Mr. Standfast

Mr. Standfast is a spy novel by the Scottish writer John Buchan, first published in 1919. It is the third of the five novels he wrote about Richard Hannay, and one of the two that are set during the First World War.

Hannay is recalled from active service in France to take on a secret mission, which is to find a dangerous German agent who is operating in Britain. Since he cannot do that as himself, he goes under cover as a pacifist and travels the country in that character.

The other Hannay novel set in the war is Greenmantle, which appeared three years earlier, and the best known of them all, The Thirty-Nine Steps, takes place in the period just before the war began. The title of this one comes from a character in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

The book refers to that allegory a good deal. Hannay uses a copy of it to decode messages from his contacts, and letters from his friend Peter Pienaar are worked out the same way.