The Three Hostages

The war is over and Sir Richard Hannay wants nothing more than his Cotswold fields and his fishing. But three people — a young man, a girl, and a boy of ten — have been kidnapped from three countries by a single hidden hand and held against the unmasking of a vast criminal conspiracy. The only clue to where they are kept is a scrap of cryptic verse, and Hannay, dragged from his retirement against every instinct, is asked to read the riddle and find the three before the hour at which they will die.

Behind the abductions stands Dominick Medina: a young Member of Parliament, a poet, a famous shot and mountaineer, the most charming and admired man in London — and the secret head of an international network of disorder. His weapon is not the gun but the mind: Medina is a master of hypnotism, able to hollow out a man’s will and leave him a puppet of suggestion. To beat him, Hannay must pretend to fall under his spell and match wits with him face to face, holding his own mind intact while feigning that it has been broken.

The most intricately plotted of the Hannay novels, The Three Hostages lays a cipher puzzle over a triple chase and crowns it with a manhunt across a Highland deer-forest, where the hunter and the hunted change places on the open hill. Beneath the adventure runs Buchan’s most anxious theme: the thin crust of civilization over barbarism, and the modern menace of a charming manipulator who can make people want what he wants — a nightmare that the century after 1924 would make to look less like melodrama than prophecy.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, its villain, and its postwar disquiet, together with a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.