The Thirty-Nine Steps

Britain’s greatest masterpieces

- John Buchan

IN 1914, convalescing after sickness arising from a duodenal ulcer, a restless John Buchan amused himself by writing a thriller. He had enjoyed success the previous year with the serialisation of a similar work, The Power House (published in book form in 1916), but the response to The Thirty-Nine Steps was immediate.

Described by its author as a ‘shocker’ in which ‘the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible’, within three months of publication in 1915 sales had raced past 25,000 copies. Buchan had already written the well-received adventure novel Prester John (1910), as well as history books and short stories, but The Thirty-Nine Steps, never subsequently out of print, ensured his lasting fame.

With due respect to Erskine Childers’s pioneering, but more ponderous espionage tale The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Buchan’s short and snappy offering was the forerunner of the fast-paced modern adventure thriller, with rapidly changing scenes and situations and an unnerving sense that no one is quite what they seemed on the surface. Tapping into the age’s paranoia about German spies, as, indeed, Childers and lesser adventure writers, such as William le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, had done, the release of the book was also timely, coming shortly after the start of the First World War.

Buchan’s approach was simple. A tale unfolds in 10 chapters, each one a gripper, around the adventures of free-spirited mining engineer Richard Hannay, back from the Rhodesian veldt where he made his ‘pile’ and restless in London.