John Buchan 
Huntingtower 

According to Wikipedia, Huntingtower is a novel written by John Buchan in 1922. The first of his three Dickson Mc Cunn books, it is set near Carrick in south west Scotland around 1920. The hero is a 55-year old grocer Dickson Mc Cunn, who has sold his business and taken early retirement. As soon as he ventures out to explore the world, he is swept out of his bourgeois rut into bizarre and outlandish adventures, and forced to become a reluctant hero. The story revolves around the imprisonment under false pretenses by Bolshevik agents of an exiled Russian noblewoman. The Scottish local community mobilises to uncover and thwart the conspiracy against her, and to defend the neutrality of Scotland against the Russian revolutionary struggle. John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada. Buchan’s 100 works include nearly thirty novels, seven collections of short stories and biographies of Sir Walter Scott, Caesar Augustus, and Oliver Cromwell. Buchan’s most famous of his books were the spy thrillers (including) The 39 Steps (which was converted to a play as well as an Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, though with Buchan’s story much altered.) The ‘last Buchan’ (as Graham Greene entitled his appreciative review) was the 1941 novel Sick Heart River (American title: Mountain Meadow), in which a dying protagonist confronts in the Canadian wilderness the questions of the meaning of life. The insightful quotation ‘It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken’ is famously attributed to Buchan, as is ‘No great cause is ever lost or won, The battle must always be renewed, And the creed must always be restated.’