Greenmantle

Greenmantle is a spy novel by the Scottish writer John Buchan, first published by Hodder and Stoughton in London in 1916. It is the second of his five novels about Richard Hannay.

The book opens in November 1915, with Hannay and his friend Sandy Arbuthnot recovering from wounds they took at the Battle of Loos. Sir Walter Bullivant, a senior intelligence officer, calls Hannay in and gives him a question to answer.

What he has to investigate is a rumoured uprising in the Muslim world, and the answer takes him through enemy territory towards Constantinople, where he is meant to meet Sandy. The novel follows the journey and what the two of them find at the end of it.

Hannay travels with three other men: Peter Pienaar, an old Boer scout, John S. Blenkiron, an American who has come to fight the Kaiser, and Sandy Arbuthnot himself, who is the Greenmantle of the title. It is one of the two Hannay novels set during the First World War, the other being Mr. Standfast.