25. The Thirty-Nine Steps: The First James Bond

How did the First World War inspire The 39 Steps? Why did John Buchan set the novel in Scotland? And, is the dashing protagonist Richard Hannay, a model for later Spy heroes? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The 39 Steps, and the world it was born of. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editors: Lorcan Moullier & Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:39Speaker 05

  I was just fitting my key into the door when I noticed a man at my elbow. Though not seen him approach, and the sudden appearance made me start. He was a slim man with a short brown beard and small gimlety blue eyes. I recognized him as the occupant of a flat on the top floor with whom I passed the time of day on the stairs.

• 2:00Speaker 06

  Can I speak to you?

• 2:01Speaker 05

  He said.

• 2:03Speaker 06

  May I come in for a minute?

• 2:04Speaker 05

  He was steadying his voice with an effort, and his hand was pawing my arm. I got my door open and motioned him in.

• 2:11Speaker 06

  Is the door locked?

• 2:12Speaker 05

  He asked feverishly, and he fastened the chain with his own hand.

• 2:16Speaker 06

  I'm very sorry, he said humbly. It's a mighty liberty, but you look the kind of man who would understand. I've had you in mind all this week when things got troublesome. Say, will you do me a good turn?

• 2:29Speaker 05

  I'll listen to you, I said. That's all I'll promise. I was getting worried by the antics of this nervous little chap. There was a tray of drinks on a table beside him, from which, characteristically, Tabby, he filled himself. He filled himself a stiff whiskey and soda. He drank it off in three gulps and cracked the glass as he set it down.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  Pardon, he said. I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  What a strange man. So that's the opening chapter of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was published in 1939. And Buckon himself called it a shocker, but we might call it the first modern thriller. It's not a long book, so if you haven't already read it, you can probably read it before I start the next sentence.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  Well, slightly before we finish this episode.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Definitely. So it's barely 100 pages long, and it's a period piece that is set just before the First World War, but it is also one of the most celebrated, the most exciting, and the most influential adventure stories ever written. It's the template for James Bond, for the Jason Bourne series, for the kind of, you can see the elements of Slow Horses or the Lee Child books, or all of these kinds of thrillers. And Tabby, I mean, one of the defining things about it is that it's so fast-paced, isn't it?

• 3:48Speaker 06

  It's incredibly fast-paced, even by modern standards. So for instance, that scene that we opened with, that very dramatic scene when this stranger kind of barges into this flat and pronounces himself dead, that happens only a couple of pages into the book. And given how short the book is, it packs so much in. So our hero in the book is Richard Hane, and he's a mining engineer in his late 30s. He's Scottish-born, like James Bond. But he spent most of his life in South Africa, so he's a fellow expatriate, like me.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  He's been in England for the last three months, and he's fed up with it. He's bored, he's restless. So he says, in about a week, I was tired of seeing sights, and in less than a month, I had had enough of restaurants and theatres and race meetings. The talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick. I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda water that has been standing in the sun. So because of this, he's thinking of cleaning out and going back to the South African veld. And he's been to see his stockbroker, and he's been for drinks at his club, then he goes to a music hall, which he hates, and then he comes back to his flat, just off Oxford Circus, when this neighbor accosts him.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:58Speaker 06

  And this neighbor turns out to be an American called Franklin Scudder, and he's a freelance war correspondent who claims, very dramatically, that he's uncovered a plot to murder the Prime Minister of Greece and trigger a war in the Balkans that would drag in all the European powers. So obviously, this calls to mind the start of the First World War with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And Scudder, at this moment, thinks he's being watched, and he's faked his own death, as we've heard, to evade his pursuers. So it's all very, very dramatic, and this is why he needs Hane's help to hide in his flat. And like utterly incomprehensibly, Hane's like, yeah, sure, come in, sleep on my sofa,

• 5:42Speaker 06

  drink my booze, hang around.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Well, Hane doesn't get much choice there, does he? I mean, Scudder basically invites himself in and helps himself to Hane's whiskey.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  But if that happened to me, I'd be calling the police.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  Anyway, at the end of this first chapter, Hane comes back home to find that something has happened to Scudder. If you've read the book, you know what it is. But we won't give it away just in case you haven't, because it's one of the great cliffhangers in all modern fiction, actually. Hane ends up going on the run, and he is pursued across the lowlands of Scotland. He's gone to Scotland for reasons that are slightly obscure, but we'll get into that later on. He's pursued across the lowlands of Scotland by the police, but also by a gang of sinister conspirators who are called the Black Stone.

