"Dick, have you ever considered what diabolical weapon that can be—using all the channels of modern publicity to poison and warp men's minds? It is the most dangerous thing on earth. You can use it cleanly—as I think on the whole we did during the War—but you can also use it to establish the most damnable lies. Happily in the long run it defeats itself, but only after it has sown the world with mischief."

"He said that the great offensives of the future would be psychological, and he thought the Governments should get busy about it and prepare their defence...He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion, and he wanted to meet it at the source, by getting at the mass-persuader."

This remarkably prescient book was published in 1924, but the author seemed to have a direct line on today. Sir Richard Hannay believes he has retired from service to his country, only to be pulled back in by a most desperate case. People seem to agree that this is the best of the Hannay novels and while I haven't yet read them all, it's certainly my favorite so far. Despite the highly technical climax where Hannay is scaling cliffs and outwitting his enemy with his woodcraft, I found this a gripping spy-thriller. Yes, it has its share of politically incorrect references and language, and your sensitivity to that content may vary. But if you can get past that, there's a fine adventure here. ( )

review of
John Buchan's The Three Hostages
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 13, 2019



I got this bk, used, b/c the jacket informed me that the author had also written The Thirty-Nine Steps. I've never read that but I enjoyed the Alfred Hitchcock movie based on it so I wanted to read something by Buchan. I've used snippets of the Hitchcock movie in my movie entitled The 26 Mmmms: http://youtu.be/1YQI5IBEA0A . A further enticement for buying this bk was that it's a paperback-sized hardback.

I was a bit disappointed to find that this was somewhat like Sapper's Bulldog Drummond - The Carl Peterson Quartet, something that I was astonished to discover that I read more than 5 yrs ago ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/362026-review-of-bulldog-drummond---the-car... ). To quote from the 1st paragraph of my Bulldog Drummond review:

"If I had any 'guilty pleasures', reading Bulldog Drummond might be one of them.. but I don't, so it isn't. Many yrs ago, but probably w/in the last decade, I read Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night. I thought I reviewed it on Goodreads. Apparently, I haven't. IF I HAD I'd be directing the reader of this review to my pan of the Spillane bk - but I didn't even bother to pan it. Spillane wrote hard-boiled anti-Communist propaganda crime fiction in the 1940s & 1950s. No doubt they were very popular. The lurid cover of One Lonely Night has a naked 'white' woman hanging from her wrists from a rope hanging from a ceiling. In the story, she's being brutally interrogated by some commies. We all know that commies love torturing pretty 'white' women - I mean it's not like they fought against nazis or anything, they're just low criminals & all that talk of economic justice & fairness & suchlike is just a smokescreen to cover up their natural sordidness. Thank GOD for detective Mike Hammer."

The point, vis à vis The Three Hostages, is that Buchan seems to be another 'right-wing' crime fiction novelist. As w/ the Bulldog Drummond movies that I've seen, the main character as presented in Hitchcock's movie is much more loveable than he is here.

This was 1st published in July, 1924. It seems like I've read, fairly often, that Britain was somewhat anti-semitic in the early 20th century & that there was more sympathy for Hitler than might ordinarily be supposed.

The main character is a recurring one: "Occasional references will be found in this tale to the earlier experiences of Sir Richard Hannay, which are chronicled in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Geenmantle and Mr. Standfast." (p ix) Hannay seems like a slightly run-of-the-mill anti-semite (& anti-whatever-else), not really a genocidal one. Here're some standard tastes of how that plays out in various passages in The Three Hostages, the sentiments aren't necessarily expressed by Hannay:

""Think of it!" he cried. "All the places with names like spells—Bokhara, Samarkand—run by seedy little gangs of communist Jews." - p 2

"I knew it, of course, for the name of one of the richest men in the world—the American banker who had done a lot of Britain's financial business in the War, and was in Europe now at some international conference. I remembered that Blenkiron, who didn't like his race, had once described him to me as "the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul."" - p 27

"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. You found it among the young Bolshevik Jews, among the young entry of the wilder Communist sects, and very notably among the sullen murderous hobbledehoys in Ireland." - p 36

