25. The Thirty-Nine Steps: The First James Bond

The Book Club - Goalhanger

The episode explores John Buchan's 1915 novel *The Thirty-Nine Steps*, often considered the first modern thriller and the template for James Bond.

Key takeaways

• The novel *The Thirty-Nine Steps* is considered the first modern thriller and the template for James Bond.
• John Buchan was a prolific writer, politician, and imperial administrator with a diverse career.

Main topics

• The origins and plot of *The Thirty-Nine Steps*
• John Buchan's life and career

Notable quotes

"I'm very sorry, he said humbly. It's a mighty liberty, but you looked the kind of man who would understand."

Conclusion

*The Thirty-Nine Steps* remains a foundational text in the thriller genre, offering a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by the London Review of Books. And now we are certainly not shy of digging into things on the book club, whether that is why it is that a classic novel endures or why more contemporary novels manage to capture a particular zeitgeist or mood. So the London Review of Books, an absolutely brilliant periodical, by the way, operates on much the same principle. Each issue is an archive of long-form essays, poetry, cultural criticism, and of course the famed book reviews. In an age of clipped opinions and half-baked insights, the LRB is the outlier. It's a trustworthy source that prioritises the thinking, not the word count. So try three months of the London Review of Books, completely free when you sign up today. Subscribe now at LRB.combe.combe forward slash book club. So that is LRB.m.m.m. forward slash book club to try three months of the London Review of Books for free. I was just fitting my key into the door when I noticed a man at my elbow, though not seen him approach, and the sudden appearance made me start. He was a slim man, with a short brown beard and small, gimlet blue eyes. I recognised him as the occupant of a flat on the top floor, with whom I passed the time of day on the stairs. Can I speak to you? He said. May I come in for a minute. He was steadying his voice with effort, and his hand was pressing against my arm. I got my door open and motioned him in. Is the door locked? He asked feverishly, and he fastened the chain himself. I'm very sorry, he said humbly. It's a mighty liberty, but you looked the kind of man who would understand. I've had you in mind all this week when things got troublesome. Say, will you do me a good turn? I'll listen to you, I said. That's all I'll promise. I was getting worried by the antics of this nervous little chap. There was a tray of drinks on a table beside him, from which, characteristically, Tabby, he filled himself a stiff whiskey and soda. He drank it off in three gulps and cracked the glass as he set it down. Pardon. He said. I'm a bit shaken tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead. What a strange man. So that's the opening chapter of John Buchan' The 39 Steps, which was published in 1939. And Buckin himself called it a shocker, but we might call it the first modern thriller. It's not a long book. So if you haven't already read it, you can probably read it before I start the next sentence. Well, starting before we finish this episode. Definitely. So it's barely 100 pages long, and it's a period piece that is set just before the First World War, but it is also one of one of the most celebrated, exciting, and influential adventure stories ever written. It's the template for James Bond, for the Jason Bourne series, for the kind of, you can see the elements of Slow Horses or the Lee Child books or all of these kinds of thrillers. And Tabby, I mean, one of the defining things about it is it is so fast-paced, isn't it? It's incredibly fast-paced, even by modern standards. So, for instance, that scene that we opened with, that very dramatic scene when this stranger kind of barges into this flat and says he's dead, that happens only a couple of pages into the book. And given how short the book is, it packs so much in. So our hero in the book is Richard Haney, and he's a mining engineer in his late 30s. He's Scottish-born, like James Bond. But he spent most of his life in South Africa. So he's a fellow expatriate like me. He's been in England for the last three months, and he's fed up with it. He's bored. He's restless. So he says, in about a week, I was tired of seeing sights. And in less than a month, I had had enough of restaurants and theater. and race meetings.. The talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick. I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as flat soda water left in the sun. So because of this, he's thinking of packing up and going back to the South African veld, and he's been to see his stockbroker, and he's been for drinks at his club, then he goes to a music hall, which he hates, and then he comes back to his