Die neununddreissig Stufen (1915)

A breezy thriller from a time before the 'thriller' was codified – John Buchan referred to his The Thirty-Nine Steps as a 'shocker'. This is the originator of the 'man on the run' formula now common to the increasingly uninspired thriller genre, and serves as a bridge from the old-style imperial gentleman-adventures – "pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle", as one character puts it (pg. 29) – to the modern page-turners.

The plot of The Thirty-Nine Steps is very lean, but still with a prose quality a cut above the modern thriller. Buchan's short book came along at a time when readers were beginning to expect to be spoon-fed, but when it was still expected that the spoon be somewhat gilded. The major flaw, rather, is that the plot is scarcely believable, chock-a-block with coincidences and cunning disguises and all that rot. It works because Buchan brazens it out, but to all intents and purposes The Thirty-Nine Steps survives only as a curiosity. ( )

Though it takes place before World War I… it offers insight into the view of what was happening at that time making the tale timeless. With some minor changes, it could easily be a thrilling espionage adventure told in modern day. All books deserve, and should be judged, for their context…. and while most do…we all know that some don't. The fact that this one has a solid four-star average after hundreds of reviews…easily says how much fun this was to read. The book differs from Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation in that there is no love interest for Hannay here… because it simply isn’t needed. ( )

A month after reading this one I can't remember that much about it. A man who has just returned to the UK from Africa is approached by another man staying at the same hotel. For no reason at all this man tells him about a planned assassination. When this second man ends up murdered our narrator goes on the run -- from the police and the presumably German spies who don't want anyone to find out about their assassination plans. He starts out on trains, then on foot, by truck and car. Along the way he stays in a small hotel and, later, when injured, in the home of a road worker. He tells everyone his story -- or as much as he knows-- and they believe him and hide him. Eventually he makes his way to London, finds some big wig in the British military, tells him the story and practically gets to run the scheme to catch the spies. Seriously. I was left with the impression that people in 1915 were either incredibly trusting or incredibly naive.
I'm glad to be able to check this one off my reading list, but, I didn't like or believe much of it. ( )

Far and away the most printed and read of John Buchan's novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps was also made into three different films and a feature-length television adaptation, along with adaptations into other media. First published in 1915 while Buchan was working for the British War Propaganda Bureau, it is set in England and Scotland on the eve of World War I. The protagonist Richard Hannay is informed of an alleged international conspiracy, and then must flee both the conspirators and the police, since he has been framed in the murder of his informant.

Buchan classed the story as a "shocker" and it pioneered the use of tropes that have become staples of the "thriller" and "suspense" categories in entertainment, principally that of the fugitive hero. The telling is very fast-paced, over ten chapters that I think I read in a total of four or five sittings. It keeps its narrative tension right up to the final page, with a mere three sentences of denouement.

The book has hardly any women characters with proper names and none with repeat appearances. Hannay says, "A man of my sort, who has travelled about the world in rough places, gets on perfectly well with two classes, what you may call the upper and the lower. ... But what fellows like me don't understand is the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folks that live in villas and suburbs" (97). His capacities are tied into this sort of alternating social adaptability and dysphoria. I don't doubt that many "comfortable, satisfied middle-class" readers have derived excitement over the last century from reading of Hannay's mingling with both the elite and the impoverished in this story, and that those readers have largely been men.

I returned from the city about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the old country and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that, I should have laughed at him, but there was the fact.
(FYI- this book was published in 1915.)