The Thirty-Nine Steps

I’ve christened this month on the blog John Buchan June, and I’m reading and writing about as many of Buchan’s classic adventure novels as I can. Today I tackle what is far and away the most famous of them all—The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In a review of American political philosopher Russell Kirk’s thriller Old House of Fear a few years ago, Douglas Murray wrote that while “there are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table . . . one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.” This doesn’t precisely describe the situation of The Thirty-Nine Steps in John Buchan’s corpus, but it gets close.

Buchan wrote this novel while recuperating from an illness in the late summer of 1914, during the early weeks of the First World War. In his dedication to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, who would later die on the Western Front, Buchan writes that he had run out of a supply of “that elementary type of tale which Americans call the ‘dime novel’ and which we know was the ‘shocker,’” a genre toward which he had “long cherished an affection,” and with an indefinite amount of time to while away until his recovery, he decided to entertain himself by writing his own. This genre, “the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible,” we now know as the thriller, and the novel Buchan wrote as he battled illness and the world went to war helped more than any other to give the thriller its earliest definitive shape. Twenty years later, Alfred Hitchcock’s very loose film adaptation would stamp the same imprint onto the cinematic thriller. It would not be until Ian Fleming and Casino Royale in the 1950s that another novel, another hero, and another author would exert such a stylistic and tonal force on the genre.

Fortunately, in addition to being successful, recognizable, and influential, the most famous of all of Buchan’s two-dozen novels and scores of books, The Thirty-Nine Steps is also really, really good.

The novel introduces us to Richard Hannay, a Scots mining engineer who has lived in South Africa since the age of six. Now 37, he has returned to what is notionally his homeland but feels ill-suited to life in London and has come to hate it. He vows to give the capital one more day to give him something interesting to do before he abandons it for the colonies, never to return.

It is that day that he meets Franklin P Scudder. Scudder intercepts Hannay at his front door, and Hannay recognizes the nervous, voluble man as his upstairs neighbor. Scudder tells Hannay that he’s a freelance spy, that he’s been digging into the “subterranean” networks of powerful people manipulating Europe and the world, that he’s dug deep, that he’s dug too deep. He has intelligence of vital importance and a looming deadline—June 15, the day only a few weeks hence when an organization called the Black Stone will assassinate a crucial European leader during his visit to London, pin the blame on a rival power, and drive all sides into war.

Hannay finds himself liking Scudder but still treats his claims with polite skepticism. He allows Scudder to lie low in his flat for a few days and carries on with his own business, right up until the night he comes home from dinner to find Scudder dead: “a long knife through his heart . . . skewered him to the floor.”

Scudder’s murder presents Hannay with a quandary: at least some of what Scudder had told him has turned out to be true, and the powerful people Scudder feared have proven powerful enough to find Scudder at Hannay’s flat, and it is the clear intent of whomever killed Scudder to frame him for the murder. Hannay flees.

But before he flees, embarking upon weeks of adventure, he finds Scudder’s encrypted notebook hidden in his tobacco jar. If this notebook was important enough to get Scudder killed, it’s important enough for Hannay to preserve. So he goes to ground in Scotland, the place in the British Isles still wild and empty enough to give him, with his decades of frontier experience and veld-craft, some kind of advantage over his pursuers. And Hannay is pursued—by the police, by locals, by a foppish old acquaintance from whom he steals a car, and by mysterious men who speak perfect English but confer among themselves in German.

What else is coming? How can he prove that he didn’t murder Scudder? What will happen on June 15? What do the coded messages in Scudder’s notebook mean? What else did Scudder discover that was so dangerous? And what can Hannay do about it?

The Thirty-Nine Steps is still tremendously engaging and exciting to read. This is thanks in great part to Buchan’s usual strengths as a writer—good strong prose, briefly sketched but believable characters, continuously escalating tension, and perfect pacing—now honed after two decades of professional writing to the tools of a master craftsman. But several elements distinguish it as a masterpiece even from the rest of his own work, and help us understand why it has had the success and influence it has in the century since.

