for modern readers at least, is their now archaic innocence and idealism of word and deed. Modeled on Buchan's Oxford friends and fellow World War I officers, they were created in a time when aristocratic and gentlemanly virtues were still fashionable and younger sons sought fame at the four corners of the world. For them, the trail of anything, even an idea, is always a "spoor." Girls, when they appear, and they appear seldom, are customarily wholesome and boyishly slim. Men are lean...
...considerable charm, partly, one suspects, because Buchan would so clearly have behaved that way himself, partly because it offers a refreshing change from the satyrical cynicism of today's crop of international gumshoes...