Unlike most who-dunnits I have in my audio collection, Buchan-along with Dorothy Sayers-will bear re-listening. So far from tiring my mind, I find Buchan (again, like Dumas) refreshes it. And our anonymous officer was right-like Dumas, the story grabs you and carries you along. As some of the poems quoted in Martin Gilbert's works on World War I attest, as bad as it was many believed in what they were doing in Flanders. It's a combination of idealism and realism that may have done much to brace spirits at Ypres and the Somme-probably because it accurately reflected the general attitude in the trenches. At the same time, Buchan and his protagonist never flinch from admitting the ghastliness of the Western Front. Duty, as Ulysses Grant said, can be a beautiful word.

It is a job that has to be done and there is pride in doing it well. Membership in a group of fighters who are also friends and the death of some of those friends makes war personal. And it's hard to remember, living as we do at the other end of the disastrous 20th Century, that soldiers cherish the camaraderie that grows out of shared dangers. There's a touch of Rupert Brooke here-soldiering is described as the only proper work for a man. Buchan treads a fine line when talking about the war. It’s a neat trick to write about mortal danger in such a way that men who are living with it on a daily basis don’t chuck your book into No Man’s Land or, more likely, use it as necessary paper. Nevertheless, it could apply the Greenmantle as well. Granted, his comment was about Buchan’s first thriller, The 39 Steps. All that matters is that once you’ve started, you can’t put the book down.” The viewpoint that fascinates me most is from that line officer at the front. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.” Finally, this bit of analysis from someone at the London Telegraph: “ understood that in a thriller…what matters above all is to keep the reader focused on what is going to happen next…It doesn’t matter that the reader has no clue where he is being taken or, when he gets there, how the thing happened as it did. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. “Between Kipling and Fleming,” he said, “stands John Buchan, the father of the modern spy thriller.” A nameless reviewer at Library Journal agrees: “Buchan essentially invented the espionage novel with his Richard Hannay yarns.” And a nameless officer serving on the Western Front offered this endorsement: “It is just the kind of fiction for here.

Greenmantle by john buchan