flat, just off Oxford Circus, when this neighbour accosts him. Yes. And this neighbour turns out to be an American called Franklin Scudder, and he's a freelance war correspondent who claims very dramatically that he's uncovered a plot to murder the Prime Minister of Serbia and trigger a war in the Balkans that would drag in all the European powers. So obviously this calls to mind the start of the First World War with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And Scudder at this moment thinks he's being watched and he claims to have faked his own death, as we've heard, to evade his pursuers. So it's all very, very dramatic. And this is why he needs Hane's help to hide in his flat. And like utterly incomprehensively. Hannay says, yeah, sure, come in, sleep on my sofa, drink my booze. Hang around. Well, Haneh doesn't get much choice there, does he? I mean, Scada basically invites himself in and helps himself to Hanna's whiskey. But if that happened to me, I'd be calling the police. Anyway, at the end of this first chapter, Hanna comes back home to find that something has happened. to Scudder. If you've read the book, you know what it is. But we won't give it away just in case you haven't, because it's one of the great cliffhangers in all modern fiction, actually. Hannae ends up going on the run, and he's pursued across the lowlands of Scotland. He's gone to Scotland for reasons that are slightly obscure, but we'll get into that later on. He's pursued across the lowlands of Scotland by the police, but also by a gang of sinister conspirators who are called the Black Stone. And again, there are echoes of the build-up to the First World War there, because, of Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a group called The Black Hand. Hane has a series of adventures and escapades, some of them quite bizarre. He dons a succession of kind of bonkers disguises. He impersonates a roadside labourer, among other things, or an aspiring liberal politician. And every step brings him closer to discovering the truth about the villain's plot, but also to the villain's lair, which is elsewhere in the British Isles, and to its mysterious 39 steps. So this was published in 1915 by John Buckin. A lot of the first readers were men in the trenches in the First World War, and they thought, you know, almost without exception, that this book was just unbelievably exciting. Now, Tabby, when you read it some years after the First World War, did you find it as exciting? I did. We were saying just before this, I think I maybe was a little bit, too young to kind of understand the plot and what was going on and the kind of political dimension. But I did think it was unbelievably exciting. I thought it was kind of one big Highland manhunt, which is always thrilling. You know, you're just ahead of your would-be captors. And there were explosions. And he was just so very capable and always one step ahead, Hanay himself. But I couldn't remember the ending at all, at all. And I think that's really telling because the final portion of the book is incredibly rushed. What about you? Yeah, interesting. So I knew of the book before I read it. I probably read it when I was a teenager. I remember thinking, gosh, that'll be very exciting when I read the 39 steps. And I remember I wasn't that excited by it, I think probably because my palate had been ruined by reading James Bond. Yeah, I can see that. And sort of subsequent imitators who are more overtly, you know, adrenaline-packed. So I sort of thought, gosh, it's more offbeat than I was expecting more cozy, more low-key. You know, there's a lot of sort of hiding in Heather in Scotland. Yeah, there's a bloody good chap's element to it. Yes, completely there is. But that's actually a really good point because this was definitely my first kind of thriller. So I hadn't been ruined for it yet. So that's really interesting. The slight tweediness of it, I suppose, didn't grab me when I was maybe 14 or whatever. However, now reading it, I think it's a really nice book. I love the slightly offbeat humor of it, actually, the rindness of it with all the different characters. Definitely. We'll come to some of the intricacies of the plot, won't we? And obviously, there will be spoilers. I mean, you know, it's hard to talk about a thriller without spoiling it a little bit. But maybe, first of all, we should set the scene with the author and his times. Because actually, of all the authors we've done, I mean, John Buckin, I mean, he had one of the most interesting and sort of varied lives, didn't he? Yeah, I mean, he just strikes me as having been so talented, so competent. So he's incredibly prolific. He wrote almost 30 novels and loads of short stories, essays and a massive 24-volume account of the First World War and thousands of newspaper articles. And that kind of reminds me of, you know, Lord Sumption with his