A century on, why are we still in love with John Buchan’s most famous story?
“Tell me, my Lord, how are you enjoying the film?” Alfred Hitchcock asked one of his honoured guests during the interval at the 1935 premiere of The 39 Steps. The Scots-born Lord Tweedsmuir, who was soon to become Governor General of Canada, replied humorously: “Well, it’s very good, Mr Hitchcock, but can you tell me how it ends?”
The joke here is that Lord Tweedsmuir was, of course, better known to the world as John Buchan, author of the highly popular novel on which Hitchcock’s now iconic film was based. “My grandmother was horrified by what they’d done,” says one of Buchan’s granddaughters, Lady Deborah Stewartby, “but JB – an innately modest man, always amazed when things were popular – was just delighted that people should watch it.”
While there’s the sense of this encounter having become a family story retold down the generations, it nevertheless highlights two ironies about John Buchan and what has become, undoubtedly, his most famous work – first published 100 years ago this summer.
First: despite having written around 100 books – including respected biographies, historical fiction and a 24-volume contemporaneous history of the First World War – Buchan is best remembered now for a speedily-written thriller. Second: ask people to describe the plot of The Thirty-Nine Steps and they’re more likely to come up with something approximating what Hitchcock (and his screenwriters Charles Bennett and Ian Hay) developed, rather than what Buchan actually wrote.
“Buchan deserves to be remembered for his Huntingtower ‘trilogy’, for his masterpieces Witch Wood and Sick Heart River, and for his superb short stories,” insists Dr Kate Macdonald, author of John Buchan, A Companion to the Mystery Fiction. “I think it’s a mistake to conflate the career of the novel and the film, because they really are separate entities, though inextricably associated with each other on the surface.”
Another of Buchan’s grandchildren, award-winning garden writer and author Ursula Buchan, is also “conflicted” about The Thirty-Nine Steps. “I know that it has been hugely important in preserving JB’s memory in the public mind for the last one hundred years,” she says, “but the book’s fame seems to stop many people from going beyond it to read some even more brilliant fiction – both short stories and novels. The Thirty-Nine Steps is not the best novel by any means.”
Buchan is said to have written The Thirty-Nine Steps while confined to bed by duodenal ulcers in late 1914, but it appears to have been something he’d been considering for a while. “His mind had been turning for some time to the writing of detective fiction,” his wife Susan Buchan, Baroness Tweedsmuir, later wrote. “He read a few thrillers and said to me one day, before the War, ‘I should like to write a story of this sort and take real pains with it. Most detective story writers don’t take half enough trouble with their characters and no one cares what becomes of either corpse or murderer’.”
The initial five chapters of The Thirty-Nine Steps were first published anonymously – “by H. de V.” – in the July 1915 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, between an article on the impending conflict at “Constantinople and the Bosphorus”, and some rather negative “Recollections of the Germans in China, 1900”, by Major-General Sir G K Scott Moncrieff, KCB.
Subsequent chapters appeared in the magazine’s August and September issues, before the Edinburgh-based Blackwood’s re-published the novel as a single volume on 19 October 1915. It proved an instant hit, both at home and – as letters sent to Buchan would soon testify – with the troops on the front line.
“I can only imagine that the serving soldier enjoyed the book because it was short, fast-paced, and exciting,” adds Ursula Buchan. “The story tells of one man prevailing against a nest of very dangerous German spies, despite being chased by the police for a murder he didn’t commit – and we mustn’t forget that if Hannay had been caught and convicted he would have hung. This must have been attractive escapism for soldiers, who came to see themselves as mere cannon fodder.”
“The Thirty-Nine Steps is a short episodic book with lots of short chapters and therefore quick and easy to read,” agrees Andrew Lownie, author of the biography John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, and editor of several collections of John Buchan’s stories. “Its first person narration adds to the sense of pace and authority. Buchan always claimed it was light-hearted relief to earn some money, but he clearly drew on his knowledge of the spy world and current affairs and the landscape of both London and South West Scotland is one he knew well.”
Not that its subject matter was that unusual for the time; the decade leading up to the outbreak of the First World War had seen many very successful – though not necessarily well written – novels about a future war against shady foreign powers.
“Buchan took the adventure romance to a new level by losing Victorian ponderousness and writing a story that read at the speed at which its readers were now living,” adds Macdonald. “He gave the popular novel permission to be complex and to be well-written, to be culturally multi-levelled, to quote the Bible and the classics, by not talking down to his readers.”
While Hitchcock’s version still appears regularly in satellite TV schedules, The Thirty-Nine Steps was more recently reincarnated as an acclaimed West End show. While owing more to Hitchcock than Buchan, its success helped significantly with the creation of The John Buchan Story, a museum about the author and his life, now located in Peebles.
“If it hadn’t been for the play, I don’t think we could’ve got this museum off the ground,” insists Lady Stewartby. “So many people had seen the play, particularly in London, that we were pushing on an open door. So I’m very relaxed about the impact of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Better they read it, than that they don’t.”
THE FILMS
“Hitchcock’s film – and indeed the others – have been very important in perpetuating JB’s memory,” insists Ursula Buchan. “The Hitchcock film seems to come round on a loop on the television, so future generations do at least have the chance to discover JB through it. Which is fine provided that no one is under the illusion that the film is very like the book in plot, because it’s not.”
Indeed, many of the film’s most iconic moments – Robert Donat as Hannay escaping from the police on the Forth Bridge, him being hand-cuffed to Madeleine Carroll for much of the film, the “39 Steps” code-name for a secret spy organisation – have nothing to do with Buchan.
Nevertheless, with his 39 Steps, Hitchcock essentially set the cinematic template for thrillers in which innocent men (or women) finds themselves on the run from both the authorities and enemy agents – which has given us everything from Harrison Ford as The Fugitive to Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity.
There were two subsequent film adaptations of Buchan’s novel in 1959 and 1978 (starring Kenneth More and Robert Powell, respectively), plus the BBC’s 2008’s adaptation with Rupert Penry-Jones.
However, there are arguments in favour of the most stylish re-imagining of The Thirty-Nine Steps on film remaining Hitchcock’s own, hugely popular 1959 film, North by NorthWest, in which a perfectly cast Cary Grant plays an advertising executive who suddenly finds himself framed for murder and mistaken as a spy by foreign agents.
First published in the August 2015 issue of The Scots Magazine.
