 UK cover | |
| Author | John Buchan |
|---|---|
| Country | Scotland |
| Language | English |
| Series | Edward Leithen |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | W Blackwood & Sons [1] |
Publication date | 1916 [1] |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 238 [1] |
| Followed by | John Macnab |
The Power-House is a 1916 novel by John Buchan, published by W. Blackwood & Sons after an initial 1913 serialisation in Blackwood's Magazine . A thriller set in London, the novel is the first of five featuring the barrister and Tory MP Edward Leithen.
The story's narrator, Edward Leithen, is a promising young barrister and Member of Parliament. His friend, Tommy Deloraine, tells him about the recent mysterious disappearance of the eccentric adventurer Charles Pitt-Heron. Pitt-Heron has a reputation for dashing off abroad on a variety of madcap schemes, and initially it seems that he may have departed of his own accord. Pitt-Heron's wife Ethel, a woman Leithen retains a soft spot for, having been romantically attracted to her in the past, is perplexed. When Ethel discovers the draft of a letter her husband was evidently preparing to send her, warning of terrible danger, Tommy decides to track Pitt-Heron down.
Pitt-Heron has inadvertently become involved in an international criminal organisation known as "the Power-House", led by the rich art connoisseur Andrew Lumley, and has been forced to flee. In Central Asia, Pitt-Heron is chased by Lumley's agent Saranov, and by his right-hand man, Roth (otherwise known as Tuke the butler). With help from Macgillivray at Scotland Yard and Felix, a friend at the embassy, Leithen arranges for the border posts between Samarkand and Bokhara to be watched. Pitt-Heron, Tommy, and the two followers are identified.
Leithen finds that he is himself being watched in London. He takes into his confidence Tommy's close friend, a burly Labour MP called Chapman. Leithen receives a telephone call apparently from Macgillivray, suggesting dinner at a quiet restaurant in Antioch Street, and only after finding himself imprisoned in an upper room does he realise the call had been faked. He is rescued by the timely arrival of Chapman, who is delighted to have an opportunity to use his fists. Felix reports that Pitt-Heron and Tommy have been rescued, that one of the hunters has been killed and the other has confessed.
Now fully aware of Leithen's involvement, Lumley re-doubles his watchers and makes arrangements to have Leithen murdered. Holed up in his London flat with Chapman, Leithen eventually manages to make his escape and find his way to the embassy where he explains all to the Ambassador. He writes a letter to Macgillivray setting out his evidence, and asks that it be handed to him at 9.30 that evening. In the meantime, he drives to Lumley's London house for a final confrontation. In order to avoid further distress to the already-traumatised Ethel Pitt-Heron, Leithen offers to have the whole affair hushed up if Lumley will take the opportunity to catch the boat train to Paris before 9.30, and never return. Lumley says he will think about it, but that he wants to consider other options.
Next morning, Leithen reads in the newspaper of Andrew Lumley's sudden overnight death from heart failure. The truth is suppressed, and Lumley is lionised in press reports for his learning, connoisseurship and philanthropy. Leithen has achieved his aim, and learns from Ethel's glowing face that her troubles are over.
Buchan dedicated his novel to Major-General Sir Francis Lloyd, saying "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. [2]
"The dominant theme of Buchan's fiction is the fragility of civilisation," it has been said in the context of a discussion of The Power-House. [3] What the critic Christopher Harvie calls "perhaps the most famous line in all Buchan" [4] occurs during the first meeting between Leithen and Lumley, when the latter tells the former, "You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass" (Chapter 3). Harvie cites a comparable passage from the second volume of The Golden Bough , where Frazer speaks of "a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society," which, "unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture," is "a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any time be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering beneath."
Talking to Lumley, Leithen is reminded of an encounter he once had in Tyrol with a "Nietzschean" German professor who told him, "Someday there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march." This quote has been described as prophetic of Nazism. [5]
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
The Thirty-Nine Steps is a 1915 adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, first published by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It was serialized in All-Story Weekly issues of 5 and 12 June 1915, and in Blackwood's Magazine between July and September 1915, before being published in book form in October of that year. It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a knack for getting himself out of tricky situations.
Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1754 to 1783 when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Sydney. He held several important Cabinet posts in the second half of the 18th century. The cities of Sydney in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Sydney in New South Wales, Australia were named in his honour, in 1785 and 1788, respectively.
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine, was a British Whig lawyer and politician. He served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain between 1806 and 1807 in the Ministry of All the Talents.
Sir Robert James MacGillivray Neill KC (Hons) is a British barrister and Conservative Party politician. He has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bromley and Chislehurst since a by-election on 29 June 2006, following the death of the previous incumbent Eric Forth. He served as a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Communities and Local Government from 14 May 2010 to 4 September 2012. He is the current Chair of Parliament's Justice Select Committee.
Alfred Austin was an English poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, after an interval following the death of Tennyson, when the other candidates had either caused controversy or refused the honour. It was claimed that he was being rewarded for his support for the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury in the General Election of 1895. Austin's poems are little remembered today, his most popular work being prose idylls celebrating nature. Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote of him, “He is an acute and ready reasoner, and is well read in theology and science. It is strange his poetry should be such poor stuff, and stranger still that he should imagine it immortal.”
Major-General Sir Richard Hannay, KCB, OBE, DSO, is a fictional character created by Scottish novelist John Buchan and further made popular by the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps, very loosely based on Buchan's 1915 novel of the same name. In his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door, Buchan suggests that the character is based, in part, on Edmund Ironside, from Edinburgh, a spy during the Second Boer War, and a British Army field marshal and CIGS.
Edward C. Lumley, is a Canadian corporate executive and former politician.
The Latin phrase Demortuisnilnisibonumdicendumest, "Of the dead nothing but good is to be said." — abbreviated Nil nisi bonum — is a mortuary aphorism indicating that it is socially inappropriate for the living to speak ill of the dead who cannot defend or justify themselves.
John Macnab is a 1925 adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan.
Sir Edward Leithen is a fictional character in several of John Buchan's novels: The Power-House, John Macnab, The Dancing Floor, The Gap in the Curtain and Sick Heart River. These were published over a number of years, the first in 1916, and the last in 1941, one year after Buchan's death. Leithen's name is borrowed from the Leithen Water, a tributary of the River Tweed, one of many references to the Scottish Borders in Buchan's novels.
The Dancing Floor is a 1926 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan featuring Edward Leithen. It is the third of Buchan's five Leithen novels.
The Gap in the Curtain is a 1932 borderline science fiction novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. Part of the action is autobiographical, featuring the agonies of a contemporary up-and-coming politician. It explores the theory of serial time put forward by J W Dunne: Buchan had been reading An Experiment with Time.
Sir Richard Richards was a Welsh politician and judge. He was Member of Parliament for Helston on two occasions, but only made one speech in Parliament. He was later a successful chancery barrister, eventually becoming Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer.
It All Came True is a 1940 American musical comedy crime film starring Ann Sheridan as a fledgling singer and Humphrey Bogart, who was third-billed on movie posters, as a gangster who hides from the police in a boarding house. It is based on the Louis Bromfield novel Better Than Life. Sheridan introduced the hit song "Angel in Disguise". The picture was produced by Mark Hellinger and directed by Lewis Seiler. The cast also featured Jeffrey Lynn as the leading man, Zasu Pitts, and Una O'Connor.
James Ferguson FRSE was a Scottish advocate and Tory politician and the third Laird of Pitfour, a large estate in the Buchan area of north east Scotland, which is known as the 'Blenheim of the North'.
William Blackwood and Sons was a Scottish publishing house and printer founded by William Blackwood in 1804. It played a key role in literary history, publishing many important authors, for example John Buchan, George Tomkyns Chesney, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, John Galt, John Neal, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, John Hanning Speke and Anthony Trollope, both in books and in the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine.
Sir Archibald Roylance was a fictional character created by John Buchan. He appeared in many Buchan novels, never as the protagonist. He was a good friend of Richard Hannay and Edward Leithen despite being younger than them.
The Half-Hearted is a 1900 novel of romance and adventure by the Scottish author John Buchan. It was Buchan's first novel in a modern setting and was written when he was 24 while working for an All-Souls fellowship and reading for the bar.
The Watcher by the Threshold, and other tales is a collection of early novellas and stories, most with supernatural elements, by the Scottish author John Buchan. When first published in the UK in 1902 the collection included five stories, mainly set in the Scottish Borders. The collection was republished for the US market in 1918 under the title The Watcher by the Threshold, with four of the original stories and four new ones.
The Power-House public domain audiobook at LibriVox