endless, endless, endless, endless books about the hundred years. Yeah, but it's incredible. How did these people, I don't know, how do you have the time when he was doing all the other things that he was doing? Because he was also an imperial silver servant, an MP. He was head of government propaganda in the First World War, and he ends up as a hugely popular Governor General of Canada, which is remarkable. And actually the most famous photo of him, if you Google John Buckin, one of the first photos you find is a very odd, Congress photo taken by Yus of Karsh, when he's Governor General of Canada, he's wearing this enormous native feathered headdress. Yeah. He's sort of reaching out to the kind of, what they call them the First Nations peoples of Canada. And he looks... He looks very grim-faced, doesn't he, and kind of beaky. And he's wearing, there's no hint of humour that he's wearing this kind of headdress. It's kind of interesting that as well, because he very much encouraged kind of the people of Canada to have their own sense of nationhood and stuff. And yet, but he was quite pro, the British Empire. Yeah, but I think he thought there was no contradiction between this. No, well, exactly. Yeah, as we'll see. So let's get into his life in a bit more detail, because as we've said, he is such an interesting character with one of, in fact, surely the most varied career. of any writer that we've done on this show so far. So he's born in Perth in 1875, and he's brought up in Kirkuddy in Fife. And his father was a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, and his mother was very young, actually, when she had him, she was 18. And he goes to a local school. His father has then transferred to a parish in the Gourbles in Glasgow, very poor area, and he goes to grammar school in Glasgow. And in many ways it's quite an austere background. His parents are very serious. So, for example, on Sundays, you know, expect this for the Free Church of Scotland kind of minister, they're not allowed to do anything that's kind of fun. So if they want to have games, they have to act out Old Testament stories, or they have to read stories about Protestant martyrs and things like that. It's great fun. Yeah, that's great fun. He's a big reader. He's obviously a very bright boy. He loves Walter Scott above all. So the great, you know, sort of romantic Scottish novelist of the early 19th century, the guy who in many ways invents the idea of Scotland and Scottish history and invents stories like Ivanhoe or something. These stories of great kind of daring do and excitement and romance and all of this. You can see that in his fiction, I think. Oh, totally. So a book of his that I love, Buckens, is called Witchwood, set in 1700s. And there's a massive element of Walter Scott in that. I mean, it's so obvious. The adventure, the chivalry, the romance, all that. But one of the other elements in Buckens' boyhood is a book that we've talked about before in the concepts of Little Women, which is Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Yeah, thrilling. Well, so there's a biography of John Buckin by his granddaughter Ursula Buckin, whom I know, who I've met. Really? Yeah. You do have friends in high places. We, on the rest of this history, we mentioned John Buckin slightly, and Ursula Buckin listened to it and wrote to us. I actually did know this, yes. And she... I can't. she put out that I was wrong, that I had maligned him. And I was wrong. She put me right. She's an excellent woman. I take my hat off to her. Anyway, she says, you know, Pilgrim's Progress, which people who listen to our little women episode may remember, in Pilgrim's Progress, it's a character called Christian, who goes through all these kind of trials and tribulations to kind of reach, what's called the Celestial City or something like that. Anyway, the idea of the quest, the idea of defeating evil in this kind of desolate landscape and all of this kind of thing. There's a lot of that in a lot of John Buckens' adventure stories. You can perhaps see it under the surface. Anyway, that makes them sound very boring, the Buckens. But actually, outdoorsiness is a huge part of Buckens' life and his fiction. I mean, we were talking beforehand about school trips and outings when we were teenagers and, you know, being forced, enforced marches across bleak landscapes and sort of camping trips and things like that. If you like that, this is undoubtedly the book for you because Buckner's drawing on his childhood memories of times when he and his mates would kind of roam around outside, he was part of various gangs, there were always fights and scrapes. So given that he's actually, as it were, a good boy all his life, it's reassuring to read that when he was very small, he was sometimes naughty. So apparently the biggest prank was they got some tower barrels, set fire to them, and rolled