The Thirty-Nine Steps

⚖The case for it

Under a hundred and fifty pages, finished in an afternoon, and readers still call it “the foundation stone of spy fiction,” the man-on-the-run template every chase since has borrowed. The Galloway moorland writing is the best thing in it by common agreement, praised even by readers unmoved by the plot. Buchan writes with “lighting bolts rather than a pen,” short and fast with nothing padded anywhere. Hannay talks and improvises his way out of corners rather than shooting his way out. And it is funnier than expected, “hilarious in a stuffy British way.” A “dashed ripping yarn.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Scudder’s early monologue blames a Jewish conspiracy for the state of the world, and readers split over whether Buchan endorses it or discredits the man saying it; either way the “anti-Semitism and some gross racial profiling” sits on the page. The plot runs on a “seemingly endless line of good Samaritans” who shelter a stranger on the run without a question, with coincidences “piling on like wretched clichés.” Hannay has no interior life. There are no women. The “clumsy dialect in the Scottish parts” slows it further. “He runs around in the fields. A lot.”

— the honest librarian

2h

honest hours

3

sittings