The Thirty-Nine Steps (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) - Softcover

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan takes us back to Edwardian Britain on the eve of the First World War. An inexplicable murder drives the innocent Richard Hannay, on the run from a manhunt that never seems to end, to hide in remote Scottish moorland. Disguise and deception are his only weapons, as he struggles to decode the clues left by the murdered man to prevent the theft of naval secrets by an unfriendly foreign power. The story races along, making this novel one of the greatest short reads of twentieth-century literature. Its style is rapid, colloquial, and expertly handled. Buchan’s narrative voice has the easy authority of a government insider, with the smooth assurance of a man in the know. He was a born storyteller, his skills leading the reader to believe effortlessly everything that the narrative suggests. The publication of The Thirty-Nine Steps marked the birth of the modern thriller, and it is still one of the most satisfying adventure novels of the twentieth century. It rode the crest of a new wave in popular fiction and was a powerful influence on the development of the detective novel, the action romance, and the spy story.

John Buchan (1875–1940) was a polymath who lived in the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras, through the Boer War and the First World War. Buchan’s own family was of respectable but not wealthy farming stock from the Scottish Borders. His father was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and Buchan was the eldest of six siblings, becoming later a father of four, and a devoted son to a most trying mother. He studied at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford, and his writing style shows a clear reliance on the solid foundations of a Victorian Presbyterian manse upbringing and his classical education. His prose is beautifully balanced, steeped in the cadences of the Bible, Shakespeare, Horace, and Caesar, yet one never encounters the drone of the pedagogue. Also influencing his fiction writing were the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, since he mixed their style and settings with the swift realism of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Grant Allen, and the theatrical daring of E. Phillips Oppenheim. As well as being a writer for more than forty-five years, Buchan was a civil servant, a journalist, a publisher, a war propagandist, a historian and biographer, a member of Parliament, and finally, in 1935, ennobled as Lord Tweedsmuir, he was appointed governor-general of Canada. His wife, Susan Grosvenor, was a cousin of the Duke of Westminster and connected with much of the landed aristocracy of the British establishment.

Convalescing in bed in a rented seaside house in August 1914, Buchan was frustrated and bored. War had just been declared, and at thirty-nine he was too old, and medically unfit, to join up. His political instincts were urging him to find out the latest intelligence. His job as a journalist and war historian was also demanding that he publish the latest news. But he was confined to bed, again, with the recurrent duodenal ulcer that debilitated his health for much of his life. Bored of reading “shockers”, the popular adventure stories of the day, this very experienced writer decided to write something better himself. Buchan was an expert creator of “atmosphere.” As a publisher and a journalist, he had trained himself to recognize what the public wanted, and what would sell. At the beginning of the First World War he was also becoming aware that a wartime readership would need more stories than ever to take their minds off the new horrors of war. In The Thirty-Nine Steps he used Mayfair and Westminster settings for top-level secret meetings and Intelligence gatherings, but at this stage in the war he had not yet had experience of these. He later became Britain’s Director of Intelligence, but his access to top-secret information at the beginning of the war was only that of a well-informed newspaperman. At the time that he wrote this novel Buchan was regularly reading wartime reports and government dossiers for his war history, Nelson’s History of the War (1915–1919), and for the weekly wartime magazine, The War, that his firm, the Scottish publishing house Thomas Nelson & Sons, had hastily put together in August 1914 to give employment to the staff now bereft of their foreign printing contracts. Buchan knew what was going on, and what had been going on, at high political levels, and transmuted this knowledge into a pre-war fiction as a might-have-been for the outbreak of this war. This was not the only time that Buchan wove fact and history into a best-selling novel: the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle (1916) uses the same fluidity of verisimilitude to lightly cover pure invention with a suggestion of fact.

Buchan thus created his most famous character, Richard Hannay, almost by accident. He had been working towards the invention of such a determined personality in earlier stories, but Hannay leapt into life in The Thirty-Nine Steps with such confident energy that he was clearly destined to be the man for this hour. An ex-patriate Scot with a South-African accent, Hannay is a mining engineer looking for fun on holiday in the “home country,” and finds nothing but trouble. He is asked to shelter a neighbor for a few days, and comes home one evening to find the man dead in his drawing room. The police chase is inevitable, but Hannay is dogged by a mysterious second set of pursuers, who want something unknown from him. Buchan’s speciality feature of chases through a hostile landscape is played again and again, as Hannay repeatedly evades capture, finds respite, and is on the run again, in a loop-tape of perpetual panic and thinking on his feet. The chases don’t stop even when Hannay is taken under the wing of the British government and the police are called off. One of Buchan’s most spectacular short, sharp sprints takes Hannay into the heart of Establishment London, hurtling through St James’ Park with a pack of baying young men about town after him. But even this chase has its purpose: it brings Hannay to the right house, at the right time, to spot the enemy, and to realize that the enemy has spotted him. This time Hannay turns hunter, and the final showdown is only a few, feverishly turned pages away.

The Thirty-Nine Steps was a best seller at the time, and has never been out of print. On its first publication, as a serial story, the sales of those issues of Blackwood’s Magazine would have shown that this story could fly out of the door equally fast on its own merits, and it was published as a novel three months later. Reviewed enthusiastically and with gusto, it seems to have attained classic, rather than fashionable, status straight away, for in subsequent reviews of Buchan’s later novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps is barely mentioned, whereas its immediate sequel, Greenmantle, is more frequently cited. But, unlike Greenmantle, The Thirty-Nine Steps has remained on school curricula and in the fond memories of British readers for generations.

The success of TheThirty-Nine Steps changed Buchan’s career. He had been a relatively successful but not a particularly well-known author since 1895. The Thirty-Nine Steps was his seventeenth book, and his ninth full-length work of fiction. But its success marked a change in the pattern of Buchan’s publishing, from predominantly short-story collections and republished journalism, to a steady sequence of one novel each year, interspersed with a history, a biography, or a book of essays. There were four Hannay sequels (Greenmantle, Mr Standfast in 1919, The Three Hostages in 1923, and The Island of Sheep [The Man in the...