them into a quarry where they exploded. I mean, I think that is quite hardcore, actually, for a sort of eight-year-old or something. That is seriously hardcore. I mean, not very Christian as well, but I mean, it's very, very hardcore. I mean, I think it sounds like in that regard they have a wonderful childhood. Yeah, do Christians not set light, tar barrels? I don't know. It isn't entirely in keeping with the Christian martyrs readings of the Old Testament thing. But maybe it is. Maybe it is. Maybe it's very Old Testament. And so, as we've said, this outdoorsiness is a massive part of his identity and his fiction. And it's one of the things that readers always associate. with John Buckin. So it's chases across Heather Morland's, fugitives hiding on remote islands, pursuits across hills and mountains. So we were discussing before this episode, Duke of Edinburgh trips or or deals, as I would call them. And this is basically one big Duke of Edinburgh expedition. I think for some people, it would be incredibly evocative, you know, make you yearn to jump on a train without supplies and survive in the highlands of Scotland with nothing but your wild. For him, the countryside is this great sort of adventure playground, isn't it, I guess? That's how he thinks of it. Like, he doesn't live in the countryside. He's one of these writers who uses the countryside as a kind of, as a place of fantasy and a place of fun, I guess. He does all stuff like fishing and, I don't know, bird watching and things. Love all that. That's great. Yeah. John Keegan in his introduction to one of the editions of The Thet Nine Step says, The Longer the Walk, the Harder the Climb, the More He Enjoyed the Holiday. That is not you. No, that's not me. I hate it when I go on holiday with people and they kind of turf me out of bed at 8am to go, I don't know, water skiing or something. Just leave me alone. Okay, wow, you're fun-loving. But, you know, for Buckin, it's actually not just fun because he thinks it's very good for you. And this is typical of the late Victorian kind of a Dwardian generation who have read moralises like John Ruskin, the classic, and Matthew Arnold and think that city life and kind of industrializations and all of that, is rotting the moral fibre of the British people. And everyone needs to get outdoors and get back to nature and get back to, you know, the soul of Old England, Moral, England. And it's this mood that produces Baden Powell and the Scouts. It is. And now I have to say John Buckham will be turning his grave to you say Old England. Because, of course, with him it will be Scotland. I know, yeah. Forgive me. Forgive me, John. Back to his own career. He wins a birthday to Glasgow University when he's 16 years old. He studied classics like you, Tammy. He wins another scholarship to Oxford. He's done his classics again at Oxford. He's a big star. The university wins loads of prizes. He becomes president of the Oxford Union. Very impressive, isn't he? He is impressive. And basically, everybody at Oxford thinks he's brilliant. He's, even at this point, he's a published author. So he's had stories published in magazines and things, essays. He's making a lot of money from his writing. This is an age when you can make tens of thousands of pounds and today's money. Yeah, I know. He's already making all this money and he's so young and he's doing so much else alongside it. I mean, it's... Yeah, it's a lesson to us all. Yeah, I mean, too late for us, but for our younger listeners. So the nice thing about him, actually, he, even though he's come from a sort of outsider's background, he has no chip on his shoulder. No. He loses his Scottish accent quite quickly, but he never loses his sense of being a proud Scott. And his friends at Oxford are very well-connected people. So, Raymond Asquith, who's the son of the Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, goes on to be killed in the First World War. Another great First World War character called Aubrey Herbert, who was twice offered at the throne of Albania, who was a kind of adventurer and conservative MP. He hangs out with Churchill a bit to Rudyard Kipling. Because he's seen as one of the stars of his generation, he gets first and everybody he says he is going to be an absolute titan. You know, he'll be in politics or he'll do something, and, you know, his will be a name to conjure with. And he's also very likable, I think, isn't he? Yeah, in the introduction to the edition that I was reading, it said that he was incredibly likable. He was known for his generosity. He wasn't at all prone to kind of being partisan, politically. He was always willing to be polite about the people who he was up against or whatever it may be. But the one thing it said, he had a slight superficial weakness, just to foyer. for, you know, he had an eye for the rich and famous. He liked being in their