A great read of high adventure with a good bit of humor, especially in the early part. Book two in Buchan's Richard Hannay series. A special treat is getting to met Peter Pienaar who helped Hannay survive the ordeal of The Thirty-Nine Steps without even being present. He's definitely present in t...more

Compared to the hectic pace and implausible coincidences of The Thirty-nine Steps, Greenmantle (1916), the second volume of the Richard Hannay trilogy, is more than a Boy's Own adventure tale. Buchan, it turns out, can really write. I was entertained by his deft turns of phrase. Even when the plo...more

This is great work--the writing is personal and emotional, and yet it's formula is spy novel, Conan DOyle in the mystery but with added depth because it's about Turkey and the East and will give you insight into World War I in Europe. It's also remarkably prescient, written before the end of that...more

Greenmantle follows Buchan's "Thirty-nine Steps" not as a sequel so much (imho), but rather as something along the line of the further adventures of Richard Hannay, the main protagonist and overall hero of the Thirty-nine Steps. Hannay has since been a soldier in WWI, in which he was injured at L...more

I first read this book when I was 10 or 11. It was a library copy, borrowed from the Kodaikanal Club in Kodaikanal, a hill station in south India. It used to be the local English club and the contents of the library still include a large number of old hardbound editions of authors who were popula...more

Recovering from injuries sustained at the Battle of Loos, Richard Hannay is charged by Sir Walter Bullivant with investigating rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world.  It seems the Germans plan to use religion to help them win the war by causing Britain and its allies to divert troops from th...more

An involved plot that drags spy Hannay across half of Europe and into Turkey, with one identity after another.

This was too much convolution out on a limb, not enough grounding the reader in what was going on, an ending that comes out of nowhere, and a lot of scenes where I was expected to react i...more

The Ripping-est of Ripping Yarns

I've got a special shelf, "Ripping Yarns," set up here at Goodreads devoted to this sort of tale. The salient feature of a ripping yarn is that once you're well into the book, despite whatever flaws there might be in plot, plausibility, or characterization, it's da...more

What a splendid adventure story and more.

Richard Hannay in 1915 on a top mission to foil a plot to create a holy war in the Muslim world, to draw troops from the Western Front, and to help Germany win the war. Hannay must track down the mysterious prophet who holds the key to everything - Greenma...more

What a strange, entertaining book!

Greenmantle is an odd kind of historical novel about WWI, a spy story about a team of heroes trying to solve a mystery and foil plots. What makes it unusual is that John Buchan wrote it *during* WWI, while serving in France and in British intelligence. Through t...more