Around the World in Books / Scotland

A Spy Novel That Inspired Alfred Hitchcock Has Thrills All Its Own

‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ blazed trails with car chases, aerial surveillance, and other plot devices

Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat in Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps’ / Gaumont-British Picture Corp.

This is the 24th post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books about 30 countries in the first 30 days of March. Tomorrow: Trinidad

Anyone who knows The Thirty-Nine Steps only from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie is missing a treat.

That film — good as it is — takes liberties with John Buchan’s plot that are as wild as the Scottish moors on which its hero finds himself hunted by his enemies. So no matter how many times you’ve seen Robert Donat handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll on a screen, it won’t spoil a reading of the novel. With good reason, Buchan called the book one of his “shockers,” or stories that set personal dramas against tense political realities.

Part of the allure of The Thirty-Nine Steps is that by the standards of more recent spy novels and movies, it’s as sleek as a stiletto. It has none of the political bloviating of John le Carré’s later fiction or the logic-defying plot twists of the Mission Impossible and similar franchises.