The Thirty-Nine Steps E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Richard Hannay Adventures - Selected as one of the 100 best novels in English in the Guardian
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 223

Beschreibung

Selected as one of the 100 best novels in English in The Guardian Recently returned from South Africa, adventurer Richard Hannay is bored with life, but after a chance encounter with an American who informs him of an assassination plot and is then promptly murdered in Hannay's London flat, he becomes the obvious suspect and is forced to go on the run. He heads north to his native Scotland, fleeing the police and his enemies. Hannay must keep his wits about him if he is to warn the government before all is too late. This classic spy thriller sold a million copies before Buchan died in 1940, has been adapted countless times for film, television and the stage, and features the most exciting chase in the history of fiction. With an introduction by Stuart Kelly. This edition is authorised by the John Buchan Society.

Leseprobe

THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

JOHN BUCHAN led a truly extraordinary life: he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician, publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perth in 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took a scholarship to Oxford. During his time there – ‘spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery’ – he wrote two historical novels, one of them being A Lost Lady of Old Years.

In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George’s Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan’s literary output was remarkable – thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers – ‘shockers’ as he called them – were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.

John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.

STUART KELLY is the Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday. He is the author of Scott-land and The Book of Lost Books, and has contributed to The Decadent Handbook, Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and the Scottish Government’s Introducing Scottish Literature.

JOHN BUCHAN

The Thirty-Nine Steps

Introduced by Stuart Kelly

This ebook edition published in 2011 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 1915 by Hodder & Stoughton This edition published in Great Britain in 2011 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Introduction copyright © Stuart Kelly, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-169-9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Introduction

John Buchan’s characteristic modesty about The Thirty-Nine Steps, as well as its numerous adaptations and transformations into film and television productions, has contributed to the present situation where it is regarded as a book to be brainlessly enjoyed rather than critically scrutinised. In the dedication to Thomas Nelson, Buchan claims that during his recuperation from a duodenal ulcer, he was reduced to writing his own light reading having polished off all the available ‘aids to cheerfulness’ in the house in Broadstairs, Kent. Authors’ descriptions of the genesis of their works should always be treated somewhat sceptically. Indeed, G. K. Chesterton made a similar claim for his Father Brown stories, and it is striking that in both cases the writer felt the need to downplay the aspect of serious intent, particularly since quite sophisticated and significant ideas were being presented through a genre more commonly associated with mere diversion and entertainment.

Buchan writes that he and Tommy have ‘long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans called the “dime novel” and we know as the “shocker”’. Both terms are rather more loaded than their offhand deployment here might suggest. ‘Dime novel’ is the older term, dating back at least to 1835, when it was defined in the Progressive Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Fallows as ‘a name generally given to the low sensational style of literature of the present day; specifically applied to a novel, usually of the trashy order, which is sold for ten cents or a dime’. By the 1860s, however, after the publication of Seth Jones: or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860) by Edward S. Ellis, often erroneously called the first dime novel, the critical tone towards dime novels was more respectful. The Eclectic Review in 1864 was surprised that such books ‘contain nothing that can even remotely pander to vice’ and the Smith College Monthly, in 1905, argued that ‘the dime novel should have a place in the affection and esteem of educated people’, albeit that it can ‘cause a chill to run down our spines – the same cold, disapproving chill which ran down the spines of our grandmothers when the word novel alone was mentioned’. Novels were referred to as ‘shockers’ or ‘shilling shockers’ from the mid-1890s onwards. Again, the stereotype of a mildly salacious form of literature needs qualification. In terms of Buchan’s self-identification with these forms, it seems significant that they were often used to describe work by two other Scottish authors: Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. In her ghosted Autobiography of S. S. McClure (1906), Willa Cather describes the journalist’s thrill at Sherlock Holmes as a superior form of shilling shocker; the term was also used by the influential reviewer Theodore Watts-Dunton, who saw similarities between the shilling shocker and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Likewise, the critic Richard Burton, in Masters of the English Novel (1909) referred to Stevenson’s Treasure Island as a ‘sublimated dime novel’. Buchan’s use of this terminology flirts with the dangerous edge of literature, where the popular and the canonical overlap.

