Literature / Mr. Standfast

Mr Standfast is a thriller novel by John Buchan. It is the third to star Richard Hannay, who was introduced in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In the last pivotal days of World War I on the Western Front, Hannay wages a battle of wits with a German spymaster, Graf von Schwabing, the last member of the spy ring he uncovered in his first adventure.

Also introduces a Love Interest (something the earlier novels had done without, not that you'd know it from any of the film versions).

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Mr Standfast contains examples of:

• Age-Gap Romance: When Richard Hannay meets Mary Lamington, he's approaching forty and she's seventeen. Hannay is somewhat self-conscious about the age gap, and Mary occasionally tweaks him about it, but nobody regards it as a serious obstacle. It's noted that Mary is mature for her age compared to what she might have been if she hadn't spent the last few years playing an active role in the war effort.
• Bait-and-Switch: Near the end, Hannay learns that von Schwabing has abducted Mary, and rushes to the villain's lair, where he finds von Schwabing standing over a figure in a chair — end of chapter. The next chapter is a flashback to Mary's abduction, and ends with the revelation that she was rescued by their colleagues before reaching the villain's lair. The chapter after that identifies the figure in the chair as Blenkiron, come to tell von Schwabing that the jig is up.
• Bittersweet Ending: The villains have been defeated and the Allied victory secured, but Peter Pienaar and Launcelot Wake each make heroic sacrifices in the final push to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: If you're going to pinion the hero in a Death Trap and declare that you have a Villainous Crush on his girlfriend, as an absolute minimum you should take his gun away before you head off leaving him completely unguarded. Otherwise you only have yourself to blame when he shoots himself free and turns up at the denouement.
• Character Overlap: The Hannay novels explicitly occupy the same universe as many of Buchan's other novels — those set in the (then) present day at least. The Author Avatar Sir Edward Leithen, the protagonist of The Power-House among others, is a member of the same gentlemen's club as Hannay and his friends (they even tell stories to each other in The Runagates Club). Leithen encounters Archie Roylance in John Macnab, and Archie in turn works with Dickson McCunn in Huntingtower and The House of the Four Winds.
• Chaste Hero: Beyond the obvious lack of time for philandering in the first couple of books, Hannay is till his marriage terribly shy around women.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Hannay is given a decoration to wear on his pocket watch to identify him to another British intelligence agent. They meet, look at each others' watches, and the story proceeds. Several chapters later, when Hannay is alone and in desperate straits, a complete stranger (also, it turns out, a British intelligence agent, in the area on unrelated business) notices his watch decoration and offers him assistance.
• The Chessmaster: The plot develops into a contest between two chessmasters, Graf von Schwabing on the German side and John S. Blenkiron on the British. Several times it turns out that von Schwabing has known the heroes' moves all along and acted against them while letting them think they were undetected — but in the end it turns out Blenkiron is even better at that game than he is.
• Chest of Medals: Hannay's is alluded to—especially funny if you've ever read Exodus 28:15ff.
  They gave me my battalion before the Somme, and I came out of that weary battle after the first big September fighting with a crack in my head and a D.S.O. I had received a C.B. for the Erzerum business, so what with these and my Matabele and South African medals and the Legion of Honour, I had a chest like the High Priest's breastplate.
• Clear My Name: Hannay goes undercover as a visiting colonial named Brand to investigate a spy ring, but after the bad guys rumble him they turn the tables by denouncing Brand to the police as a suspected spy, leading to him finding himself on the run in a miniature repeat of The Thirty-Nine Steps.
• Contrived Coincidence: The series is known for its many improbable coincidences; Buchan declares in the foreword to The Thirty-Nine Steps that he regards them as a characteristic and necessary attribute of the genre. In this novel, the remote and inaccessible Scottish cave Hannay is staking out is visited on that very evening by a possible antagonist from earlier in the book. He turns out to be a complete innocent who likes mountain climbing and just happens to be in the area.
• Cool Old Guy: Peter Pienaar, who taught Hannay most of what he knows about disguise, spying, and veldtcraft. Will calmly walk into occupied Germany or across No Man's Land if necessary. Especially good at breaking out of prison, knocking you out with a well-aimed tea-tray, snuffing the lights in a public-house with a revolver, or rescuing your kidnapped Love Interest. Eventually discovers his life's calling as an elderly RAF air ace.
• Cyanide Pill: When von Schwabing is captured at the end, he attempts to commit suicide with a poison pill hidden in his cigarette case, but is foiled by an alert guard.
• Determinator: Probably Richard Hannay's defining character trait as well as his preferred modus operandi, both mental and physical—he will keep running long after anyone else would have lain down and died from exhaustion, exposure, injuries, or being blown up.
• Diabolical Mastermind: Otto von Schwabing, the German spy and Master of Disguise (two other characters, the pacifist leader Moxon Ivery and the American journalist Clarence Donne, are actually his aliases), who is plotting to undermine the British war effort.
• Distressed Dude: Hannay gets lured into a Death Trap, from which he extracts himself with a combination of astronomy, trajectories, brute strength and really good shooting.
• Dragon Ascendant: The Big Bad of Mr Standfast, von Schwabing, was the second-in-command of the spy ring Hannay uncovered in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

