The book was written in the direct aftermath of the 1926 General Strike which seemed to put the spectre of a Socialist Revolution – highly unwelcome to people of Shute's persuasion – on the British agenda.

The text is prefaced by a quotation from Sir Walter Raleigh: And then none shall be unto them so odious and disdained as the traitours ... who have solde their countrie to a straunger and forsaken their faith and obedience contrarie to nature or religion; and contrarie to that humane and generall honour not onely of Christians but of heathen and irreligious nations, who have always sustained what labour soever and embraced even death itself for their countrie, prince, and commonwealth.

Driving home after a dinner in Winchester, he chances to encounter Maurice Lenden, who in 1917 had been a fellow pilot in the Royal Flying Corps.

It emerges that Lenden, who had suffered repeated financial failure and believes himself to be divorced, has entered Soviet service as a mercenary pilot, thus becoming a traitor to his own country.

On a night espionage flight to photograph naval construction in Portsmouth Harbour, he has made a forced landing in his Breguet XIX in a remote part of the Under Hall estate.

When Fazzini has roused his men to raid the secret Communist base, Moran remarks: "His force of Fascisti paraded in the square.

They were a fine, straight body of young men, dressed in field-green breeches and black shirts and each armed with a sort of truncheon."

Rather, they interrogate him only verbally and ineffectively, and it is the Englishman Philip Stenning who brutally beats up the prisoner, breaking his arm, to extract information on the fate of Lenden.

The book achieved publication in the United States under the somewhat uninspiring title The Mysterious Aviator.Shute makes similar comments about rewriting So Disdained in his autobiography Slide Rule (page 78).