The Thirty-Nine Steps, a brilliantly teasing and memorable title, was first published as a serial adventure story in Blackwood's Magazine from August to September 1915, appearing in book form that same October from the Scots publisher, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh. Then I saw something in the far corner which made me drop my cigar and fall into a cold sweat.' Now read on. When Hannay returns to his London flat after dinner in clubland, the reader can hardly escape the grip of Buchan's brilliant narration: 'I snapped the switch, but there was nobody there.

This is lethal, spare, clean and contemporary. None of this would have amounted to a hill of beans without Buchan's brisk characterisation, loving evocation of Scottish landscape and his switchblade prose. He knew exactly what he was doing, describing a 'romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the border of the possible'.

His creator was obviously influenced by Conan Doyle ( No 26 in this series) and would, in turn, later influence Graham Greene and Ian Fleming.īuchan's other great contribution to this genre, which also owes something to Kidnapped ( No 24 in this series) was to refine the 'man on the run' yarn into a page-turning adventure. Hannay, who would feature in four more subsequent Buchan thrillers, is a mix of sleuth and action man, a cross between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Buchan's contribution to this 'dime novel' scenario was to create in his protagonist, Richard Hannay, an appealing antihero, both cool and brave, but also 'pretty well disgusted with life' who, caught up in a high-octane international drama, has the resource, intelligence and daring to thwart a naked foreign attempt to drag Britain into war. Buchan, who worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau, was well-versed in this Edwardian genre and the outbreak of war across the Channel became the perfect inspiration for a topical and thrilling tale of acute jeopardy involving British secrets, German spies and the sinister plotting of the Black Stone gang, a conspiracy hellbent on fomenting a vicious global conflict.

The thirty steps