Number 56 - The 39 Steps - John Buchan

Only a few days left till the end of the year, and I figure I can hit 60 if I stick to thin books like this one.

This is of course the basis for teh Afred Hitchcock film of the same name.  Published in 1915, it's credited as inventing the entire genre of the spy novel.Therefore it's an important, if rather slim, volume.

I'd love to say that I think it's better than the film and everyone should rush out and read it but I can't. It's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination but does it deserve the classic status?

It's well paced, the story moves at a fast clip but the action rarely takes off.  The big action set pieces we associate with this story seem to be unique to the filmed versions, especially the Big Ben finale.  In fact the eponymous steps barely make an appearance in the book.  They're mentioned briefly about halfway through, but don't reappear as a plot point until very late on.

There isn't really much in the way of action, there's lots of running and hiding, and a few disguises but precious little in the way of actually trying to solve his problems - at least until the closing chapters, where the biggest problem, the dead man in his apartment and him as lead suspect, has solved itself in any case. He's a very reactive, rather than a proactive, protagonist (a retagoinist?) 

Some bits of the story have aged very badly, several mentions of the Jew conspiracy for example.  As a cardr carrying member of the Labour Party I''d be unable to recommend this book unreservedly purely for the antisemitism on display from the good guys.

Considering the book was published a year into WWI and set the same year, the story seems to be ignorant of the history of the period, and the world war hasn't yet started... I can only assume it was written a couple of years earlier and took time to get published.

It was still a solid enough read, as long as you could allow for when it was written.  It's certainly a product of its time.

6/10