• Feed the Mole: Hannay is asked to help uncover a spy ring that's leaking British military secrets to the Germans. He assumes at first that the aim is to catch them in the act and arrest them, but Blenkiron quickly and firmly corrects him: they want the ring discovered intact if possible, so that it can be used to feed the Germans with disinformation.
• Fictional Counterpart: The garden city of Biggleswick, which Hannay visits while working undercover, is based on Letchworth in Hertfordshire.
• Foil: The supporting character Launcelot Wake acts as a foil to the main villain, Otto von Schwabing. Von Schwabing approves of the War and has encouraged it for his own ends, but (although a bold man in his own world of espionage) loses his nerve when he gets caught in the field of actual battle. Wake is a committed pacifist on idealistic grounds, but no coward, and shows great courage when he starts working in the war zone first as a Red Cross worker and then as a messenger. Hannay first meets Wake, and initially dislikes him, around the same time as von Schwabing's first appearance in the novel, in a cover identity of whom Hannay initially thinks very highly. In the penultimate chapter, their deaths occur in quick succession and are directly contrasted, with Wake being fatally wounded while carrying a vital message under heavy fire and von Schwabing getting himself killed by cracking up and running out in front of his own side's guns.
• Forged Message: Mary is lured out of safety into the villain's clutches by a forged message purporting to be from Hannay; when he sees it afterward, Hannay admits it to be a convincing imitation of his handwriting and prose style.
• Four-Star Badass: Richard Hannay, who is commissioned as a Captain at the start of the First World War and ends it as a Major-General with knighthood and a Chest of Medals.
• Funetik Aksent: Buchan depicts Scottish accents phonetically, and with sufficient faithfulness that several different accents can be distinguished between the various characters Hannay meets on his Scottish adventure.
• Go Seduce My Archnemesis: The villain falls for Mary without at first being aware that she's an agent of British military intelligence; she has to play along enough to keep him interested while her colleagues work to bring him down.
• Have a Gay Old Time: Given that he was writing in the early twentieth century, Buchan has his moments — most notably, Richard Hannay is known to his friends as 'Dick'.
• Heroic RRoD: At one point Hannay's exertions catch up with him and he is bedbound for several days with a relapse of the malaria he caught in his Africa days.
• Heroic Sacrifice: There's at least two during the final battle. Launcelot Wake volunteers to carry a vital message over hazardous terrain and is fatally wounded, but gets the message through. Peter Pienaar rams a German plane with his own, killing himself along with the German pilot, to prevent the German returning to base with information that would turn the tide of the battle.
• Hospital Hottie: Near the beginning, Hannay goes to visit his wounded comrade Blaikie in hospital and is struck by the beauty and charm of one of the nurses. (When he asks Blaikie who she is, Blaikie says he hasn't noticed her in particular, which Hannay takes as a sign of how unwell he still is.) Hannay and the nurse meet again not long afterward, and this time he gets her name: Mary Lamington. They end up getting married.

