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"Thirty-Nine Steps, I Counted Them..."
One hundred years on, something of 1915 lives with us still: a book published in that year and set during the period leading up to the war then raging. But it was not a dense political, historical, or diplomatic work. Rather, it was a thriller - its writer called it a "shocker" - whose hero, wrongly suspected of murder, goes on the run and encounters a ruthless German spy ring. The book was The Thirty-Nine Steps.
The year 1915 should have been an inauspicious time to publish a piece of light fiction. It was a grim year; Britain was ensnared in the most terrible war the world had ever known, and the "over by Christmas" optimism of 1914 was now only a distant memory. There was bloody stalemate in France and Flanders and Gallipoli; Zeppelins bombed British targets, and U-boats threatened to starve Britain into submission. However, The Thirty-Nine Steps appeared as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine between July and September 1915 with publication in book form following in October.
The author was John Buchan, a 40-year-old Scotsman who had already published 36 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and over 800 articles. Buchan was the son of an ordinary Scottish manse but was now, after some abrupt career changes along the way, resolutely upwardly mobile; at the time of his death in 1940 he was ennobled and serving as Governor General of Canada. The Thirty-Nine Steps was written during 1914 to pass the time while he was recovering from illness. Afterwards he always rather dismissed it, yet it has never been out of print. Some have wrongly claimed it as the first spy novel, but the likes of Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Kipling's Kim preceded it, and it wasn't even Buchan's first stab at the genre. However, it has been hugely influential amongst later espionage writers such as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. It's a book with staying power. Why has it lasted so much longer than its contemporaries?
IF The Thirty-Nine Steps is an early novel in the espionage genre, it also belongs to another, weirder scene - the Invasion Scare thriller. Many popular works of this kind appeared in Britain in the 1890s and...