Fiction · 1916
Greenmantle
A year after The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay is called back from the front for something worse than trench warfare: a rumour, half-believed at the Foreign Office, that Germany and Turkey are planning to raise a holy war across the Islamic world, centred on a mysterious prophet-figure called Greenmantle. Hannay, Sandy Arbuthnot, Peter Pienaar and the American John S. Blenkiron scatter across wartime Europe and the Middle East to find out whether the rumour is real, travelling separately and mostly undercover, toward a rendezvous in Constantinople none of them is sure the others will reach.
It is Buchan's second Richard Hannay novel, serialized weekly in Land and Water from July to November 1916 and published complete on 26 October 1916 by Hodder & Stoughton; it sold 34,000 copies within five months. Buchan wrote much of it, by his own account, in odd half-hours between wartime work, and prefaced it with a short note catching up his own characters — Hannay back at the front, Blenkiron home in the States, Peter Pienaar shaved and joined the Flying Corps — before the story proper begins.
Bibliomancer restores the 1916 text exactly as Buchan wrote it.
Contents
- Introductory
- Chapter I — A Mission is Proposed
- Chapter II — The Gathering of the Missionaries
- Chapter III — Peter Pienaar
- Chapter IV — Adventures of Two Dutchmen on the Loose
- Chapter V — Further Adventures of the Same
- Chapter VI — The Indiscretions of the Same
- Chapter VII — Christmastide
- Chapter VIII — The Essen Barges
- Chapter IX — The Return of the Straggler
- Chapter X — The Garden-House of Suliman the Red
- Chapter XI — The Companions of the Rosy Hours
- Chapter XII — Four Missionaries See Light in their Mission
- Chapter XIII — I Move in Good Society
- Chapter XIV — The Lady of the Mantilla
- Chapter XV — An Embarrassed Toilet
- Chapter XVI — The Battered Caravanserai
- Chapter XVII — Trouble by the Waters of Babylon
- Chapter XVIII — Sparrows on the Housetops
- Chapter XIX — Greenmantle
- Chapter XX — Peter Pienaar Goes to the Wars
- Chapter XXI — The Little Hill
- Chapter XXII — The Guns of the North
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1875–1940 · Modern
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.
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