First, Buchan helped establish the place of modern technology in the thriller. Hannay has to contend not only with hostile and inscrutable enemies but with the advantages that technology gives them. He is tested continuously by the speed with which his enemies can pursue and even anticipate him. The technologies in question—the airplane, the telegraph, the automobile, the submarine—may seem quaint now, but it is impossible to imagine a similar thriller today that doesn’t involve a hero working against the latest in transportation and communications technology.

Second, Buchan roots the plot in recognizable real-world politics. This, too, has become a commonplace of the thriller, but Buchan avoids making the story so dependent on the nitty-gritty of his own day that it’s unintelligible to later readers. The geopolitics is not really the point. It’s realistic flavoring, it raises the stakes in universally understandable terms, and, ultimately, it’s an excuse to get Hannay on the run.

Third, while Buchan does not make knowing the real-world intricacies of, say, the Second Balkan war indispensable to the plot, he does cleverly play on his readers’ assumptions to misdirect and surprise. Compare the way that Agatha Christie, as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook recently pointed in a great episode of The Rest is History, manipulates her readers’ prejudices as a form of misdirection. I don’t want to give too much away, but not everything Scudder tells Hannay turns out to be true, which reveals quite a lot about Scudder and the Black Stone—and about modern readers who read no further and accuse Buchan of anti-Semitism. There is much more yet to be discovered after Hannay flees into the highlands, and the man on the run unraveling the mystery of his own flight has become another staple of the genre.

Fourth, in one of the real strokes of genius in the novel, Buchan makes his hero an outsider in his own home country, rendering the familiar threatening. A quiet London street, a genteel manor house, a man fly-fishing in a stream—hidden dangers lie everywhere in a landscape that is supposed to be safe, and Hannay never knows whom to trust. In a word, Buchan invents the thriller’s sense of paranoia.

Finally, Richard Hannay is a winsome and compelling hero—tough, capable, resourceful, brave, and honorable, but not without a sense of humor and of the absurdity of his situation. He is also restless, a man with strengths that must be used. As the late Sir John Keegan put it in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition:

The frustrated energy, the impatience with convention, but also the fundamental deference towards Imperial Britain’s great and good ring absolutely true. So too does Hannay’s personal integrity. He may look up to grandees [but] at his centre, . . . Hannay believes in himself, as a successful professional . . . and in his own simple but unswerving code of right and wrong. Moral certainty, which Buchan possessed in abundance, was one of his strengths as a writer. It gave him the power to achieve something particularly elusive: moral atmosphere.

One of Buchan’s great but underappreciated strengths as a writer—all the more remarkable in the age of anti-heroes and pragmatists that has arisen since his time—is his ability to make goodness not only believable but desirable. His heroes, as Keegan implies, feel like real people, not puppets in a morality play or bloodless avatars of a didactic message. Hannay is a great early showcase of Buchan’s abilities, a model of honorable behavior in a crisis who is portrayed sincerely but unromantically. Having missed the attack on Scudder, Hannay must escape. Having escaped, he must clear his name. Having cleared his name, he must help prevent the Black Stone from succeeding. Hannay does all of these things because they are the right thing to do, and does them in only the most honorable ways possible.

This “moral atmosphere,” as Keegan puts it, elevates The Thirty-Nine Steps from a mere thriller or adventure yarn into “a story of good and evil.” A striking accomplishment for so short and vigorous and thrilling a book, and for one dashed off as entertainment during an illness.

While The Thirty-Nine Steps has proven the most famous and enduring of all of Buchan’s work, the difference from the situation described by Douglas Murray above is that, while Buchan may have conceived and executed this novel quickly only for it to find runaway success, there was no later high-minded magnum opus that it outshone to his chagrin, and The Thirty-Nine Steps was never a mere “trifle.” It is a small masterpiece, and was followed by decades of steady, quality work, including twenty more novels, that have often been unjustifiably neglected while The Thirty-Nine Steps has remained justifiably famous. I’ll be digging into more of those as John Buchan June continues, and I hope you will, too.