Many contemporaries knew John Buchan, or Tweedsmuir, only as journalist and statesman. Some readers knew him as historian and biographer. But most readers in both England and America knew Buchan best for his fiction, as the writer of the exciting adventures of Sir Edward Leithen, Dickson McCunn, and Richard Hannay. Hannay is the gentleman-hero of the popular spy-thriller--or "shocker" as Buchan called his adventure novels--The Thirty-Nine Steps, which sold over a million copies in English, has been translated into many other languages, and in 1935 was made into a popular film by Alfred Hitchcock.

But Buchan was also a serious novelist in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, both important influences on his early works. Buchan's literary output is prodigious. He wrote thirty novels, seven books of short stories, sixty-six other books, seven full-length biographies, several short biographies and memoirs, and many articles. He...