![]() ![]() one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.” This doesn’t precisely describe the situation of The Thirty-Nine Steps in John Buchan’s corpus, but it gets close.īuchan wrote this novel while recuperating from an illness in the late summer of 1914, during the early weeks of the First World War. In a review of American political philosopher Russell Kirk’s thriller Old House of Fear a few years ago, Douglas Murray wrote that while “there are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table. Today I tackle what is far and away the most famous of them all- The Thirty-Nine Steps. ![]() I’ve christened this month on the blog John Buchan June, and I’m reading and writing about as many of Buchan’s classic adventure novels as I can. ![]()
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