John Buchan

John Buchan (1875–1940) was born in Perth, Scotland, the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Glasgow and Oxford. He practised law, worked as a publisher and Conservative MP, and served as Director of Information during the First World War before turning increasingly to writing. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) introduced Richard Hannay and the chase thriller that made him famous, followed by four more Hannay novels and dozens of other books — histories, biographies, over a hundred works in total. In 1935 he was appointed Governor General of Canada as Baron Tweedsmuir; he died in office in Montreal in 1940, of injuries from a fall.