Despite his achievements as historian, biographer, historical novelist, and statesman, it is for his thrillers that John Buchan has found an enduring reputation in popular letters. The "Buchan touch" is a name applied to fiction which shares his appeal: his characters are romantic but not preposterous, his sense of setting and climate is superb, and his plots move swiftly.Written with unassuming ease, his thrillers and tales of high adventure have been read by many. He introduced to spy fiction its basic theme: that evil and worldwide conspiracies can lie just beneath the surface veneer of so-called civilization--"Away behind all Governments and Armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people" (The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1915). According to Andrew Lumley in The Power-House (1916), it is civilization that is the conspiracy that holds chaos and anarchy at bay.

Born in Perth on 26 August 1875, John Buchan...