Huntingtower

Dickson McCunn, a retired Glasgow grocer with a romantic heart, sets out on a walking holiday in Galloway in search of adventure. He finds it when he meets a band of tough slum boys from Glasgow, the Gorbals Die-Hards, and learns that a beautiful Russian princess is held prisoner in a lonely house, Huntingtower, by Bolshevik agents who want her jewels. With the boys and a young poet, the elderly grocer defends her in a siege.

John Buchan published the novel in 1922, the first of his books about Dickson McCunn, a gently comic adventure. Read Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and Mr Standfast.