Being a work in a distinctive genre – indeed, a work which creates a specific genre, the ‘man on the run’ thriller – does not preclude The Thirty-Nine Steps from being a work with a message. Others have noted the influence on Buchan of a writer like William Le Queux, whose books The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and The War of 1910 (1906) also inspired the classic invasion fantasy, H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898). There is, however, a crucial difference between the paranoiac work of Le Queux and Buchan’s version. Le Queux wrote cautionary tales of possible wars. Buchan wrote a novel set before the Great War, but one written and published during it. A great deal of academic and anecdotal ink has been spilled over the title, with different writers identifying different sets of thirty-nine steps which might have been the original inspiration, and some academics striving to link the title to the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican Doctrine, and, for all I know, someone on the Internet has fathomed its connection to 1939 and acclaimed Buchan as the possessor of precognitive powers. The title is a deliberate enigma: a McGuffin. More tellingly, prior to its publication in Blackwood’s Magazine, alternative titles were discussed. Buchan’s own suggestion was to call the book The Kennels of War; presumably being a nod to Marcus Antonius’s line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, ‘Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war’. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a novel about the seething, constrained and eager belligerence from before the onset of war proper. It does not prophecy war: it diagnoses its outbreak. Hannay, in the last paragraph, says ‘three weeks later, as all the world knows, we went to war. I joined the New Army the first week, and owing to my Matabele experience got a captain’s commission straight off. But I had done my best service, I think, before I put on khaki.’

The book provides a justification for the war. One officer wrote to Buchan from the Front, ‘it is just the kind of fiction for here. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.’ But the idea of the novel as a light distraction from the carnage – although such an idea is hardly improbable, and Buchan himself wrote to G. K. Chesterton to tell him how the soldiers were all quoting his poem ‘Lepanto’ amid the horrors – is insufficient as an explanation for its appeal in those ghastly times. The Thirty-Nine Steps depicts an enemy that is implacable, ingenious, committed and ubiquitous, and that has been preparing for war long before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Bearing that in mind explains some of the novel’s more frequently-criticised moments. Buchan sought to fend off certain complaints by saying it was a ‘romance’ – the genre where “the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible”. When Hannay lights out for the Borders, in fear for his life, and desperate to find the least likely place the enemy might discover him, he inadvertently ends up close to one of their strongholds. This may stretch credulity to snapping point: or it might be read as the awful possibility that the enemy is literally everywhere. (How, incidentally, do the German spies manage to be on Hannay’s trail far quicker than the police who think he might be a murderer? Because their network and intelligence outstrips our own might be one feasible reading.)

The Thirty-Nine Steps very subtly hints at wider, hidden machinations that the average Tommy in the trenches could not imagine, but should accept as real. The dedication calls the period ‘these days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts’. The original intelligence which Hannay acquires, about an assassination attempt on the fictional Premier Karolides of Greece, matches what we do know about Buchan’s attitude towards Franz Ferdinand. In his History of the War Buchan wrote: ‘The Archduke Francis Ferdinand was a man in middle life, a lonely and saddened figure, oppressed by the imminence of a fatal disease. Almost alone of his countrymen he had the larger vision in statesmanship . . . His policy was the destruction of the Dualist system, and the establishment in its place of a true federation, under which different races should have a real local autonomy, and find union in a federal Parliament. The Archduke was, therefore, a voice in the wilderness, and his chief foes were those of his own household. Like Mirabeau, he was the only man who might have averted calamity, and his death, like Mirabeau’s, meant that the arts of statesmanship must yield to the sword.’ I have quoted this at length since the avocation of a ‘federal Parliament’ is a reminder that the caricature of Buchan as an Imperialist is indeed that, a caricature; but also that Ferdinand, like Karolides, was a bulwark against major conflict. Every reader would have known that there was no Premier Karolides and realised that Buchan was describing Franz Ferdinand. They would also have realised that if he had wanted to say Ferdinand rather than Karolides, he would have. There is an ‘I know that you know that I know’ wink in the substitution which reinforces the idea that there are secrets and implications over and above a territorial war between two powers. The Times Literary Supplement, reviewing The Thirty-Nine Steps, praised it for its ability ‘to make the reader feel that he himself was the hero’. In the context of a vocal, if not widespread, condemnation of the war as a reckless Imperialist spat – the kind of argument put forward by George Bernard Shaw in Common Sense About The War – the idea of a moral and necessary purpose behind the conflict must have been a bizarre comfort. The position is satirised as ‘appalling rot’ where the ‘“German Menace”’ is a ‘Tory invention to cheat the poor of their rights and keep back the great flood of social reform’. Even yet, I cannot decide if Buchan’s decision to call the spy group The Black Stone was evidence of his familiarity with the classified knowledge that Gavrilo Princip was a member of The Black Hand, or evidence of his wise awareness that terrorist cells are rarely very creative in terms of their nomenclature.

