Greenmantle

John Buchan's follow-up book in the classic espionage series featuring Richard Hannay takes up when Hannay has recently returned to London following the Battle of Loos, and is called to meet with Sir Walter.

Asked to take on a mission to neutralise a potentially devastating plot by the Germans in the Ottoman Empire to inflame the Islamic Near East to jihad. Hannay is accompanied by American John Blenkiron and his compatriot from Loos Sandy Arbuthnot. In this story all three are ‘masters of disguise' and possess plenty of other skills necessary for such an unlikely undertaking. Along the way Hannay meets up with old friend Peter Pienaar, the South African Boer Scout.

The first third of the story follows Hannay and Pienaar as they make their way through Europe initially to Germany, then on to Turkey, where the original trio are to meet up. As we come to expect with Hannay (and Buchan) there are tremendous coincidences, great luck and lots of bravado en route, as long as some fantastical disguises!

Once in Turkey, the action really hots up and the story moves fast through various evolutions of turning all in sundry into enemies. The story culminates at the battle for Erzerum, at the Turkish/German and Russian front line.

The story is framed in the actual war setting, and the reality contrasting with the ridiculous is a nice touch. There are many references (some I understood, many went over my head) to battles and events of World War I - Gallipoli features heavily in mentions, there is plenty of British stiff upper lip ethos, and the larger than life characters. Given that when this book was published it was set in the current time, the audience would have had a more intimate knowledge of the setting and goings on, so there was perhaps less need to explain to the reader. While there is much that goes unexplained, and Greenmantle is somewhat of an enigma until near the end, it is without doubt a lot of fun.

For me this was a step up from #1 in the series, as it brought to it a complexity missing in the earlier book (and another 100 pages).
4 stars

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Book #1 The Thirty-Nine Steps