Sometimes I read a good review of a book and go out and buy it the next day. Sometimes the effect of a good review is delayed, in that I leave it too late to buy the book before it goes out of print, but quite often I have seen a book in the second-hand shelves and remembered that I meant to buy it when it first came out. Bingo! A bargain. But the other day I surprised even myself by buying a new book 70 years after it came out.

It happened like this. In August I have to go up to Edinburgh to do a talk at the Book Festival, and a young man called Calum rang me up and said they were asking all the authors on the programme to recommend their own choice of reading to the visitors. He rang me up several times, actually, because although I have enjoyed hundreds of books I can never think of any of them off the top of my head, and I kept playing for time. Finally he nailed me down, though, and I went for Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman and Conan Doyle’s The Tragedy of the Korosko.

“I don’t know that one,” said Calum.

“It’s a very old-fashioned adventure yarn,” I said. “Also bang up to date. A boatload of Western tourists on the Nile get kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists and are threatened with death unless they convert. There are rescue attempts, shootings, hostage fatalities … Quite modern considering it was written a hundred years ago.”

“Mmm,” said Calum politely. “Well, I read a good yarn the other day which I can heartily recommend to you as well. A John Buchan book called The Free Fishers.”

“Don’t know that one,” I said.

I haven’t read any John Buchan for years. My dad gave me the Richard Hannay stories when I was a lad, and I devoured them, and in my teens I read a few more, but you don’t read John Buchan when you’re grown-up, do you?

That’s not what I said to Calum.

“I’ll get it and read it,” I said.

“It’s good,” he said. “And the plot is amazingly modern.”

And much to my surprise I did order it (still in print) and read it, and by gum, it’s been a long time since I read a rattling good adventure yarn. It’s set in Napoleonic times, and it’s about a plot to destabilise Britain by assassinating Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister, but really the whole thing is about the endless chases, and the coming together of unlikely allies, and the way each of the goodies has his own talent (for sailing, or horsemanship, or whatever) and how they finally get there in the nick of time to stop the evil intent of the baddies, in this case the death threat to Spencer Perceval being carried out. (Which is odd, because in real life Perceval was indeed assassinated.)

Buchan being Buchan, the women are all improbable creations (was Buchan a bit scared of women?) and the book is also scattered with a few choice Scots terms, such as “widdershins”, the old word for anti-clockwise or even just the wrong way round. The one that most startled me was the word “feck” which nowadays has been popularised by Father Ted as a euphemism for the F-word, but was used by Buchan in its proper Scots meaning of “majority”. So “the feck of the folk” means “most people”. That makes sense. But it’s still odd to see John Buchan fecking away…

When Calum said that the plot was very modern, I don’t think he meant the plan to assassinate the PM. The main villain of the piece is a man whose ideals are based on the French Revolution, and who is prepared to achieve drastic social change by violence, which certainly suggests parallels with modern fundamentalism. Talking of which, I wonder if Calum has read The Tragedy of the Korosko yet…? It would be nice to compare notes on it with someone. I have never met anyone yet who has read it.