In the dedication page, the author writes to Thomas Arthur Nelson:
"You and I have long cherished an affection for that elementary type of tale which Americans call the 'dime novel' and which we know as the 'shocker' - the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I exhausted my store of these aids to cheerfulness, and was driven to write one for myself. "This pretty much sums up how I think about the book. It is fun, cheerful, a quick, gliding read. But that is what it is.
Here, in Richard Hannay, we have a protagonist who seeks adventure, and finds it gift wrapped. The book is set in the months before WWI, and the protagonist tries to stop some particular event, details of which somehow I do not understand completely. It is much more about the chase, and reads like a movie. No wonder so many times it has been adapted to or inspired, film version.
I seem to have read quite a few books in this category of London, terror and spy/agent fiction. This one comes soon Conrad's The Secret Agent and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday in my recent reads. Not really any anarchists here. But the chase is similar to The Man who was Thursday. Although so much more logical and sensible and of this world than Chesterton's. Unlike The Secret Agent which dealt more with the politics of it all, and which belongs to a different genre altogether, this one sits in the spy thriller category, albeit with more lightness and humour, and bigness or horrors of the impending WWI is just referred to, and the dark powers reduced to three gentlemen who play the antagonists here.
Not fair to compare it like this. It is a good quick read that holds your attention completely when you read it, but soon after leaves you with very little to report.
Still, I do have a couple of things I would like to note from the book. First one is on acting:
"I remember an old scout in Rhodesia, who had done many queer things in his day, once telling me that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. You could never keep it up, he said unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it."And secondly, an interesting observation by the author on hiding in plain sight.
"If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in which he had first been observed, and this is important - really play up to this surrounding, and behave as if he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives on earth.... A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different"These two go in my list of stuff that help 'seeing'. Perceiving, observing and seeing. Stuff that makes living intense and life, rich.