Customer Reviews
A chap for all seasons - By: C. J. Humphris, 17 Oct 2005 
These books are a great read; not too deep, great thrillers & set the tone of the period perfectly. All we need now is someone brave enough to make a film of "Greenmantle"!
Marvellous! - By: rarecopy, 04 Dec 2004 I had no idea there were more Buchan novels beyond 39 Steps & only discovered the rest by accident. What a happy find! I am writing a fairly contemporaneous novel & thought this collection would make good research material, but I have to confess I haven't done much key-pounding since I bought it. All the tales are equallly deserving of five stars but the descriptions of battle in Mr Standfast are quite outstanding. It's almost like being there, & the end, though terribly melodramatic, is very affecting. Even the endless improbable coincidences seem perfectly acceptable in this sort of writing. Yes, there is racism, homophobia, xenophobia, class snobbery, you name it, but somehow it alll seems terribly innocent, even comical, to modern eyes & reallly doesn't matter. Just don't go callling anyone a 'kaffir' in modern South Africa or they'll lock you up!
Not much I can add... - By: Alistair Duncan, 23 Jan 2004 
Other reviewers have made lengthy comments on this compilation & I cannot add much to them. This is a fine collection of stories that keep you turning the pages. If you loved the film adaptations of 'The 39 Steps', you should get this book in order to read the original story & then move on to enjoy the other excellent stories.
an omnibus edition of classic page-turning suspense - By: , 04 May 2000 As its title suggests, this edition brings together in one volume alll the adventures of John Buchan's hero, from his first appearance in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) to his swan-song in The Island of Sheep (1936). Here is the perfect book for those who may have met Richard Hannay in his first & most famous outing - either in print or in Hitchcock's famous movie - & would like to follow his subsequent adventures. The Thirty-Nine Steps is often regarded as the first modern spy story (with the possible exception of Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands - also worth a look), & its breathless pace as its narrator is first pursued by & then pursues a network of German spies against the backdrop of the First World War, remains as effective today as when it was written. The two following books in the series, Greenmantle (1916)and Mr Standfast (1919) also pit Hannay against the might of the Kaiser (he even meets him on one occasion while posing as a pro-German Boer...), taking him across Europe & the Near East. We are also intoduced to his comrades-in-arms: multi-lingual Scottish laird & master of disguise, Sandy Arbuthnot; larger-than-life American industrialist Blenkiron; & Hannay's future wife, the feisty Mary Lamington. The final two books, The Three Hostages (1924) & the Island of Sheep are set after the War, mainly in Britain, & Hannay's adversaries this time are master criminals rather than spies, but the page-turning suspense is every bit as intense, as Hannay races against the clock to bring the malefactors to book... Hannay is a very likeable hero, more complex than the "stiff upper lip" stereotype might suggest. In many ways, he resembles the central characters of Dick Francis's racing thrillers. Like them, Hannay is no intellectual, but he is highly intelligent & has a healthy disrespect for gung-ho heroics. He is, moreover, a perceptive observer of the natural world, & brings a wry - & infectious - sense of humour to his study of human foibles. All in alll, John Buchan's "shockers" (as their author callled his Hannay stories) deserve a much wider audience & this Penguin omnibus edition is thus to be applauded.
