That followup clause beyond the semicolon has always made me laugh. I gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw His name is Richard Hannay and he was, up until the start of the novel, spectacularly bored. He poses as a milkman, a road-man and a political-speaker, when as a matter of fact, he’s a mining engineer recently returned from South-Africa. (Not Ludlum’s Treadstone, though one wonders…) This pursuit leads him all the way to the wilds of Scotland – his native home (one wonders about Skyfall, too…) – and has him don a range of strange disguises. He has been framed for the murder of a spy and is being hunted by both the police and a gang of german agents called The Blackstone. The plot, for instance, centers around a man on the run.

It’s the kind of book Ken Follet, Ian Fleming and Graham Greene would come to write, and a good-many ground rules were laid down securely by Buchan.

Written by John Buchan, a politician, diplomatic and novelist, it has code books and duplicity, intrigue and deception. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is my love for ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps.’ It’s a superb book and is, truly, one of the best of its kind - that is, the espionage-thriller. Now, my blog has a shorter-title, a different house-scheme, and some less-serious tip0s. It had autumnal tones, a picture of a fountain and some serious typos. Back then, my blog was called ‘The Fountain Of Words and Wonder’ (a little long winded, in hindsight) and it looked very different to how it does now. ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ was, I think, the first book I ever reviewed for my blog. James Inskster reviews John Buchan's Thirty Nine Steps.

Author of the 39 steps