Richard Hannay is bored. Not by work, daily commutes or family tiffs – he doesn’t have any of those. No, the young-ish, wealthy, independent Hannay is bored by his own prosperity – and to him London’s restaurants, theatres and parties are all an epic snooze.
It is, I admit, a challenge at this point not to fling the book across the room while shouting “oh TOUGH life mate!” But happily Hannay’s creator is on the case, and the moustachioed hero of John Buchan’s spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps is not about to get a holiday, but a swift kick up the rear. The resulting journey takes Hannay from urban sprawl to desolate heath, and the nation from complacent security to the brink of devastating conflict – and it’s a voyage I have repeatedly stowed away on.
The adventure gets rolling when Hannay’s neighbour turns up at night, babbling about a gang that is planning to cause mayhem by assassinating the Greek premier and kicking off a major war - the first world war, to be precise. Next thing we know, Hannay’s tripping over said neighbour, who has been pinned to the floor with a knife through his heart. And that, of course, is just not cricket. “I had seen men die violently before; indeed I had killed a few myself in the Matabele War; but this cold-blooded indoor business was different,” Hannay muses, his moustache no doubt bristling indignantly.
Judging himself to be a “marked man”, Hannay goes on the run to his native Scotland in an attempt to evade both the police (who think he bumped off the neighbour) and the dastardly gang who, far from being a troupe of thugs, appear as a chameleon-like trio uncannily able to morph into whatever characters they choose. Hannay’s plan is to lurk in the remote wilds of Galloway, waiting for the opportune moment to reveal the conspiracy to the authorities and give the nation a fighting chance.
Celebrating its centenary this year, The Thirty-Nine Steps has lost none of its zip and go. Indeed, there’s something I find endlessly cathartic about basking in the frenetic energy of Hannay and his desperate attempts to outwit his pursuers, while lazily rolling past bucolic scenery on my own vacations, tucking into a second Tunnock’s teacake while Hannay has to be content with a cup of cold tea.
Because, let’s make no bones about it, Hannay’s plan is a bit rubbish. Quite why hiding on open moorland ever seemed like a genius idea is never really clear, and for all his colonial bravado (his party trick is to throw a hunting-knife and catch it between his lips), time and again Hannay makes a bit of a meal of things – despite a stint in army intelligence he bowls along for several hours before realising that pinching a conspicuous vehicle from his enemies was not such a cunning plan. “I began to see what an ass I had been to steal the car. The big green brute would be the safest kind of clue to me over the breadth of Scotland.” He’s also pretty blasé about the havoc he causes, happy to blab about his mission to all and sundry and then hotfoot it, leaving his well-meaning acquaintances to their fate. It’s a journey at speed, with a constant urgency that sidesteps outright farce, crashing coincidences and lumbering good luck in a giddy blur of action.
But while Buchan’s hail-fellow-well-met Hannay is something of a blundering action man, it is those whom Hannay meets on his journey that have always held the greatest fascination for me. Some of my own most memorable journeys have been in the company of people whose names I never knew, from the elderly lady who excitedly told me of her plans for a sea voyage to go polar-bear watching in the Arctic, to the widow who confided in me the depths of her heart-wrenching sadness at the recent loss of her husband.
Buchan, I suspect, was no stranger to such impromptu exchanges, for it is his chatty cameo characters that ring truest, from the eager literary-minded young publican with a penchant for Kipling, to an old shepherd laconically falling off the wagon: ‘‘Bein’ a teetotaller I keepit off the whisky, but I was nip-nippin’ a’ day at this brandy”. But it’s the lonely, hardworking rural roadman that is Buchan’s crowning glory, his broad dialect ripping across the page, “Confoond the day I ever left the herdin’!” he cries as he labours under the after-effects of his daughter’s wedding.
Indeed, while The Thirty-Nine Steps will forever be a bounding tale of espionage, conspiracy and somewhat bungled derring-do, it also carries another message for travellers: everyone has a tale to tell. And it might be every bit as interesting as your own.
