Grove Koger
In my post about adventure fiction for November 1, 2023, I mentioned several candidates for the best example of the genre ever written, including John Buchan’s 1916 novel Greenmantle.
While not Buchan’s most widely read book, it gets my vote as his best. It also features the second appearance of Major-General Sir Richard Hannay, whom Buchan introduced as the protagonist of his short 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (William Blackwood & Sons)—undoubtedly his best-known work. Together, the two novels mark the opening stages of a fictional career that ended (on paper, at least) in 1940 with the publication of Sick Heart River, in which Hannay appears as a secondary character.
Buchan dedicated The Thirty-Nine Steps to his close friend Tommy Nelson, describing it as a “romance” in which the “incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible.” That was a fair enough assessment in Buchan’s time, although in the early twenty-first century we’ve grown so used to the unlikely, in life as well as in art, that the description isn’t particularly compelling. Buchan also called it a “shocker,” but, once again, we’re well past the stage of being shocked.
In any case, The Thirty-Nine Steps sold an impressive 25,000 copies within a few months. Part of its success involved timing, of course. The year was 1915, the Great War (as it was known until a greater one erupted in 1939) had begun on July 28, 1914, and there were legitimate fears of German infiltrators.
The Thirty-Nine Steps opens in early 1914 when Richard Hannay’s frightened neighbor, Franklin Scudder, tells him that German agents are plotting to assassinate the Premier of Greece, Constantine Karolides, on a visit to London. In the wake of the crime, war is sure to follow. When Scudder is murdered a few days later, Hannay realizes that he himself is in danger and makes what he thinks is an escape to Scotland. However …
The Thirty-Nine Steps has been filmed several times, initially by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. Hitchcock (or his scriptwriters, Charles Bennett and Ian Hay) introduced several changes to the plot that improved its credibility, and although critics rate the result highly, it strikes me, nearly a century on, as unconvincing.
Hannay followed The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1916 with a better, more substantial novel, Greenmantle (Hodder & Stoughton). Here, Hannay travels to Constantinople (which Buchan himself had visited in 1910), where he hopes to thwart German plans to foment a Muslim uprising against the allies. The novel reaches its climax in early 1916 at the Battle of Erzurum in eastern Anatolia. There was speculation at the time that the “Greenmantle” of the title was based on T. E. Lawrence, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia.” However, the character was apparently modeled on one of Buchan’s friends, intelligence officer and Orientalist Aubrey Herbert. In fact, Herbert’s granddaughter, Margaret Fitzherbert, wrote a biography of Herbert titled The Man Who Was Greenmantle (John Murray, 1983).
John Buchan was a man of many parts. Born in Scotland in 1875, he wrote a number of novels and histories, and, enobled as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, served as Governor General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called him “the best Governor General Canada ever had.” You can read more about him in Andrew Lownie’s biography John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (Constable, 1995).
Buchan once wrote that there were six literary categories ranging from “highbrow to solid ivory,” and that felt he belonged in the middle, in the “high-lowbrow” category. Robin Winks dubbed him “the father of the modern spy thriller,” and he has even lent his name to a subgenre—“Buchanesque.” It’s a lively mixture of espionage with adventure that features a protagonist distinguished by an aristocratic attitude to life, a taste for action, and a disdain for danger. Later examples include Geoffrey’s Household’s Rogue Male (Chatto & Windus, 1939) and Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia (Faber & Faber, 1957). We might even reach backward a few years to include Erskine Childers’ 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands (Smith, Elder & Co). They’re short on character development, long on plot and action, and, as Buchan himself said of The Thirty-Nine Steps, their events “march just inside the borders of the possible.”
From top to bottom, the images in today’s post are of the cover of the first edition of The Thirty-Nine Steps; the covers of my Penguin paperback editions, with striking images by Stephen Russ (1919-1983); and the cover of my 2003 McArthur & Co. edition of Buchan’s biography, featuring a portrait from the National Crown Collection.
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