'The Three Hostages' by John Buchan: A Guest Post by Henry Wessells

Apart from The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), The Three Hostages is the most Buchanesque of John Buchan’s thrillers, with many of the characters and predilections of the author’s work in fine display. I had not re-read this one in over forty years, and it was interesting to look into this book again. There is so much to consider, and room for a couple of meanders and some fun along the way. The novel was serialized in Argosy All Story Weekly in June and July 1924; the Houghton Mifflin printing is the first edition, preceding by a couple of weeks the Hodder & Stoughton edition. Richard Blanchard, The First Editions of John Buchan (1981), notes at A62: “Published August 1, 1924. […] the author had originally selected ‘Enchanter’s Nightmare’ as the title for this book.”

The plot of The Three Hostages is swiftly summarized. Richard Hannay, who had made his pile of money in South Africa and served his country well during the Great War, is dislodged from his Cotswolds idyll, where he and his wife are doting parents of a young son, by a request from a senior police official to help investigate the kidnapping of three innocents: a young aristocrat, a financier’s daughter, and an eight-year old boy. There are international financial and political implications, and through coincidences worthy of Dickens, Hannay penetrates to the heart of the conspiracy and the action shifts from Mayfair clubland and the corridors of power to a remote Norway river and a night-flight over the North Sea to York, and from a low dance hall on the edges of a London slum to a rugged Scottish landscape. The villain is an ambitious and charming man whose truest motivations and actions are unsuspected by his fellow Members of Parliament and, indeed, by all save for Sandy Arbuthnot. Buchan writes action scenes well: it is a proper thriller, and the outcome hangs in the balance right to the penultimate page.

The Three Hostages, rich in intertextual and even metafictional allusions to Buchan’s work, is remarkable for deconstructing its plot from the outset. When Tom Greenslade talks about how the author of a detective story works from a known outcome to plant seeds of knowledge that a reader gains only in reading the books, and then cites “three things a long way apart [. . .] say, an old woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard”, Buchan is playing with the reader (and, I think, alluding to Chesterton’s Father Brown stories), for if those three things are not irrelevant (why then include them?), they are central. I will return to the metafictional.

Richard Hannay is a brilliant creation, the competent man of action, an outsider from the periphery of Empire whose courage and force of character bring him to the centers of power, so that his is also the voice of an insider who knows how things tick. He recognizes men of his totem but despite a curious sensitivity that at times wells up as compassion, he is not a nice man. He displays all of the prejudices of his class in spades, bluff and forthright and wholly unexamined, and just as toxic now as then. Richard Hannay is not a nice man (though I am sure he told himself he was). I brought up Chesterton’s name earlier by design, for one thing that distinguishes Buchan’s Hannay novels from the fiction of his near contemporary is that magical, appalling first person narrative voice, a voice that nonetheless demonstrates its author is not identical with his idealized character. The Flying Inn (1914) is kinetic, madcap Chesterton: Patrick Dalroy and Humphrey Pump are truly memorable characters, filled with humor and common sense, and Lord Ivywood’s Nietzschean downfall is deftly achieved. But from the (almost) blameless first paragraph, Chesterton’s off-hand, inner-circle narrative mode is a chummy, tainted “we” inseparable from the book that compels the reader to complicity. Richard Usborne was a good skeptical re-reader of Buchan. In Clubland Heroes (Second edition, Barrie & Jenkins, 1974) he called out Dick Hannay: “This type of man-of-the-world, know-it-all passage, clever trick that is effective if infrequently offered, occurs several times in Greenmantle and once or twice in each of Mr Standfast and The Three Hostages. On second readings and second thoughts you will probably agree that this style of thing is Buchan pulling high-quality wool over his readers’ eyes”.

The Power-House (Blackwood's Magazine, December 1913) is a tale of malign forces working to undermine the foundations of civilization, with a late Edwardian setting rendered quaint and old-fashioned by the war, which revealed that the civilization itself had dynamited the walls and unleashed strange forces. It is in a sense a dress rehearsal for The Three Hostages, but where the villains of The Power-House tried very hard to keep behind the scenes, Mr. Dominick Medina, the “handsomest man alive”, is a well-connected insider from an ancient Irish family, and very much a public figure, a well-regarded poet, world traveller, crack shot, etc. Richard Hannay cannot imagine that Medina would have anything to do with criminal conspiracy, yet the key to the kidnapping is “six lines of indifferent doggerel”:

“Seek where under midnight’s under 

Laggard crops are hardly won; —

Where the sower casts his seed in

Furrows of the fields of Eden; —

Where beside the sacred tree

Spins the seer who cannot see.”