"Look at the Irish ! They are the cleverest propagandists extant, and managed to persuade most people that they were a brave, generous, humorous, talented, warm-hearted race, cruelly yoked to a dull mercantile England, when God knows they were exactly the opposite."" - p 74

Well, well.. were there Bolsheviks who weren't Jews who the author thought were fine upstanding people? I think not. So why pick on the Jews so much? As for the Irish? If they were "exactly the opposite" of their alleged self-propagandizing, that wd make them 'a cowardly, miserly, humorless, untalented, mean-spirited race, cruelly yoking themselves to an exciting non-mercantile England' — so, GEE, why didn't the English just set them free & be rid of Ireland's parasitic nature?! Probably b/c Buchan's grossly propagandizing a cover-up for Britain's completely vampiric relationship to Ireland. I don't think the Irish ever asked to have their language made illegal or for the British to loot them.

Still, Buchan's not as nasty as Sapper & Sapper's not as nasty as Spillane.

Sir Richard is approached to help find 3 kidnapped family members of 3 powerful people.

""You may have heard of me," he went on. "I am a very rich man, and my wealth has given me power, so that Governments honour me with their confidence. I am concerned in various important affairs, and it would be false modesty to deny that my word is weightier than that of many Prime Ministers. I am labouring, to secure peace in the world, and consequently I have enemies, all those who would perpetuate anarchy and war." - p 29

Ha ha! Yep, it's not governments that perpetuate war it's people who are against governments who perpetuate war. (NOT) Glad we got that 'cleared' up.

"These fellows were wreckers on the grand scale, merchants of pessimism, giving society another kick downhill whenever it had a chance of finding its balance, and then pocketing their profits.

"Their motive, as I have said, was gain, but that was not the motive of the people they worked through. Their cleverness lay in the fact that they used the fanatics, the moral imbeciles as Macgillivray called them, whose key was a wild hatred of something or other, or a reasoned belief in anarchy." - p 73

Wow, Buchan really sees deeply: anarchists are tools of war-mongering capitalists! It's not governments that use fanatics as tools, oh, no, how cd anyone be so naive as to think that armies are tools of resource-grabbing!! No, no, it's secret cabals of Bolshevik Jewish Irishmen using anarchists to do their dirty-work. Believe that one & I'll tell you another one!! It's actually hard to believe that Buchan is really this naive.

"We would have drifted into politics if Pugh had not asked him his opinion of Gandhi. That led him into an exposition of the meaning of the fanatic, a subject on which he was well qualified to speak, for he had consorted with most varieties.

""He is always in the technical sense mad—that is, his mind is tilted from its balance, and since we live by balance he is a wrecker, a crowbar in the machinery.["]" - p 96

The "technical sense"? Was Ghandi running heavy machinery while under the influence? 95 yrs after this bk was published Ghandi is generally considered a paragon of peaceful resistance to oppression. No doubt, in Buchan's world, the domination of India by the British Empire was not a tilt of that country's balance from its pursuit of its own destiny into one controlled by the imperialistic motives of the Brits. Thankfully, Ghandi won in the end & the Brits had to leave. Poor babies.

Hey! But where's the mystery gotten to?

"All the while she was cooing to me in a voice which was like the drowsy swell of the sea. If I had wanted to go to sleep I could have dropped off easily, but, as I didn't want to, I had no difficulty in resisting the gentle coercion. That, I fancy, is my position about hypnotism. I am no kind of use under compulsion, and for the thing to affect me it has to have the backing of my own will." - p 126

""Go to the door—no, on all-fours—open it twice, and bring me the paper-knife from that far table in your mouth."

"I obeyed, and a queer sight I must have presented prancing across the room, a perfectly sane man behaving like a lunatic."

[..]

"Then he spat in my face.

"That, I admit, tried me pretty high. It was such a filthy Kaffir trick that I had some trouble in taking it resignedly. But I managed it." - p 167

Now, there are several meanings to "Kaffir". I know, I use the name Amir-ul Kafirs. I'm deducing that he's using the derogatory South African term for dark-skinned people who speak Bantu. That's not the one that my name refers to.

