Sir Walter Bullivant Sir Walter Bullivant Sir Walter Bullivant is a fictional character created by the Scottish thriller writer John Buchan for his series of novels featuring the spy Richard Hannay. He plays small but significant roles in both "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "Greenmantle". Sir Walter is a senior mandarin at the Foreign Office in the years leading up to World War I. He is the archetypal spymaster — gruff, acutely conscious of his duty, yet thoughtful and kindly towards those he sends into peril. In "Greenmantle", he recruits Hannay to perform a dangerous mission in the East as the Great Game heats
Richard Hannay Robert J. Harris, purports to be the first volume of a new series called "Richard Hannay Returns' about Hannay's adventures during World War II. In "Combined Forces" (1985), a humorous novel by Jack Smithers, Hannay teams up with the similar heroes "Sapper"'s Bulldog Drummond and Dornford Yates' Jonah Mansel. Hannay has been portrayed in four film versions of "The Thirty Nine Steps" respectively, by actors Robert Donat (in the original and most famous film adaptation, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935), Kenneth More, Robert Powell and Rupert Penry-Jones (in a 2008 BBC production). Powell reprised the role for the ITV