The Thirty-Nine Steps

"Well, it’s another children’s story really, isn’t it? Buchan died the year I was born, he was at the same college as me at Oxford, Brasenose, and he was interested in politics. He became the Governor General of Canada, of course. So, I had a natural interest. But, again, it’s a damn good story. Immortalised by Hitchcock and done again and again. If nobody had ever made it into a film it probably wouldn’t have become as famous but that’s true of so many books. Gone With the Wind, the most successful film probably of all time, made the book one of the most successful books of all time. But this book is about an old-fashioned First World War hero and it was popular at the time but somehow it still resonates because it’s a damn good story. Insider knowledge. He mixed with Prime Ministers, he mixed with civil servants, so you know that when he mentions these things he’s been there. It has that ring of truth. Like Ian Fleming’s books . Because we know he actually was a spy, well, not a spy, but he worked in intelligence … Because Bond is a farcical character in one way, but there are touches of such accuracy that he comes alive. I wouldn’t comment."

"The Thirty-Nine Steps , because it teaches you anything you wanted to know about adaptation. It’s actually not a particularly great book. With the Hitchcock. It’s quite a good book, nothing particularly fantastic, but it’s got one great idea in it, and Hitchcock ran – literally ran – with it. I think Hitchcock’s 39 Steps is one of a handful of perfect scripts: it never touches the ground, it just goes boom! flat out, and never lets you question it. It’s full of delight, it’s incredibly romantic, incredibly tense – it’s just got everything a movie should have. I think if you read the book and then watch the film you can see that what makes a great movie is in the difference between those two things: the whole alchemy is there in the gap between that book and the film. You see that Hitchcock’s taken something and really explored it and made it live, with the courage not to pause and explain things or fill in any background. “I think Hitchcock’s 39 Steps is one of a handful of perfect scripts.” I think when people are adapting a book or an idea they often try to do justice to it. And actually it’s just much better to take the thing that’s brilliant about it and polish it and make it shine. I guess the other thing about cinema is that it’s really very kinetic, and what Hitchcock took from that book is just running, keeping moving, and the whole process of jumping on trains, into taxis, running across moors. He just found the whole physical movement in the story, and he doesn’t let anyone stand still and talk. People are always making it. I think the other versions are just not very good. But more to the point is how ideas get passed on – Mission: Impossible is The 39 Steps , the Die Hards , Bourne, and any mistaken identity or innocent man on the run film is The 39 Steps . They’re all hugely indebted, and in the way I’ve just been talking about as well. They’re hugely kinetic: don’t wait for the explanation, don’t wait for the back story, just go, ‘Bloody hell, we’d better run’. In Hitchcock’s version there are very believable characters and the love story between them’s amazing – it’s swooningly romantic and brilliant. But there’s never those horrible clunky bits you get in Mission: Impossible films where somebody sits down and says, ‘Right, there’s a CD with all the names of the FBI agents, blah blah,’ and you just switch off. It never does that: it just goes, ‘39 steps’, and you never find out what they are until the end and the guy says, ‘The 39 steps are a criminal organisation’ and bang! he’s dead."

"I haven’t read this for a long, long time. But it has stayed with me since reading it in boyhood. It is extraordinarily fast paced. A huge part of any good thriller is the chase, and this is very good on that. Buchan has a protagonist who is in some ways a precursor to James Bond, in that he is suave, sophisticated and ingenious. It is an espionage story, and the fate of the country is at stake. And it has what every good thriller story should have, which is that no matter how high-concept and overlaid with political intrigue a novel is, it has to be a cracking good yarn. This is one of those classic page-turner, fast, exciting stories. You know the beginning and you know the end. Your job is a bit like holding a reel of yarn and unspooling it very gradually and steadily. It is very tempting to let the reel start spinning and have all the yarn out in a matter of seconds. You will get to the end that way, but it is better to unspool it gently and steadily. Each scene should only reveal one more stretch of yarn at a time. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In that sense it is quite different from journalism, where the first line of any news story essentially tells you what the entire story is. Writing a novel is the reverse. You shouldn’t know fully what has happened until you read the last line. A thriller should be slow release, even when it is a very fast-paced story – and that will keep people with you. In each chapter you give them another piece of the puzzle. It’s quite similar to how people tell a story. If you see people sitting around a table, they all do this. Both my parents, in different ways, are storytellers. When I was a child, they would tell me a little bit at a time and keep my interest alive. So – despite being a journalist – when I came to write novels, I found it less of a departure from everything that I had done before than I was expecting."

"Having first discovered the Hitchcock film, Hergé discovered Buchan’s book. Then he created The Black Island , the adventure where Tintin comes to Britain, stopping off in Dover and Suffolk before going north to Scotland. And of course it is a reflection of the flight northwards of Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps . Buchan’s construction of his narrative was precisely the same as what Hergé was striving to do. So John Buchan is an author after Hergé’s heart. He creates wonderfully exciting adventures that are very much in the spirit of Tintin. Like them, Tintin is a thriller, a page-turner, and like you said a detective story. Hitchcock said of The Thirty-Nine Steps that it was a wonderful book to film because you didn’t need to do a storyboard, it was all there already. It’s exactly the same with Hergé, and Spielberg said the precise same thing – that one of the reasons why he wanted to film Tintin was because the adventures are themselves storyboards. The advantage of the serial form is that you must leave the reader hanging in anticipation of what comes next. They have to wait until the next installment. For many writers that is very positive, whether it’s Dickens or Buchan or Hergé in their different fields. It means you have a rattling good story."