Yes, some baddies are trying to turn Sir Richard into a Manchurian Candidate. No such luck.. but they don't know that. Anyway, in case you thought we'd gotten past the bigotry, we haven't.

"A nigger band, looking like monkeys in uniform, pounded out some kind of barbarous jingle, and sad-face marionettes moved to it." - p 154

Gee, I wonder what sort of animal the author wd've looked like if he were in uniform trying to play 1920s jazz. A sloth? A roadkill?

In the meantime, Sir Richard is accomplishing wonders w/ his mind-slave routine. He gets his wannabe 'master' to do a little philosophical rambling:

""Today we incline to put a false interpretation on the word Power. We think of it in material terms like money, or the control of great patches of inanimate nature. But it still means, as it has always meant, the control of human souls, and to him who acquires that everything else is added.["]" - p 180

Gosh, ain't it just the truth?! But what about human soul hoarders? I mean what if you just collect them & keep them in piles everywhere w/o bothering to even remember who they belong to? It can be such a waste.

Anyway, I'm not really telling you much about the plot of this bk, I'm not spoiling the plot, why I'm barely even saying wch character I'm quoting from. Take this, you.. you..

"["]One of my subjects was Michael Scott. Yes—the wizard, only he wasn't a wizard, but a very patient and original thinker. He was a Borderer like me.["]" - p 203

"Scott was so famous, he has become a legend – nothing but a legend, for some. Like Roger Bacon, he was a man of science; like Bacon, after his death, his life became obscured by a smokescreen of myth and legend. A man promoting science had become a fairytale character. In 1385, Bacon was said to be capable of conjuring a bridge out of thin air to span a river – in the previous century, Scott was said to have split the Eildon Hills! Amongst his other legendary accounts was that he supposedly locked the plague in a secret vault of Glenluce castle. Rightfully called “The Scottish wizard”, he was nevertheless a Scottish export – like Bacon was very much an English export. He studied abroad and worked abroad, most famously at the court of Emperor Frederick II in Sicily. His fame earned him a place in Dante’s Inferno, as well as Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophie. He is often referred to as “the most renowned and feared sorcerer and alchemist of the 13th century”. That other famous Scotsman, Sir Walter Scott, included him in Lay of the Last Minstrel and claimed he descended from his namesake." - https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/michaelscott/

Well, there's one thing I got from this bk. I'd never heard of Micahel Scott or I'd forgotten about him so now I'm interested.

Here's another character I'm not identifying talking about a person I'm not identifying. The following quotes are taken so far out of context that one has to wonder.

"["]I think if I ever could commit murder it would be his life I would take. I should feel like Charlotte Corday.["]" - p 289

Oh you shd, shd you?

"Descended from a noble family, educated in a convent at Caen, and royalist by sentiment, yet susceptible also to the ideals of the Enlightenment, Corday was living with an aunt in Caen when it became a centre of the “federalist” movement against the National Convention after the expulsion of the Girondins in May–June 1793. Inspired especially by Charles Barbaroux among the Girondin refugees, she left for Paris to work for the Girondin cause.

"There Corday solicited an interview with Marat because of the influence of his newspaper over the masses, and on July 13, 1793 she was finally admitted to his presence while he was in his bath. She named dissidents in Normandy; he noted them and assured her that they would be guillotined. She then drew a knife from under her dress and stabbed him through the heart. Arrested on the spot, she was tried and convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal (July 16–17) and forthwith guillotined on the Place de la Révolution." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Corday

There's a lesson in there somewhere. I'm not sure what it is. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get an interview w/ a politician when he or she are in the bath-tub. Maybe it's a superstition, I dunno. I know that even when a woman's getting into the bath-tub w/ me I always check her for hidden weapons. Usually I won't even let them see me in the bath-tub. That must be why I have a reputation for being so dirty. Minded.

