Edward Leithen is the closest of Buchan's protagonists to theauthor's own experience and imagination. A prosperous Scots lawyer andMP in London, Leithen seeks adventure to relieve the tedium ofrespectability. In The Power House he is forced by event and accident to see civilisation as a thin veneer over the human jungle;

John Buchan's adventure stories, The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, have long held a place as classics of their kind. Only now is his historical fiction, which he himself regarded as his finest work, receiving its full due.