Prester John

David Crawfurd is nineteen, broke, and stuck behind the counter of a trading store in the South African veld when he works out what the Reverend John Laputa is planning. Laputa, educated and magnetic, carries the ruby necklet said to have belonged to Prester John himself, and he means to raise the tribes and drive the settlers into the sea. Buchan wrote this in 1910, five years before Richard Hannay, and the chase machinery is already running at full speed. Modern readers meet its colonial assumptions head on, yet Buchan gives Laputa a grandeur that unsettles his own politics, and the villain ends up the largest figure in the book. Read the full novel here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.