The master-stroke of The Thirty-Nine Steps is the final confrontation between Hannay and the mysterious Professor, and Hannay’s realisation that ‘this man was more than a spy; in his foul way he had been a patriot’. This was a daring statement – that the enemy possessed a virtue also owned by their opponents – and yet it has a powerful reactionary converse. The war is not going to be won by negotiation and compromise. The enemy is as committed to its course of action and the idealism behind it as the reader. The doubling of the villain and the hero, a very Scottish trope anyway dating back to Hogg and equalled by Jekyll and Hyde and Holmes and Moriarty, is also a clarion call to the notion that only victory matters. Any kind of political fudge is military balm to this antagonist. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of The Thirty-Nine Steps is that despite Hannay’s intervention, the war still happens: ameliorated, perhaps; less disastrous, maybe. Hannay’s final retort to the Professor – that Franz, who has schnelled off to the Ariadne – will be captured is based purely on presumption and speculation, and flies in the face of his experience with this tentacular, mutating enemy.

Ubiquitous, committed, implacable: but what of ingenious? Another awkwardness in The Thirty-Nine Steps is the almost surreal doppelganger strategy: that the villains can adequately impersonate Lord Alloa and therefore listen in to naval deployments to their own advantage. It’s difficult not to wonder just how dumb the members at the meeting are, that they can be fooled by some stuck-on whiskers and a schooled accent. That Buchan gets away with this most audacious turn in the novel also reveals the complex relationship Buchan had to Scottishness.

Hannay is the only person to realise that Lord Alloa is not Lord Alloa. At first he recognises everything, ‘the grey beard cut like a spade, the firm fighting mouth, the blunt square nose, and the keen blue eyes’. Then he realises he has never seen the First Sea Lord, and yet a ‘flicker, a spark of light, a minute shade of difference’ passes between them on the second meeting: a shudder of recognition and a shudder of impersonation. Hannay recognises at that moment he is recognised. The reader will recognise that Hannay alone in the novel is the skilled impersonator. He has already told us of the character who was and will be Peter Pienaar, ‘an old scout in Rhodesia, who had done many queer things in his day’, who once told Hannay that ‘the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. You could never keep it up . . . unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it.’

Hannay is the novel’s grand chameleon, its shape-shifter par excellence. Each chapter, until the end, is the story of an assuming of identity. He escapes his London flat as a milkman, and becomes a ‘kind of dealer’ of cattle on the train north. He is a minor magnate from Kimberley, who got in trouble with the diamond board, and to whom he spins a tale worthy of ‘Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle’, while the poor publican dreams of writing like Kipling or Conrad. He is then a proponent of Free Trade called Twisdon at a pompous and ineffectual Liberal hustings, and then a roadman with glasses and a difficult boss. He’s next the Anglo-Scot Ainslie yet leaves the cottage he escapes to as ‘the kind of Scotsman you see in the illustrations to Burns’s poems’. The ‘ordinary sort of fellow’ is also the person who ‘did a bit . . . myself once as intelligence-officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War’. ‘It was like a pantomime,’ he later exclaims, and given the number of costume changes, the reader is entitled to agree.

But Hannay’s first transformation is announced on the first page. ‘My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since,’ he tells us. Hannay is the protean Scot, who has had to adapt to the new opportunities and circumstances of Britishness. It is crucial that the sentence continues ‘so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me’. England is still a mystery, known about through literature and culture. Britishness – the identity that Hannay assumed as a product of Empire – is what he transforms into from Scottishness. It is equally conspicuous that on his misad-ventures around Galloway, he turns into a Scot via the medium of poetic illustrations. Hannay is accustomed to adopting new identities and new personae long before the murder of the spy Scudder; and it is his success and facility at doing so that allows him to unmask the German impersonator.

Whenever academics and historians of Scottish literature write about Buchan, they do so while metaphorically pinching their noses: Robert Crawford, in Scotland’s Books, writes that ‘casual xenophobia, or at least easily assumed imperial superiority, is present in his plotlines. There are anti-Semitic moments and a strain of period racism that will offend some readers’. Roderick Watson maintains that Buchan’s books ‘lack historical or psychological depth’ and feature ‘a good deal of implicit and explicit racism’. Colin Milton, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, endorses the position that Buchan’s work is ‘competent, craftsmanlike, entertaining but not much more’.

