Buchan and the Napoleons of Crime

I suggested in an earlier post that you could learn a lot about British ignorance and blindness in and around World War I by considering the career of John Buchan. As a followup, I went looking for a copy of his “great game” novel, Greenmantle. I didn’t find one. But for $3 and change, I got a copy of The Three Hostages, hitherto unknown to me, which expands the inquiry.

TH is not a great novel, but it has great atmospherics: a nostalgia for the old verities, and high anxiety by a new world that seems hard to comprehend. It also has the one great essential of a good adventure novel: an arch-fiend, in this case Dominic Medina, schemer extraordinaire. Here is the world-view, as filtered through the narrator's friend Macgillvray:

A large part of the world had gone mad, and that involved the growth of inexplicable and unpredictable crime. All the old sanctities had become weakened, and men had grown too well accustomed to death and pain. This meant that the criminal had far greater resources at his command, and, if he were an able man, could mobilize a vast amount of utter recklessness and depraved ingenuity. The moral imbecile, he said, had been more or less a sport before the War; now he was a terribly common product, and throve in batches and battalions. Cruel, humourless, hard, utterly wanting in a sense of proportion, but often full of a perverted poetry and drunk with rhetoric—a hideous, untamable breed had been engendered. (TH 15-16)

(Published in 1924)

On the surface, he is an appealing guy:

He is the only fellow I ever heard of who was adored by women and also liked by men. He’s a first-class sportsman and said to be the best shot in England after His Majesty. He’s a coming man in politics, too, and a most finished speaker. I once heard him, and, though I take very little stock in oratory, he almost had me on my feet. He has knocked a bit about the world, and he is also a very pretty poet, though that wouldn’t interest you. (TH 39)

But one shouldn’t be misled:

I know of no word to describe how he impressed me except ‘wickedness.’ He seemed to annihilate the world of ordinary moral standards, all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space. His consuming egotism made life a bare cosmos in which his spirit scorched like a flame. … Medina made an atmosphere which was like a cold bright air in which nothing can live. He was utterly and consumedly wicked, with no standard which could be remotely related to ordinary life. (TH 183)

I’d like to say there’s a lot more. ‘In fact, I can’t: the plot more or less unravels about halfway through. Buchan never really specifies in detail just how Medina is going to destroy the world and the whole gang goes for a vacation in Scotland. Still it is wonderful to see replayed in this context the enduring conviction: that if the world is a bad place, then it must be some bad guy who is pulling all the strings. Heaven knows, Western fiction has known any number of arch fiends, is heavy on arch-fiends. Holmes’ Professor Moriarty; Chesterton’s Sunday; heck, the Napoleon of Crime himself, McCavity the Cat. Osama Bin Laden. Oh, wait…