Ha! Not only has it just been celebrated in its Broadway opening, it has been mounted in Italy and South Africa, while productions are planned for South Korea, Japan, Australia, Mexico and more than a dozen other countries.įor that success, though, it would be wrong to credit Buchan entirely. The show which was adapted by Patrick Barlow with its allusions to London neighborhoods, its regional accents and its invocation of British music halls winking with comic collusion at the audience, almost convinced me, when I saw it in London recently, that the show was too consummately local to travel well.

So Buchan may still have a powerful British aura. By that time too, as another world war was beginning, Buchan was not just known as a pioneering spy novelist or the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, or a polymathic historian and biographer, or a former member of Parliament he was governor general of Canada and the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield. It sold 25,000 copies within six months of publication, and a million copies before Buchan died in 1940.

Its story about a colonial mining engineer, Richard Hannay, who single-handedly tries to crack a German spy ring, tapped into the fears and passions of the early days of the First World War. After all, this “shocker” as Buchan called his slight entertainment had been a British sensation. In London the award-winning theatrical comedy is billed as “John Buchan’s The 39 Steps.” But on Broadway, where the British import opened this month, it is called “Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.” Is it possible that Buchan, who published his novel “The 39 Steps” in 1915, is better known in Britain than Hitchcock, the cinematic master of suspense who in 1935 made his film adaptation of that novel into one of the triumphs of his early London period?

The 39 steps by john buchan