He was educated at
Forest School and
Hertford College,
Oxford. He matriculated in October 1888, obtained Third Class Honours in Classical Moderations in 1890, and graduated with Third Class Honours in Law in 1892. While at Oxford, he was one of the original subscribers to John Woodward and George Burnett's
Treatise on Heraldry British and Foreign (1892), and he had a lifelong interest in
heraldry. He was Secretary of the
Oxford Union in 1891. He was called to the Bar by the
Inner Temple but in 1899–1900 he was War Correspondent of
The Times during the
South African War. He was also involved, with his close and lifelong friend
Rudyard Kipling and others, in a daily paper called
The Friend started by
Lord Roberts in
Bloemfontein during the
Boer War. This South African experience launched a career of world travel, journalism, and other writing, so that he described himself in ''Who's Who
as "special correspondent, dramatist, and author"''. At a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1915,
Lord Curzon of Kedleston, former
Viceroy of
India, described Landon as "
a writer of exceptional ability on Eastern and other questions" and "
an authority second to none on the geography and politics of what was commonly called the Middle East." His best known non-fiction work is
The opening of Tibet (1905), which he wrote after joining the
British expedition to Tibet in 1903–1904; the book is subtitled "
an account of Lhasa and the country and people of central Tibet and of the progress of the mission sent there by the English government in the year 1903-4". In this book, Landon was one of the first Europeans to describe the holy city of
Lhasa in detail. He was also the author of a book of 13 original short stories,
Raw Edges, published by William Heinemann, London, in 1908, with lithograph illustrations by Alberto Martini. The most successful and enduring of these stories was
Thurnley Abbey; but also included were psychological suspense stories
Railhead and
The Gyroscope (which is about a horrifying juggernaut running amok in a crowded auditorium). Landon was private secretary to the Governor of
New South Wales William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, 1900. In 1898 he and Beauchamp had holidayed in Paris. In 1903 he was special correspondent of the
Daily Mail at the
Delhi Durbar, in China, in Japan and in
Siberia; in 1903–1904 he was special correspondent of
The Times on the
British military expedition to
Lhasa, Tibet; in 1905–1906 he was special correspondent of
The Times for the
Prince of Wales' visit to India; and after that he was in
Persia,
India, and
Nepal, 1908;
Russian Turkestan 1909;
Egypt and
Sudan 1910; on the
North Eastern Frontier of India and at the Delhi Durbar, 1911; in
Mesopotamia and
Syria, 1912; in
Scandinavia and
behind the British and French lines in 1914–1915; behind the Italian lines and to the Vatican in 1917 (the war and Vatican visits with Kipling); at the
Paris Peace Conference, 1919; in
Constantinople, 1920; in India,
Mesopotamia,
Syria, and
Palestine 1921; on the
Prince of Wales' tour of India and Japan, 1921–1922; in China and North America 1922; at the
Peace Conference in Lausanne, 1923; in China, Nepal and Egypt 1924; and in China in 1925 (source except where noted:
Who Was Who). By this time, in 1925, Landon was 57 and had travelled constantly since the age of 21. Landon from 1912 had the use of Keylands, a cottage in the grounds of Kipling's house,
Batemans, in
Sussex. His London residence was, from 1907, at
Pall Mall Place,
St James's, and, by the time of his death in 1927, his final address (from ''Who's Who'') was 1 The Studios, Gunter Grove,
Chelsea, London. On 22 January 1927, his old friend
Rudyard Kipling wrote to his former employer
Lord Beauchamp saying Landon had
"crocked badly", blaming
"exposure and over-work". He asked Beauchamp to
"keep a kindly eye on him" while Kipling was sailing to South America and added, in a postscript, ''"If when he gets better, he has to go on a milk and egg diet, you could see that he gets good country stuff. I can't arrange this from my farms, in my absence."'' But Landon died, a day later, on 23 January 1927. He was unmarried. Kipling was too upset to go to the funeral, but his poem
A Song in the Desert "was a lament for a friend he had loved". The poem is dedicated: "P. L. OB. JAN. 1927". The Kipling Society says it reflects ''"his many travels in the wild places of the world, his uncomplaining endurance of dangers and discomforts, his magical tales, lightly told, and his shrewd criticism of Kipling's own work"''. ==Thurnley Abbey==