Mr. Standfast

By: John Buchan

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Reluctantly posing as a pacifist, Richard Hannay infiltrates an anti-war league to capture an unimpeachable German spy.

Mr. Standfast, the third in the series of five novels following Hannay's exploits, picks up the story after Hannay has returned home from the Somme. Working for the War Office under an assumed name, he is a brigadier still under 40, taken out of the military for a another round in the spy game.

The only instructions he's given are to take up his old identity as a mining engineer from South Africa and pose as a staunch pacifist. As Hannay himself puts it: "To go into Germany as an anti-British Afrikaner was a stoutish adventure, but to lounge about at home talking rot was a very different-sized job."

Richard Hannay, the South African mining engineer and war hero, again takes listeners along as he navigates the twists and turns of espionage during the turbulent World War I years.

Spy guy: listen to more of Hannay's exploits in The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was the source for one of Alfred Hitchcock's classic films.©2008 John Buchan (P)1998 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Magnificent

Great books like this are sadly not written very often anymore really. And I never would have read it if my mother hadn't once told me that "The 39 Steps" was a great Hitchcock movie. So when I found the book on Audible performed by one of my favorite narrators, I listened to it. I was surprised and very impressed by the quality of the writing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I kept on reading the series, which gets better and better.

To categorize these books as spy thrillers doesn't do them justice; they are literary history and as deep as they are engaging. In an increasingly materialistic world, the God & eternity-centered POV - openly and very naturally expressed by characters that live and breathe - is refreshing in the extreme. The beginning was a bit slow but the story swiftly gets better and better and the end is fantastic.