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Edward Leithen is a lawyer in London. His friend comes home from Russia with a frightening story. A secret group is planning to destroy the whole world of cities, trains, and laws, just because they hate it. Then the friend disappears, and people start dying. Leithen must hunt a smiling, polite bad man who hides in rich houses and clubs. This short spy adventure was written just before the famous book The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Edward Leithen, a London lawyer, listens to an old friend just back from Russia telling a wild story: somewhere behind the respectable world sits a power-house, a hidden organization working to bring civilization down. Leithen almost laughs. Then his friend disappears, other men linked to the story are murdered, and the clues lead home to London, to clubs and drawing rooms and a charming villain who talks calmly about ending the modern world.
Buchan builds the book short and lean. There are no wasted scenes: a warning, a disappearance, a chase, a confrontation, each step raising the stakes. Leithen narrates in a cool, dry voice that makes the danger feel more real, not less, because he sounds like a sensible man who cannot quite believe what is happening to him either.
It works because the enemy is invisible and the hero is ordinary. Leithen has no special training, only nerve and loyalty, and the conspiracy could be anywhere, which was a new and frightening idea in 1913. Buchan wrote it just before The Thirty-Nine Steps, and you can watch the modern thriller being born: fast, cold, and impossible to put down.
Edward Leithen, a rising London lawyer, hears a strange story from an old friend just back from Russia: whispers of a hidden organization, a power-house, preparing the destruction of civilization itself. Then the friend vanishes, men are murdered, and Leithen finds the conspiracy reaching into respectable London, led by a charming villain who believes the modern world deserves to fall. John Buchan serialized this lean, dark thriller in 1913, two years before The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Edward Leithen is a rising London lawyer with a comfortable life, until an old friend returns from Russia with a strange story: whispers of a hidden organization, a power-house of conspirators quietly preparing the destruction of civilization itself. Leithen laughs it off. Then the friend vanishes, men connected to the story are murdered, and the trail leads back to respectable London and to a charming, cultured villain who calmly believes the modern world deserves to fall. Leithen, an amateur with everything to lose, finds himself hunting an enemy he cannot see.
John Buchan serialized The Power-House in 1913, two years before The Thirty-Nine Steps made him very famous, and this is the leaner, darker prototype of his thrillers: a race against an invisible enemy, with danger moving through drawing rooms as easily as through fog. Starvard carries it beside The Thirty-Nine Steps on the shelf, so readers can watch the modern thriller being invented, almost in real time. Readers who love short, cold, propulsive spy stories and amateur heroes out of their depth will devour it in an evening.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 57631.
The first chapter
The POWER-HOUSE
Title: The Power-House
Author: John Buchan
Release date: August 3, 2018 [eBook #57631]
Most recently updated: April 17, 2019
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57631
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
By JOHN BUCHAN
The
POWER-HOUSE
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY * BOSTON
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO
MAJOR-GENERAL
SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B.
MY DEAR GENERAL:
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities. I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
J.B.
CONTENTS
Preface by the Editor
CHAPTER
I. Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase
II. I First Hear of Mr. Andrew Lumley
III. Tells of a Midsummer Night
IV. I Follow the Trail of the Super-Butler
V. I Take a Partner
VI. The Restaurant in Antioch Street
VII. I Find Sanctuary
VIII. The Power-House
IX. Return of the Wild Geese
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.
Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim's trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn't abide mud—anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.
All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor-General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don't suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn about his experiences on a Boundary Commission near Lake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.
"Lucky devils," he said. "You've had all the fun out of life. I've had my nose to the grindstone ever since I left school."
I said something about his having all the honour and glory.
"All the same," he went on, "I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London. And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know."
Then he told us this story. The version I give is one he afterwards wrote down when he had looked up his diary for some of the details.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Serialized 1913; book publication 1916. Author died 1940. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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