Digested classics: The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan

The 100 best novels / No 42 / The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
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Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps / A Life of John Buchan review / A man of no mystery

John Crace

Saturday 4 October 2008

"R

ichard Hannay," I kept telling myself. "Here you are with plenty of money to amuse yourself and you're yawning your head off." That afternoon I had made up my mind that if nothing had happened by the end of the next paragraph I would return to the Cape.

As I was turning the key to my Langham Place flat, I noticed my next-door neighbour at my elbow. "I've been observing you a while," he said, "and you seem like a cool customer who's not afraid of playing a bold hand." I listened while he told me about a plot engineered by the Jew to bring Russia and Germany to war.

"To thwart this fiendish scheme I have to stay alive until June 15th when the Greek Premier, Karolides, comes to London," he continued, "but the enemy are close on my tail. So I've bought a corpse from Harrods that the Boche will think is me and left it in my flat to cover my tracks. Now I just need somewhere to hide.""Wouldn't it have just been easier to go straight to the British government?" I asked.

"That would have rather ruined the book."

I liked the cut of his jib.

"Thank you for playing the white man," he said. "Scudder at your service."

Several days later I found him dead on my living room floor. I had seen bodies before in Matabeleland, but this was different. Scudder was white. I was in the soup. I would be suspected of Scudder's murder and the Boche would know I knew their plans. I had no choice but to lie low in Scotland for 20 days. I found his notebook, persuaded the cockney milkman to lend me his cap by saying, "Gaw blimey, guv'nor", and escaped to St Pancras.I jumped off the train near Galloway, easily escaping the attentions of the police with my veldkraft. Alone that evening in the heather, I opened Scudder's notebook and saw it was written in cipher. With my hallmark cool logic, I had it cracked in 10 minutes.

What I read shocked me to the core. The Jew plot was eyewash. This was bigger than just killing a dago, it was the Boche Black Stone planning to infiltrate the British establishment, kill a Frenchie, steal our plans and sneak out at high tide by the 39 steps at 10.27pm. I stole a car and drove like the wind, escaping the police a second time by driving over a cliff and hanging on to a thorn for dear life.

I set off on foot, encountering Sir Harry, the Liberal candidate, on the road. Something about his aristocratic demeanour made me trust him.

"You are in a pickle, Mr Hannay," he said. "You should talk to my godfather, Sir Walter Bullivant, the PS at the FO who lives in Wiltshire."

I bade him farewell and continued until I came to a remote farmhouse. "Ich have been expecting you," the Black Stone sneered, locking me into a store room. I had unwittingly stumbled on the enemy's lair. I quickly found some explosives, blew a hole in the wall and hid in a dovecote, before running 20 miles to the derelict cottage of a roadman I had befriended earlier.

"Ach, I have no time for the polis," he said, "and I can see you're a gentleman. You can hide out here." I could sense my exploits had already stretched the credulity of a nine-year-old and that I needed a break, so I conveniently succumbed to a recurrence of my malaria for a week.

Eventually my strength returned and I ran through the night from Scotland until I came across a fisherman by a Wiltshire riverbank. It had to be my contact.

"I'm an innocent man, Sir Walter," I gasped.

"Don't worry old boy," he replied. "Scudder told me all about you before he was killed."

Unaware of what a bizarre coincidence it was that I had been directed to Sir Walter or what a complete waste of time my Scotch adventures now were, I fell into a dreamless sleep. I awoke to a sense of anticlimax and a strangely familiar face leaving a private meeting with Sir Walter and four British and French generals.

"That wasn't Lord Alloa," I said, bursting into their room. "That was the Black Stone."

"Good God!" Sir Walter cried. "The Boche are privy to our secrets."

"Not quite yet," I replied. "The Black Stone will want to tell the Boche in person. If we can find him before he gets home to Germany, Britain will be saved."

I pushed Allied high command to one side and studied the maps until I found a pier in Kent with 39 steps where high tide would be at 10.27pm. "There, unless I'm very much mistaken," I said, "we shall find the Black Stone."

"Arrest him quickly," Sir Walter insisted.

"Not so fast. We Brits play by the rules and we can't arrest him until we know he really is the Boche."

I settled down to a long game of bridge with the Black Stone. Damn him, he was good. Just as I was beginning to wonder if he might be British after all, he made a fatal error.

"Only a German would have bid no trumps."

"Gott in Himmel, Hannay. Ze game is hoch!"

THE GUARDIAN