Yesterday I read The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, published in 1915.  It is the thriller upon which Hitchcock based his movie, and was the basis for three more movies,  and for the current Broadway comedy production.  Buchan went on to write four more thrillers starring the very unshakeable and resourceful Richard Hannay.  I prefer the English spy thrillers of Manning Coles, which I find to be much more authentic, interesting, and fun.

Buchan has his hero Hannay bolting around Scotland trying to shake the bad guys and the police from his trail.  The chase gets a bit boring after awhile.  I also just could not believe that the thin disguises used by both Hannay and the bad guys would actually work to confuse detection, nor that Hannay’s sense of whom he could trust and whom he could not was so very reliable — especially given that such sense failed him occasionally and yet he still insisted on relying on instinct.  I suppose we all rely on our gut more than our brain, and also our heart more than our brain; does this make our heart the same as our gut?  The Thirty -Nine Steps leaves heart out of it completely: Hannay is in the game of espionage for the love of adventure alone and he is so charming, so unflappable, and so determined, that I did end up in his camp, but based solely on my gut (heart) and not on my brain.  My brain knew the whole plot made no sense and that men such as Hannay only exist in novels.

Buchan himself acknowledges the ridiculousness of his plot, when in his dedication he writes that he wrote a “dime novel…where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.”  He concludes by stating “in these days…the wildest fictions are so much less improbably than the facts.“  Written during the early years of World War One, his words are chillingly apt words for the century still to come.