A hundred years ago this month, John Buchan's spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps made its first appearance in Blackwood's magazine, where it ran in instalments for two months before being published as a book in October. Filmed three times – most famously by Alfred Hitchcock – it has become one of the world's best-known thrillers.
Robert McCrum selected it as one of his 100 best novels in English, and mentioned it on a Books podcast earlier this year. But the academic Kate Macdonald – author of new study of middlebrow fiction in the early years of the 20th century – felt we were selling Buchan short. She joins McCrum in the studio to discuss the merits of this brief novel, and why it has outlived so many others of its era.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment