John BuchanVerified

When a man is wrongly accused of murder and hunted across the Scottish Highlands, he discovers that the conspiracy hunting him reaches far deeper than anyone imagined. Buchan pioneered the modern thriller by making an ordinary protagonist's desperate flight for survival feel urgently real, creating a template that still defines the genre today.

A 1919 spy novel in which Richard Hannay, now a brigadier-general, is called away from the Western Front to find a German spy network in Britain. Posing as a pacifist, he follows enemy agents around the country, and the chase reaches the Swiss Alps.