Earlier this year Michael Dirda conveyed a double-barrelled idea he has long entertained, and gave me permission to discuss it here in print. We have to go back to 1895, and consider Arthur Machen’s novel The Three Impostors or the Transformations. Not the pair of languid aesthetes who wander through a magical London, but the harried, hapless man whose actions set the series of impostures in motion. Michael Dirda’s notion is that the “the young man with spectacles”, the decadent poet as victim, is a portrait of poet William Butler Yeats, who was well known to Arthur Machen through literary circles and more directly through their shared affiliation with the Order of the Golden Dawn. If you don’t know the fate of  “the young man with spectacles”, read the book. Now jump ahead nearly thirty years: William Butler Yeats is the “smiling public man” who was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1923, and whose opinions on the Irish Question and other public matters are widely reported. This is the second of Dirda’s notions, that Medina is Yeats. Hannay couldn’t stand to like Medina’s poetry, cites phrenology to suggest madness and degeneration, and considers Medina’s mother a powerful and manipulative figure (Yeats’  mother was safely dead). Those two ministers’  sons from the Celtic periphery, Machen and Buchan, really seem to have had it in for Willie, who was much more of an insider than they were.

Three things to note. First, to infiltrate the conspiracy, Richard Hannay, most rugged of men, feigns succumbing to hypnosis and undergoes a marked personality change, becoming a fervent, puppy-like acolyte of the great Medina. Hannay, inwardly protesting and saving his response for when the tables are turned, describes his behavior and relations with Medina in metaphors and similes of girls, women, and dogs. Second, Hannay’s wife Mary, who had proved her mettle in Mr. Standfast (1919), must have wearied of standing upon the pedestal of motherhood and decided to do something. She plays a key investigative role and it is her steely behavior that compels Medina to restore the mind of the youngest of the victims. And third, The Three Hostages employs a late and classic survival of a Gothic narrative chestnut that descends from The Wild Irish Girl (1806) to the 1920s: the Fainting Narrator. When the story gets too dreadful to tell, the narrator faints and there is a break in the continuity. In The Three Hostages, Hannay faints not once but twice: first at a key moment early in the infiltration of the conspiracy, after Medina has hypnotized and slapped Hannay, and then spat in his face; and the second time at the end of the novel. Until I re-read this book, I had considered The Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft (written 1924) as the last glimpse of this Gothic trope. An odd place for Buchan and Lovecraft to intersect.

The metafictional and intertextual pleasures of The Three Hostages are numerous, and I mention several here. The Thursday Club, where Medina takes Hannay, and where Sandy susses that something is not right, is a select dinner club whose members are accomplished men of widely diverging personalities and professions. Some years later, this is The Runagates Club (1928) whose members tell stories suggesting that the world is not so orderly as people usually think. Sandy Arbuthnot, who zigs and zags through Buchan’s novels with flair, sends Hannay a cable: “It was signed ‘Buchan,’ a horse which Sandy seemed to think had been a Derby winner.” And in a coincidence worthy of Bleak House, when Hannay encounters a helpful and distinguished elder chap in a rural Norwegian village, it is Herr Gaudian, a German engineer whom Hannay deceived while on an espionage mission during the war. Assured that Hannay is in Norway on “private business”, Gaudian quickly becomes an essential ally. There is a map of the Scottish deer forest, and some of the place names recur in John Macnab (1925).

In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute observes succinctly: “the dreamlike narrative cohesion of the longer Hannay tales, and the exorbitant literalism that governs the succession of precisely described but magically-apt coincidences and timings that carry the stories onward, lift them so far from the mundane they might serve as central examples of what could be called the Lateral Fantastic.” There are moments when Hannay’s glib use of the clichés of his class grates upon the reader, but The Three Hostages remains a ripping yarn and is well worth looking into. 

(Henry Wessells)

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