How The Thirty-Nine Steps invented the modern thriller

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Ticking bomb of a book: Kenneth More in the 1959 film version of The 39 Steps Credit: itv/rex shutterstock

Christian House 11 October 2015 • The Telegraph

The Thirty-Nine Steps, one of the greatest chase stories in literature, was actually written in bed. John Buchan penned it at a Broadstairs nursing home in 1914 as he recovered from a duodenal ulcer. 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”. It has been filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted for TV, stage and radio, and never once been out of print. 

In earshot of the lapping waters of the Kent coast, Buchan conjured up a barrelling tale of doppelgangers and assassins. “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. Richard Hannay, his resourceful hero, is also restless. 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”. The discovery gets Scudder “a long knife through his heart”.

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
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