Mr. Standfast

In 1917 Richard Hannay is called back from the Western Front and sent undercover, disguised as a pacifist South African, into the world of conscientious objectors and radical intellectuals in a garden city in the Cotswolds and on Clydeside, to track down a German master spy who is passing British secrets to the enemy. The trail leads him to the Isle of Skye, a perilous escape in the Alps and back to the front for the great German offensive of 1918, while he falls in love with Mary Lamington, a young woman working for the intelligence service.

John Buchan published the third Hannay novel in 1919; its title and many of its themes come from Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, which Hannay carries with him as a codebook. Read The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle.