We are told – and shown – that he is a master of disguise (a seaman, a groom, a Nonconformist minister, an opium addict, a common loafer, an Italian priest, a bookseller, a plumber, a dying man, an elderly huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ type and a woman is I think the whole roster). Sherlock Holmes is a different proposition.

The same could be said of the ebullient and irascible Professor Challenger from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Allan Quartermain, the hero of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, is so charismatic he couldn’t hide in a room full of Allan Quartermain impressionists. Hannay has been assuming identities all of his adult life – a Scotsman, a British official, a Westerner, a European in Africa – so doing so to save his life is second nature.ĭisguise is a peculiar phenomenon in literature. The novel is remarkable in terms of the number of disguises Hannay adopts, starting with switching places with the milkman, impersonating a political candidate at a hustings, taking on the role of a road mender, donning the apparel of a fisherman. In the novel, he knows how to speak with the drunken shepherd on the train and how to speak with Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office. In short, Hannay is the perfect literary chameleon.Īs a Scot of the Empire, Hannay is the perfect insider/outsider figure and must have had to become adept at a behavioural form of what sociolinguistics call “code-switching”. When the mysterious conspiracy theorist Scudder is murdered in his house, it precipitates a chain of events where Hannay, time and again, relies on his experiences as a Scot of the Empire to extricate himself. At the opening of the novel he has returned from colonial duties in South Africa and pronounces himself “pretty well disgusted with life in London”. Richard Hannay is a Scot, and, more importantly, a Scot of the British Empire. It also has affinities with the invasion fantasies of William Le Queux and Erskine Childers, and, further back, the ‘man on the run’ theme can be found in two of Buchan’s literary heroes, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.īut there was something different about Buchan’s ‘dime novel’ or ‘shocker’ – like Grahame Greene, Buchan took an almost perverse delight in belittling his greatest achievements – and much of that has to do with the nationality of the hero. Buchan took an almost perverse delight in belittling his greatest achievements

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