Buchan wrote this in 1916 from a sickbed, in pain from a duodenal ulcer, while also serving as Director of Information for the British government and producing a twenty-four-volume history of the war that was still being fought. Somehow, between all of that, he wrote a novel about four men racing across Europe and the Near East to disrupt a German plot to start a pan-Islamic uprising against the British Empire. The book has not slowed down since.

What it teaches a working writer is that doubt is a tax on forward motion. Buchan’s hero is permitted to believe what he believes, without hedging, and the pages turn at the pace of that permission.

— G. H. Schreiber 

18/01/2026