The Thirty-Nine Steps

Written by John Buchan in 1915 and made into a classic spy thriller by the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, The Thirty-Nine Steps contains all the traditional tropes of the good spy thriller. 

Whilst it’s a short book and written in probably the most simplest of ways, it does not fail to pique reader interest and build up some storage of suspense and anticipation of what is going to happen next. 

After returning to England from years in South Africa, Richard Hannay quickly grows to find London life dull and uninspiring. That is until a murder is committed in his apartment. Tagged as the obvious suspect, Richard goes on the run in the Highlands of his native Scotland in an attempt to delay his pursuers and gain time to decipher the true mystery surrounding the murdered man. 

It’s a classic wrong-man story set against the looming threat of war filled with strong doses of paranoia, action, violence, and the ever-present chase. 

Quite like the dime store detective thrillers and minute volumes of pulp fiction that would flourish in the 1930s, the book is a reflection of Buchan’s own distrust of German culture as well as an exhibition of a classic trope in Gothic literature: fear of the foreign Other. 

As a literary piece sitting within a genre, it’s a modern work of Gothic fiction where deserted moors have replaced gloomy castles, the pursued damsel has been traded for the wrongly-accused man, and the villain is no longer an evil king or lord but a pack of German spies, and by extension an entire country. This is the central appeal of The Thirty-Nine Steps; what reader does not love a bit of detective thriller and modern gothic? 

However, whilst where it sits within the realms of genre makes this book a little complex and intriguing, I cannot honestly say that I found it particularly exciting. For a start, the writing is very simple and is written almost entirely without any real tone or voice within the text. It’s written in the first person register from the point of view of Richard Hannay, but it’s a book where I feel that we don’t get a good sense of the protagonist’s character. 

Aside from one or two lines that clearly give the man a voice and personality, the entire narrative is told with a certain recounting passivity, which leeches a lot of the excitement and drama out of it. So by the climax, whilst I was still interested to see what happened in the end, I wasn’t afire with anticipation; I could have easily just put the book down. 

The events that are described are rather exciting, but if there’s no real fire in words and sentence structure, then I’m just reading words on a page and not entering the world they are meant to be inviting me into. 

Filled with action, suspense, violence, drama, and a few moments of fresh comedy, The Thirty-Nine Steps is a fine novel in terms of genre: it does tick all the boxes for a spy thriller and modern gothic, but ultimately there is something lacking in the tone and simplicity with which it is written and that served as a downer.