Greenmantle

Greenmantle opens in November 1915 with Richard Hannay and his friend Sandy recovering from wounds received at the Battle of Loos. Sir Walter Bullivant summons Hannay to the Foreign Office and describes a possible German and Turkish plan to provoke a vast uprising across the Muslim world. The intelligence is fragmentary: Bullivant's son has died in the region, leaving only three cryptic terms on a slip of paper. Hannay accepts the assignment despite doubting his fitness for it.

John Buchan structures the mission by division. Hannay recruits Sandy and the American John Blenkiron, then the three choose separate identities and routes toward a rendezvous in Constantinople exactly two months later. Blenkiron can move through Germany as a neutral observer, Sandy draws upon contacts in the Arab world, and Hannay plans to enter enemy territory disguised as the Boer Cornelis Brandt. One mystery therefore becomes three journeys with a fixed point of convergence.

Published in 1916, Greenmantle is the second of five Hannay novels and follows The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is set just before the war. Its form expands the earlier adventurer into an international intelligence network. Dates, clues, disguises, and parallel travel create momentum, while incomplete knowledge keeps each route exposed. The reader understands the political scale before any operative understands the plot, making structure itself the source of suspense.