"His anger made his spirits rise. All his life he had been a man of tropical loves and tempetuous hates. He had loathed the Boche, and freemasons, and communists, and the deputies of his own land" - p 308

I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the dep-u-TEE-ee

What the heck, might as well throw the "Boche" in there — & why leave out the freemasons?

"I remember that he talked a good deal of politics, but, ye gods ! what a change from the respectable conservative views which he had once treated me to—a Tory revival owing to the women and that sort of thing ! He declared that behind all the world's creeds—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the rest—lay an ancient devil-worship, and that it was raising its head again. Bolshevism, he said, was a form of it, and he attributed the success of Bolshevism in Asia to a revival of what he called Shamanism—I think that was the word."

[..]

"The common anarchist was a fool to him, for the cities and temples of the whole earth were not sufficient sacrifice to appease his vanity." - p 351

Now we're getting somewhere, eh? Religions are devil-worship, even Buddhism, & the success of Bolshevism, even though it's athiestic, is a form of devil-worship, aka Shamanism. Right. Too bad McDonalds wasn't around in 1924. I wd've loved to've seen Ronnie thrown in the mix. BUT WHY AREN'T THE JEWS LISTED AS DEVIL-WORSHIPPERS? Who can trust a guy who isn't conflating the Jews w/ Boche Irish devil-worshipping "nigger band"s? I'll bet the freemason monkies are behind it all.

""Good Lord!" said Leithen. "I don't like this. Is it another war?"

"Palliser-Yeates did not answer at once. "It looks like it. I admit it's almost unthinkable, but, then, all wars are really unthinkable, till you're in the middle of them."

""Nonsense !" Medina cried. "There's no nation on the globe fit to go to war, except half-civilized races with whom it is the normal condition. You forget how much we know since 1914. You couldn't even get France to fight without provoking a revolution—a middle class revolution, the kind that succeeds."" - p 363

Well, there you have it. I decided to look up "US presidents & their wars" online to see whether Democrats or Republicans had more wars to their (dis)credit & waddyaknow? I found this: http://retiary.org/misc_pages/us_presidents_and_wars.html created by Laurie Spiegel, well-known composer of electronic music. Some presidents don't have any wars next to their names:

Adams, John - Federalist
Adams, John Quincy - Democratic-Republican
Van Buren, Martin - Democratic
Harrison, William Henry - Whig
Tyler, John - Whig
Taylor, Zachary - Whig
Fillmore, Millard - Whig
Buchanan, James - Democratic
Grant, Ulysses Simpson - Republican
Hayes, Rutherford Birchard - Republican
Garfield, James Abram - Republican
Arthur, Chester Alan - Republican (He didn't have a Vice President!)
Cleveland, (Stephen) Grover - Democratic
Taft, William Howard - Republican
Harding, Warren Gamaliel - Republican
Coolidge, (John) Calvin - Republican
Hoover, Herbert Clark - Republican
Ford, Gerald Rudolph - Republican

It looks like the Republicans are historically the least war-mongering. Maybe we shd just bring back the Whigs to be on the safe side.

Oh! This bk? It was ok. I'll probably never read anything by Buchan again. The mystery? Yeah, that was ok. I was rooting for the good guys. That was easy b/c good & evil were so clearly delineated. Whatever. ( )

I read this many years ago, but this time saw all the easy racism, the false narratives of WWI that enabled appeasement. From the perspective of wanting to understand why the Brits engaged in appeasement, this is a perfect book.

A more-or-less standard Richard Hanay thriller. Someone has kidnapped three young people related to high government officials. They also seem to have a hold on some sensitive documents. There appears to be some kind of clue embedded in a poem. Hanay and his cronies work round the clock, and travel all over the place, eventually saving the day. ( )

While a few aspects of this 4th installment in the Richard Hannay series show their age (this was first published in 1924), most of it is surprisingly still relevant. The use of propaganda to get fanatics or troubled youngsters to stir up trouble is something we can see today.

The only thing that really holds me back from a 5 star rating is the abruptness of the ending. I would have liked one or two more pages although in reality, there was nothing more that needed to be said. ( )