• 6:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  And again, there are echoes of the buildup to the First World War there, because of course Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a group called the Black Hand. Hane has a series of adventures and escapades, some of them quite bizarre. He dons a succession of kind of bonkers disguises. He impersonates a roadside laborer, among other things, or an aspiring liberal politician. And every step brings him closer to discovering the truth about the villain's plot, but also to the villain's lair, which is elsewhere in the British Isles, and to its mysterious 39 steps. So this was published in 1915 by John Buchan.

• 7:07Speaker 05

  A lot of the first readers were men in the trenches in the First World War, and they thought, you know, almost without exception, that this book was just unbelievably exciting. Now, Tabby, when you read it some years after the First World War, did you find it as exciting?

• 7:24Speaker 06

  I did. We were saying just before this, I think I maybe was a little bit too young to kind of understand the plot and what was going on and the kind of political dimension. But I did think it was unbelievably exciting. I thought it was kind of one big Highland manhunt, which is always thrilling, you know, you're just ahead of your would-be captors. And there were explosions, and he was just so very capable and always one step ahead, Hane himself. But I couldn't remember the ending at all, at all. And I think that's really telling, because the final portion of the book is incredibly rushed. What about you?

• 8:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, interesting. So I knew of the book before I read it. I probably read it when I was a teenager. I remember thinking, gosh, that'll be very exciting when I read The Thirty-Nine Steps. And I remember I wasn't that excited by it, I think probably because my palate had been ruined by reading James Bond.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  And sort of subsequent imitators, who are more overtly, you know, adrenaline-packed. So I sort of thought, gosh, it's more offbeat than I was expecting, more cozy, more low-key. You know, there's a lot of sort of hiding in heather in Scotland.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a bloody good chaps element to it.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  Yes, completely, there is.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  Which isn't quite in James Bond. But that's actually a really good point, because this was definitely my first kind of thriller. So I hadn't been ruined for it yet. So that's really interesting.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  The slight tweediness of it, I suppose, didn't grab me when I was maybe 14 or whatever. However... Now, reading it, I think it's a really nice book. I love the slightly offbeat humour of it, actually, the wryness of it with all the different characters.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  Definitely.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  We'll come to some of the intricacies of the plot, won't we? And obviously there will be spoilers. I mean, you know, it's hard to talk about a thriller without spoiling it a little bit. But maybe first of all, we should set the scene with the author and his times, because actually, of all the authors we've done, I mean, John Buckon, I mean, he had one of the most interesting and sort of varied lives, didn't he?

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he just strikes me as having been so talented, so competent. So he's incredibly prolific. He wrote almost thirty novels and loads of short stories, essays, and a massive twenty-four volume account of the First World War, and thousands of newspaper articles. And that kind of reminds me of, you know, Lord Sumption with his endless, endless, endless books about the Hundred Years.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  The Hundred Years' War.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it's incredible. How did these people, I don't know, how do you have the time when he was doing all the other things that he was doing? Because he was also an imperial civil servant, an MP, he was head of government propaganda in the First World War, and he ends up as a hugely popular governor general of Canada, which is remarkable.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  And actually, the most famous photo of him, if you Google John Buchan, one of the first photos you find is a very odd congress photo taken by Yusuf Karsh of him when he's governor general of Canada and he's wearing this enormous native feathered headdress.

• 10:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  You know, he's sort of reaching out to the kind of, what do they call them, the First Nations peoples of Canada. And he looks, he looks very grim faced, doesn't he, in kind of beaky? And he's wearing, there's no hint of humour that he's wearing this kind of headdress.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  It's kind of interesting that as well, because he very much encouraged kind of the people of Canada to have their own sense of nationhood and stuff. And yet, but he was quite pro the British Empire and.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I think he thought there was no contradiction between the two, actually.

• 10:42Speaker 06

  Well, exactly. Yeah, as we will see. So let's get into his life in a bit more detail, because as we've said, he is such an interesting character with one of, in fact, surely the most varied career of any writer that we've done on this show so far.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  So he's born in Perth in eighteen seventy-five, and he's brought up in Kirkcudde in Fife. And his father was a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, and his mother was very young, actually, when she had him, she was eighteen. And he goes to a local school, his father is then transferred to a parish in the Gorbals in Glasgow, very poor area, and he goes to grammar school in Glasgow. And in many ways, it's quite an austere background. His parents are very serious. So for example, on Sundays, you know, you expect this for the Free Church of Scotland kind of minister, they're not allowed to do anything that's kind of fun. So if they want to have games, they have to act out Old Testament stories, or they have to read stories about Protestant martyrs and things like that.

