This is an early British spy thriller (1915) from the writer John Buchan, who would go to write a couple dozen other novels and apparently become Governor-General of Canada in the mid 1930s, which is odd. Even odder is that this is happening at the same time Alfred Hitchcock is making a film version of this novel starring Robert Donat, a big star at the time.
Weird.
Ok so the novel is an engineer who becomes embroiled in a German plot. To do what?! General mischief mainly. This novel is not about specific goals per se, so much as the roles of spies in the game of spycraft. There’s costumes and disguises and crazy (Scottish) accents and a lot of anti-Semitism. It’s also the kind of pre-war (start of the war really) novel that was really really afraid of bomb throwing anarchists, the way that GK Chesterton’s novel The Man who was Thursday (a great novel) was also terrified of bomb-throwing anarchists, which is part of, but not all of the book’s fear of Jews, or more to the point “The Jew.” So be forewarned that that happens a lot in this book (and a lot of British novels/spy novels before WWII).
The novel does do something fun, which is related to why I brought up Buchan’s political life, and that is that the main character as he’s struggling to solve a mystery mentions that he’s “no Sherlock Holmes” after all. And that’s fun, since there were still more Holmes to come. Anyway, this is perfectly ok, ultimately empty, definitely problematic, and more of a historical piece than anything.
(Photo: http://americanstage.org/the-39-steps-from-page-to-screen-to-stage/)
Sounds like the book is disappointing, but I’ve seen the Hitchcock film which is pretty standard. But the play if such fun! I saw it a number of years ago and it was so surprisingly funny and well executed.
The book is over the top and unintentionally goofy. Like every line should be read as “Spies!” but it’s not all bad. It has an issue I don’t like where it does too much action in too short a space, so something dramatic will happen, then something else, then something else, and then the narrator will be like “Then nine days passed.”