He's summoned not to the War Office, but to the Foreign Office and offered a different job altogether. Now, with his recuperation almost done, he receives a telegramme that raises hopes of being given a battalion to command. This was trench warfare at its most infamous, famed for being the first use of poison gas by the British which succeeded in killing as many of our own as it did the enemy, the campaign summed up at the beginning of Oh What A Lovely War by the scoreboard reading: British Losses: 60,000/ Total Allied Losses: 250,000/ Ground Gained: 0 Yards. Our hero, Major Richard Hannay, is convalescing in a Hampshire Country House 'after Loos'… the so-called big push of September / October 1915. The good news is that that almost certainly guarantees another outing for Buchan's work – a chance for me to read more of it, and hopefully, a re-assessment of its value.

Tastes in books are as fickle as they are in shoes. I can't answer that, except, I guess, to say that fashions change. That lifts them from being 'classics of the genre' into something much more important. So ignorant in fact, that not only was I amazed to discover that he wrote over 30 novels, 60-odd non-fiction works (including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell) and 7 collections of short stories, but even more fascinated to realise that he was writing much earlier than I thought – that The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle were published almost contemporaneously with the events they portray. I put myself well into that ignorance camp. Let's be honest most of us only know that one from the many film versions, just about all of which take huge liberties with the original plot. Really? John Buchan? Oh yes, he wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps… and that's as far as most of us get. I'm told that Buchan is still widely read. Summary: Boys own adventure set in the First World War, that has eerie resonances today, but remains great escapist fun.

Greenmantle by John Buchan