William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty far from the iniquities of London, is contributor of nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast, a national newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent when the editors mistake him for a novelist who shares his surname, John Courtney Boot. He is sent to the fictional African state of Ishmaelia where a civil war threatens to break out. There, despite his total ineptitude, he accidentally manages to get the "scoop" of the title....