The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (PDF)

Description

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It first appeared as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form in October that year by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It is the first of the five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations. The novel formed the basis for a number of successful adaptations, including several film versions and a long-running stage play. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC’s The Big Read poll of the UK’s “best-loved novels.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Good page turner, but a bit too mu h description of unknown, archaic landscape terms in the pursiut phase. otherwise. very good

⭐There was a time when manly men signaled their worldliness to other men by making offensive flat statements about Jews and indigenous peoples in rah-rah, boy’s adventure voices. I understand the film is better for leaving those bits out.

⭐John Buchan’s The 39 Steps opens with Richard Hanney having a chance encounter that will soon change to the course of his life. A desperate man named Franklin Scudder (who we realize later is a spy) confides in Hanney that he is running for his life, and then proceeds to relate a wild tale of a plan of espionage and assassination. Scudder goes as far as to say he has also faked his own death to get away from those tracking him.“It was the wildest sort of narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales…which had turned out to be true…Events take a very sharp and drastic turn when Hanney discovers Scudder dead, a knife in his back. Scudder, however, had left behind a notebook. Could this be the key? Hanney vows to take on Scudder’s mission. Yet, he will now be the one who is marked and now in imminent danger:“Yet, oddly enough, for the first time I felt the terror of the hunted on me.”I found The 39 Steps to be a very engaging and effectively told thriller. Told from the vantage point of our man on the run, we get inside Hanney’s head as encounters each obstacle and trap set for him and has to try to worm his way out, and use his cunning and wits to escape. Additionally, the frantic pace and tempo that Buchan employs helps to create a thrilling and fun ride. I was reminded a bit of the 1993 film The Fugitive as I read.Eventually, Hanney soon realizes that there is a mission of much greater import, and that he must try to fulfill his quest. While on the run, Hanney meets an assortment of characters (some allies, some foes) among them a milkman, a literary innkeeper, a roadman, and a sinister old man. There are definite nods to Sherlock Holmes as our hero tries to figure out the one clue that will solve this puzzle, all the while trying to stay alive.“I felt the sense of danger and impending calamity, and I had the curious feeling, too that I alone could grapple with it.”The 39 Steps is quite an entertaining and lively yarn, filled to the brim with adventure and intrigue. It has a bit of everything you want in a thriller—spies, espionage, decoding messages, aliases and disguises, frantic pursuits, assassination plots.Are there some improbabilities and conveniences to aid our protagonist? Yes, there are. But, I felt that these were forgivable because of the entertainment value over all.Very enjoyable book, and I’m interested in taking on reading the next one in the series, Greenmantle.

⭐A sleeper that is an important read

⭐The police cars do not crash up into a pile in such gay profusion but the basic outlines are the same. Like “the brothers”, the hero Richard Hannay is on the run, with multitudes of folks trying to track him down. He isn’t exactly on a “mission from God” but he certainly holds the fate of Britain in his possession. The bad guys are always right at his heels, miraculously being able to track him as he moves throughout England and Scotland from a “monoplane” (it’s written in 1915 but the story’s setting was prior to the war, e.g. 1914, before skilled aerial reconnaissance had been developed) and with a coordination of ground movements, pre-age of radio, that causes the reader to chuckle. But, as with “the brothers” it is all good fun and not at all intended to be taken seriously. Buchan himself styled it a “dime novel” and thus it is. Buchan’s writing style is pretty good. He is not overly descriptive as Richard Adams is in “The Plague Dogs”, another British chase story, but neither does he rise, in this book, to Adams’ story telling skill. The reader watches Hannay surviving one close encounter after another ( blowing up a small building with himself in it) with the same emotional attachment that one has with a comic book character. Still, he holds our interest, if nothing more than by curiosity, as we wonder what he is going to get into, and out of, next. It is fascinating to speculate about Buchan’s overall intentions in this novel. It was written when things were bleak on the Western front, German Zeppelins were laying down the prelude to the next war’s Blitz, and the prospects for victory were not entirely clear. Buchan was involved in the intelligence effort at the time and it is possible that within this story lie secrets that still have not been entirely revealed. It may have been simply propaganda, a means of encouraging the home front as well as the French allies. There is a very loose analogy to actual events – the assassination of a public figure and the hint of a conspiracy to start a war behind it, as well as allusion to a real historical gathering among senior politicians prior to the war’s commencement.. On the whole though, if there was some deeper significance to the novel, it is lost on the typical modern reader. The only things one should bring to this story, are an easy chair, a glass of your favorite beverage, a roaring fire and snow flakes drifting past the window. That’s pretty much how I read it, in one sitting, and it was just the tonic (pun intended) I needed.

⭐I have a treasured edition of this John Buchan novel; a birthday gift to me nearly 60 years ago. I was thrilled by the adventure and I followed further books in the series. And to give this review further context, let’s get rid of the elephant in the room. I accept that there are attitudes which are not acceptable. I’m not going to comment on those.This book was written over 100 years ago and remains, for many, a literary classic. As a nation, Britain considered itself the centre of the universe at the peak of its powers and influence. Germans weren’t popular, so the German spy theme and a nation at risk were very topical. When I first read the book in the late 1950s, I took it very much at face value. A ripping yarn involving national security and loads of action. It’s some years since I revisited the text and I gave to say it remains a compelling man on the run thriller. If some of the slightly dated and stilted language is ignored, along with the jingoism, this remains a great tale. There’s a real sense of isolation in the moors scene, a claustrophobic sense of threat in the final pages, well depicted in a couple of cinematic adaptations.This is a gung ho adventure. Take it for that and enjoy it. It’s still in print 100 years on, which speaks volumes about the worth of this tale, however you choose to look at it.

