Edward Leithen is the closest of Buchan's protagonists to the
author's own experience and imagination. A prosperous Scots lawyer and
MP in London, Leithen seeks adventure to relieve the tedium of
respectability.

In The Power House he is forced by event and accident to see civilisation as a thin veneer over the human jungle; in John Macnab he makes his own adventure by playing the poacher; in Sick Heart River, seeking a lost friend he meets death and redemption in the wastes of Canada.


Each book contrasts with the others; each pulls us into Buchan's world and holds us there.

John Buchan's adventure stories, The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, have long held a place as classics of their kind. Only now is his historical fiction, which he himself regarded as his finest work, receiving its full due.