“And they have never lost their spell for me.”Īfter being framed for Scudder’s murder, Hannay bolts to the burns, glens and moors of Galloway and Peeblesshire, with the police and enemy agents – disguised in “Aquascutums and tweed caps” – in hot pursuit. “Wood, sea and hill were the intimacies of my childhood,” he recalled in old age. Its parishes were well known to the author. Although conceived at the seaside, The Thirty-Nine Steps is mostly set in the wilds of the Scottish Borders. Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in Hitchcock's 1935 film adaptationīorn in Perth in 1875, the son of a Scottish clergyman, John Buchan was raised in Fife and spent his summer holidays with his grandparents at Broughton in Tweeddale. The 39th was saved by a builder and sent to the family. “His daughter, my late aunt Alice, used to count the steps as they went down to the beach from the cliff,” James Buchan, John’s grandson and a novelist himself, tells me, adding that during the Forties those old oak steps were ripped out of the cliffs. Broadstairs inspired its seaside climax – and its curious title. The novel – “one of the finest thrillers ever written,” declared the Telegraph – was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine during the summer of 1915 and published as a book that October. The discovery gets Scudder “a long knife through his heart”. Lazing around in his Fitzrovia flat, he’s spurred into action when his neighbour Scudder uncovers a German plot to steal Britain’s naval plans – “the most finished piece of blackguardism since the Borgias”. Richard Hannay, his resourceful hero, is also restless. “During the first months of war and compelled to keep my mind off too tragic realities, I gave myself to stories of adventure,” Buchan wrote in his memoir. In earshot of the lapping waters of the Kent coast, Buchan conjured up a barrelling tale of doppelgangers and assassins. It has been filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted for TV, stage and radio, and never once been out of print. When his Edwardian spy novel was first published, 100 years ago this month, it created a blueprint for the modern thriller – or, to use Buchan’s term, “shocker”. John Buchan penned it at a Broadstairs nursing home in 1914 as he recovered from a duodenal ulcer. The Thirty-Nine Steps, one of the greatest chase stories in literature, was actually written in bed.
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