Word: buchan
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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...
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...
...Imagine James Bond rejecting a dish like that!) Buchan dealt in other literary coinage-glints of dry Scots humor, an eloquent fondness for the British countryside, the straightforward invocation of courage and comradeship in danger. The face on the coin is Victorian, but it rings true...