⭐This is one of THE great adventure stories! I first read it about forty years ago and I have reread it numerous times since.John Buchan seems to epitomise the great Victorian work ethic – now best known as a writer of cracking adventure stories featuring upright, “decent” heroes, he was a prolific worker. In addition to his thirty novels and various volumes of short stories, he also produced a multi-volume history of India and biographies of Sir Walter Scott and the Earl of Montrose. Writing was, however, really only his second career. His primary vocation was the law, and he built up an extensive practice as a tax barrister. From the Bar, like his fictional avatar Sir Edward Leithen, he progressed into politics (as a Unionist though one espousing both free trade and women’s suffrage), eventually entering Parliament on the Unionist ticket in 1927. He was subsequently appointed Governor-General of Canada shortly after his elevation to the House of Lords as Baron Tweedsmuir. Where did he find the time?While the plots and subject matter of his novels have recently fallen prey to satire for their idealised evocation of a Corinthian age that probably never really existed, his prose is always beautifully constructed and flows with inner cadences. This short novel introduces Richard Hannay, recently returned to Britain from Rhodesia where he has secured his fortune as a mining engineer. Bored out of his skull by the trivial interests of the other members of his social circle he is on the brink of returning to South Africa when he encounters Franklin Scudder, a frightened man with a scary secret.Scudder starts to give Hannay all sorts of frightening insights to the prevailing European political situation and the inevitability of war against an over-powerful Germany, the catalyst for which will be the imminent assassination of Karolides, the last hope for sustained stability in the Balkans. However, Scudder himself is murdered and Hannay is put in the frame as his killer. He decides to flee to South West Scotland where he hopes to be able to lie low until he can muster sufficient evidence of the plot against Karolides.Buchan is always at his finest when describing Scottish landscapes, and the Galloway wilderness almost becomes a character in its own right. Hannay is hunted relentlessly through the varied Galloway terrain, both by the police and by pursuers of an altogether more deadly provenance.What has always amazed me most about “the Thirty Nine Steps” is the recurrent failure of film makers to bring it to the screen with any success, given that its plot-driven nature would seem to lend itself so readily to cinematic treatment. Hitchcock completely eviscerated the plot in his 1935 film, introducing a bizarre music-hall scene which was retained in the 1959 version directed by Ralph Thomas and starring Kenneth More. Meanwhile the 1970s version had Robert Powell hanging off the hands of Big Ben. Even the recent BBC version, though truer to the book than all of the others, felt the need to introduce a spurious romance element. Certainly Buchan did not do female characters well, a failing that he acknowledged – I don’t think there is a single line of dialogue delivered by a woman in the whole novel.It would also be easy to pick holes in the plot. [CAUTION – possible spoilers] There is, for example, an overwhelming dependence upon bizarre coincidence; while fleeing in a stolen car Hannay has a crash with someone whose godfather happens to be Permanent Secretary at the Home Office; fleeing from his pursuers he takes refuge in a private house only to find that it is owned by the leader of the pack from whom he is trying to escape; at one point he is locked in a storeroom only to find that it is full of explosives and fuses; and coming upon a solitary driver in the wilds of Galloway it turns out to be someone whom he knew from London, even though we have previously been told of the paucity of his social life during his brief stint in the capital.Does any of this matter? Absolutely not! The story was written as a gripping adventure story, and it still succeeds in holding the reader’s (and re-reader’s) attention. One hundred years since its first publication it still works perfectly well.

⭐I didn’t know what to expect before going into this book and I went into like a blank canvas, with no real expectations about it, just knowing that it is meant to be a classic. I remember enjoying it at the time and being pleasantly surprised by that, swapping back and fore from listening to the audiobook format and reading it. I did prefer listening to the audiobook version as it dragged me into the story more, but overall the story was alright. It was a nice easy listen and read, especially as it was free at the time on kindle and audible. It was quite easy to get into, which I don’t know if it would’ve been if I actually just read the entire thing, so the audiobook did help with my enjoyment of this.

⭐This classic spy thriller is the June selection for my reading group currently meeting on conference call during lockdown.It was chosen because of its status and I was surprised how short it was. It flew by as its hero evades the rotters trying to undermine peace in Europe. As it was written during the Great War it was at the time very topical.There were aspects that were a little dated though that was to be expected in a 100 year novel.I will likely update this after our group meeting.I did listen to its audiobook recording though didn’t like the narrator at all.

⭐I can still recall the classic 1935 film of this story directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. I also saw the 1959 remake with Kenneth More and a Finnish actress Taina Elg.The films both differ from each and from the original story but both convey the essence of Buchan’s masterpiece set just before World War I.The protagonist is a patriotic Briton (Scotsman) who has spent many years in South Africa where he made his pile as a mining engineer and has now returned to the ‘old country’ to enjoy the fruits of his wealth and experience. While in London he witnesses the murder of an acquaintance who has already warned him of the activities of some spies working for an unnamed European power (no prizes for guessing which!). He manages to escape to Scotland by the night train from Kings Cross or St Pancras.Sensing that these spies are on his tail he takes to the Hills, where he instinctively feels more at home. The essence of the story is the series of adventures he undergoes, up hill and down dale, to outwit the spies before he can contact the responsible authorities and inform them of the vital clue to foiling their plot, namely the ’39 steps’.

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