His attitude to authority and empire was trustful and loyal. But his writing shows an attraction first to the exotic and the numinous, and second to the underdog, the rebel, and the outsider. In many of his novels there are mysterious and evil women with hypnotic, magical properties—including the bewitching Hilda von Einem, in Greenmantle, and a female in The Three Hostages whose hands “were laid on the arms of the chair”; “hands more delicate and shapely I have never seen, though they had also the suggestion of a furious power, like the talons of a bird of prey.”