• It's Personal: The investigation becomes this for Hannay when he learns that the spy master he's up against is the last surviving leader of the spy ring he helped defeat in The Thirty-Nine Steps and even more so when he learns that they're both in love with the same woman.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy
• Just Between You and Me: When the evil mastermind captures Hannay, he can't resist an extended gloat about how he's outmaneuvered British Intelligence and been one step ahead of them the whole way. He does it again when he thinks he has Blenkiron in his clutches, only for Blenkiron to calmly cut him off and explain how thoroughly he's been beaten at his own game.
• Lazy Alias: Richard Hannay usually averts this when working under cover, but sometimes he slips up. Having used the pseudonym 'Cornelius Brandt' in Greenmantle, he opts for the almost-identical 'Cornelius Brand' in Mr Standfast.
• Literary Allusion Title: The title of Mr Standfast comes from The Pilgrim's Progress, which is also alluded to throughout the text.
• Master Actor: Hannay, quoting his old friend Peter Pienaar, states that acting the part is a necessary component of any disguise, and may even be the most important part of any disguise, more than costume or make-up. "A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different." The greatest masters of disguise in the series can appear to be a completely different person without any costume or props at all.
• Master of Disguise: Otto von Schwabing, the Big Bad, to the point that on occasions Hannay spends hours in his company without recognizing him, and on one occasion Hannay knows that a certain person must be him in disguise but still has trouble seeing through the deception. About halfway through Mr Standfast, Hannay happens to see von Schwabing's true self show through in an unguarded moment, and from that point on is always able to recognise him whenever he sees him but not when he only hears him speaking out of the darkness.
• Nobody Here but Us Birds: There's a scene where Hannay is exploring one of the spy ring's hidden meeting places while a colleague keeps watch and hoots like an owl to warn him when somebody approaches.
• Not My Driver: This is pulled on the villain by the heroes near the end, with von Schwabing's chauffeur being replaced by a British intelligence agent.
• Officer and a Gentleman: Richard Hannay, Sandy Arbuthnot, Archie Roylance.
• Once per Episode: As in each of the first three novels, Hannay is bedbound for several days due to a relapse of the malaria he caught in his Africa days, and ends up figuring out something important as a result of having nothing to do but lie and think.
• Shout-Out: Mr Standfast can be seen as one big shout-out to The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan — Hannay uses a copy of that book to decipher coded messages throughout the story, and the title refers to a character from it.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Definitely on the Idealist end of the scale owing to Buchan's convictions about the war. However his idealism need not be mistaken for ignorance or shallowness. The books treat Germans sympathetically and Buchan witnessed trench warfare firsthand as a newspaper correspondent.
• The So-Called Coward: Launcelot Wake is a sensitive artistic pacifist unable to handle himself in a fight—so naturally Hannay views him with contempt. Turns out he's a pacifist for truly idealistic reasons and is quite possibly the bravest person in the book. As the war progresses, he volunteers as a medical worker in the front lines and during the climactic battle dies heroically from wounds earned carrying a vital message under heavy fire.
• The Spymaster:
  • Graf von Schwabing for the Germans.
  • On the British side, Sir Walter Bullivant continues in this role as in the previous novels. John Blenkiron takes over direct charge of the particular operation Hannay and Mary Lamington are involved in, and proves to be a devious chessmaster.
• Stern Chase: It's just not a Buchan novel if at some point there isn't an awesome Stern Chase.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Richard Hannay and friends.
• Trust Password: The German spy ring uses the closing lines of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Wanderer's Nightsong" ("The little birds in the forest are silent." / "Wait, soon you will rest too.") as their sign and countersign. The first time Hannay hears it, he narrates that it is
  Clearly some kind of password, for sane men don't talk about little birds in that kind of situation.
• Underground Railroad: Inverted — the Untergrundbahn is a German operation to kidnap and imprison people who might be a danger to the German war effort.
• Villainous Crush: The evil mastermind is revealed to have fallen in love with the same woman Hannay has, which adds to the feeling that this time It's Personal and contributes to the villain's downfall.
• Villain on Leave: In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay defeats a German spy ring at the outset of World War I. The first sequel, Greenmantle, has a new and unrelated group of villains, but then the second sequel, Mr Standfast, sees the Dragon from the first novel return as the Big Bad, leading a new spy ring in the closing months of the War, and getting his final come-uppance.
• Wacky Americans Have Wacky Names: Hannay's American ally John S. Blenkiron.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian: Taken to extremes by Richard Hannay. At one point, Hannay has an opportunity to shoot the Big Bad — but, because he's in a crowded location and has his back to him, he declines.

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