Buchan has become, like Sir Walter Scott, a useful whipping boy for what Dr Gerard Carruthers has called ‘the bampot version of Scottish literary history’. Re-reading The Thirty-Nine Steps it is not only evident that Buchan’s view of Scottish adaptability in the face of Britishness is a more complex matter than colonial kowtowing, but that some of the accusations of racism are very wide of the mark indeed.

The most notorious section of The Thirty-Nine Steps is Scudder’s view of international affairs as he propounds them to Hannay: ‘The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog . . . But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake.’ This is convincingly anti-Semitic (and anti-Prussian), but we are later told, with an almost patrician disdain, that the powers that be consider Scudder to have ‘a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’ Hannay himself calls it ‘eyewash’. The whole vision of a Jewish conspiracy is shown to be a paranoid delusion – Scudder is even accused of ‘want[ing] a story to be better than God meant it to be’. Buchan’s moral compass is very clear indeed. Scudder’s speech has an odd afterlife. Debunked in the book, it can be heard glimmering in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’: ‘the rats are underneath the piles, / The Jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs’.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is of its time – not even Bond, Hannay’s great literary offspring, had a whisky-and-soda and some biscuits for breakfast! – but it is not just of its time. A great deal of Scottish literature fell from favour after the First World War: the reputations of Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson all declined, and Buchan’s lagged a little after theirs. All four writers have a love of battle, and a sense of war as the theatre in which a man finds himself. That might have been possible when talking about Culloden or Poitiers but not after Ypres or Passchendaele. Buchan does not revel in war, but he respects it. Or at least he did until Tommy Nelson fell, in 1917. The later Hannay novels reveal a more ambiguous viewpoint than this novel, the finest piece of propaganda of its era, that transcends being mere propaganda.

Stuart Kelly

Contents

1. The Man Who Died

2. The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels

3. The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper

4. The Adventure of the Radical Candidate

5. The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman

6. The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist

7. The Dry-Fly Fisherman

8. The Coming of the Black Stone

9. The Thirty-Nine Steps

10. Various Parties Converging on the Sea

ONE

The Man Who Died

I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If any one had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. ‘Richard Hannay,’ I kept telling myself, ‘you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.’

It made me bite my lips to think of the plans I had been building up those last years in Bulawayo. I had got my pile – not one of the big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest of my days.

But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a week I was tired of seeing sights, and in less than a month I had had enough of restaurants and theatres and race-meetings. I had no real pal to go about with, which probably explains things. Plenty of people invited me to their houses, but they didn’t seem much interested in me. They would fling me a question or two about South Africa, and then get on to their own affairs. A lot of Imperialist ladies asked me to tea to meet schoolmasters from New Zealand and editors from Vancouver, and that was the dismalest business of all. Here was I, thirty-seven years old, sound in wind and limb, with enough money to have a good time, yawning my head off all day. I had just about settled to clear out and get back to the veld, for I was the best bored man in the United Kingdom.

That afternoon I had been worrying my brokers about investments to give my mind something to work on, and on my way home I turned into my club – rather a pot-house, which took in Colonial members. I had a long drink, and read the evening papers. They were full of the row in the Near East, and there was an article about Karolides, the Greek Premier. I rather fancied the chap. From all accounts he seemed the one big man in the show; and he played a straight game too, which was more than could be said for most of them. I gathered that they hated him pretty blackly in Berlin and Vienna, but that we were going to stick by him, and one paper said that he was the only barrier between Europe and Armageddon. I remember wondering if I could get a job in those parts. It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.

About six o’clock I went home, dressed, dined at Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer. At Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.

My flat was the first floor in a new block behind Langham Place. There was a common staircase, with a porter and a liftman at the entrance, but there was no restaurant or anything of that sort, and each flat was quite shut off from the others. I hate servants on the premises, so I had a fellow to look after me who came in by the day. He arrived before eight o’clock every morning and used to depart at seven, for I never dined at home.

I was just fitting my key into the door when I noticed a man at my elbow. I had not seen him approach, and the sudden appearance made me start. He was a slim man, with a short brown beard and small, gimlety blue eyes. I recognised him as the occupant of a flat on the top floor, with whom I had 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 an effort, and his hand was pawing my arm.

I got my door open and motioned him in. No sooner was he over the threshold than he made a dash for my back-room, where I used to smoke and write my letters. Then he bolted back.

‘Is the door locked?’ he asked feverishly, and he fastened the chain with his own hand.

‘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 my 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 he filled himself a stiff whisky-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 rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.’

I sat down in an arm-chair and lit my pipe.

‘What does it feel like?’ I asked. I was pretty certain that I had to deal with a madman.