The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

Here we have an Edwardian Action Thriller; plain and simple.

The protagonist is a perfectly ordinary British chap (by which I mean a fairly wealthy middle-class London-dwelling Scotsman whose main problem in life is boredom) who gets himself embroiled in a sinister plot against the Government of Great Britain! Hannay (our ordinary chap) ends up with an allied spy being murdered in his flat, and takes the initiative to flee to his native Scotland to avoid being arrested for the murder. With the sinister 'Black Stone' organisation on his tail, Hannay flees across the wilds, sleeping rough, and pulling every trick he knows in order to escape detection by the Black Stone and the police. The Black Stone, it transpires, are a group of German spies who are collecting information for the Kaiserreich in preparation for the First World War, and the only thing Hannay can truly rely on is his unwavering sense of patriotism.

It could have been awful, but it wasn't. I have heard a lot about the invasion literature of the Edwardian era, when a lot of writers took advantage of the popular anti-German paranoia of the age and wrote stories about how Germany had spies planted all over Britain and were preparing to invade and destroy the British nation forever. The most famous example of this is The Riddle of the Sands by Robert Erskine Childers. It is a curious thing that the First World War took nobody by surprise when it eventually happened, what with so many books being written about it before 1914. But anyway, this is about fiction, not history, so back to Hannay's incredible adventure and how he saved Britain.

I make it a rule of mine to know as little about a book as possible before I read it, so that I have few preconcieved notions to alter my appreciation of the story. I went into The Thrity-Nine Steps virtually blind, having only heard the title before, and hearing my Grandfather saying about how film adaptations significantly altered the plot. When I was reading it I had no idea what it was going to be about, aside from that it was a thriller, and so it took me a good deal of time to realise precisely what time it was meant to be set in. It was only due to a few very small clues in the text that gave me the impression it was pre-First World War, some time between 1912 and 1914, but altogether I found the lack of help from this front to be a minor concern. I have only just discovered from Wikipedia that it was written during the war, so that helps put it in context.

I wasn't that impressed when I first started reading it, but as Hannay got deeper into the Scottish counrtyside it began to grow on me. I quite liked his sense of being on-the-run, that his adventure was fuelled largely by paranoia, but in this case 'they' really were out to get him. Occasionally he would stop at an isolated cottage and beg lodgings with them, and eat at their tables, but the lovely rural Scots were always too polite to accept his payment for their kindness, every single time! On later occasions he would have to argue them into taking his money, which would leave him feeling a little rotten for forcing them to accept his thanks. It just feels terribly British for some reason.

So yes, I would recommend this book. It's not a hard slog, and I quite enjoyed the ending. Go back to spy novels from before Ian Fleming, where spy-work was practically a fee trade. And for those who want to know a shocking historican truth, the British Secret Service was formed due to concerns that German barbers living in Britain were actually agents of the Second Reich. I kid you not.