In The Three Hostages (1924), when Lord Artinswell disturbs the rural idyll of Sir Richard Hannay by sending him a letter ‘in the nature of a warning’ (which can only mean another job for Hannay), this is received with exasperation: ‘I had done enough for the public service and other people's interests, and it was jolly well time that I should be allowed to attend to my own.’ If Hannay's predicament elicits momentary sympathy from the reader, it is with the comfortable expectation that as soon as he rouses himself fully there will be no peace for the wicked. Buchan's own post-war intervention on behalf of another adventurer, T. E. Lawrence, was met with long-term gratitude, because Lawrence too wanted to be left alone after considerable service for his country, and Buchan helped him find the privacy in the ranks that Lawrence sought, by enabling him to serve under a pseudonym to evade his wartime celebrity. In 1915, Buchan had claimed that The Thirty-Nine Steps was a ‘romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just within the borders of the possible’. Lawrence's desert exploits in the Negev between October 1916 and October 1918 fomenting the Arab Revolt demonstrated that Buchan's romantic imagination in his fiction during the War, as reused in Greenmantle (1916), did not rely completely on fantasy. Lawrence's appeal to Buchan for assistance to hide from his celebrity is ironic, given Buchan's role in constructing the public face of Lawrence of Arabia.