• 11:36Speaker 06

  It's great fun. Yeah, it's great fun.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  He's a big reader, he's obviously a very bright boy, he loves Walter Scott above all. So the great, you know, sort of romantic Scottish novelist of the early nineteenth century, the guy who in many ways invents the idea of Scotland and Scottish history, and invents stories like Ivanhoe or something.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  These stories of great kind of daring do and excitement and romance and all of this. You can see that in his fiction, I think.

• 12:01Speaker 06

  Oh, totally. So a book of his that I love, Buckon's, is called Witchwood.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  Right.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  Set in seventeen hundreds. And there's a massive element of Walter Scott in that. I mean, it's, it's so obvious. The adventure, the chivalry, the romance, all that.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  But one of the other elements in Buckon's boyhood is a book that we've talked about before in the concept of Little Women, which is Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, thrilling.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  Well, so there's a biography of John Buchan by his granddaughter Ursula Buckon, whom I know, who I've met.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  Really?

• 12:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  You do have friends in high places.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  We, on The Rest Is History, we mentioned John Buchan slightingly, and Ursula Buckon listened to it and wrote to us.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  Oh, I actually did know this, yes.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  And, and she put out that I was wrong, that I had maligned him. And I was wrong. She put me right. So.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  She's an excellent woman.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  I take my hat off to her. Anyway.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  She says, you know, Pilgrim's Progress, which people who listen to our Little Women episode may remember, in Pilgrim's Progress, it's a character called Christian who goes through all these kind of trials and tribulations to kind of reach, what's it called, the celestial city or something like that.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Anyway, the idea of the quest, the idea of defeating evil in this kind of desolate landscape and all of this kind of thing, there's a lot of that in a lot of John Buchan's adventure stories. You know, you can perhaps see it under the surface. Anyway, that makes them sound very boring, the Buckons, but actually, outdoorsiness is a huge part of Buckon's life and his fiction. I mean, we were talking beforehand about school trips and outings when we were teenagers, and, you know, being forced, enforced marches across bleak landscapes

• 13:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  and sort of camping trips and things like that. If you like that, this is undoubtedly the book for you, because Buckon is drawing on his childhood memories of times when he and his mates would kind of roam around outside, he was part of various gangs, there were always fights and scrapes. So, given that he's actually, as it were, a good boy all his life, it's reassuring to read that when he was very small, he was sometimes naughty. So apparently, the biggest prank was they got some tar barrels, set fire to them, and rolled them into a quarry where they exploded. I mean, I think that is quite hardcore, actually, for a sort of eight-year-old or something.

• 14:17Speaker 06

  That is seriously hardcore. I mean, not very Christian as well, but I mean, it's very, very hardcore. I mean, I think that it sounds like in that regard, they have a wonderful childhood.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, do Christians not set light at tar barrels?

• 14:27Speaker 06

  I don't know, it just isn't entirely in keeping with the Christian martyrs readings of the Old Testament thing. But maybe it is, maybe it is, maybe it's very Old Testament. And so, as we've said, this outdoorsiness is a massive part of his identity and his fiction. And it's one of the things that readers always associate with John Buchan. So it's chases across heather, moorlands, fugitives hiding on remote islands, pursuits across hills and mountains. So we were discussing before this episode, Duke of Edinburgh trips or ordeals, as I would call them. And this is basically one big Duke of Edinburgh expedition. I think for some people, it would be incredibly evocative, you know, make you yearn to jump on a train without supplies and survive in the Highlands of Scotland with nothing but

• 15:11Speaker 06

  your, your wiles.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  For him, the countryside is this great sort of adventure playground, isn't it, I guess? That's how he thinks of it. Like, he doesn't live in the countryside, he's one of these writers who uses the countryside as a kind of, as a place of fantasy and a place of fun, I guess.

• 15:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  He does all stuff like fishing and, I don't know, bird watching and things.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  Love all that. That's great.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. John Keegan, in his introduction to one of the editions of The Thirty-Six Steps, says, "The longer the walk, the harder the climb, the more he enjoyed the holiday." That is not you.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  No, that's not me. I hated when I got on holiday with people and they kind of turfed me out of bed at eight AM to go, I don't know, water skiing or something. Just leave me alone.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  Okay, well, you're fun-loving.

• 15:55Speaker 06

  But, you know, for Buckon, it's actually not just fun, because he thinks it's very good for you. And this is typical of the late Victorian kind of Edwardian generation, who have read moralises like John Ruskin, the classic, and Matthew Arnold, and think that city life and kind of industrialisation and all of that is rotting the moral fibre of the British people. And everyone needs to get outdoors and get back to nature and get back to, you know, the soul of Old England, moral England. And it's this mood that produces Ben Powell and the Scouts.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  It is. And I have to say, John Buchan would be turning his grave to hear you say Old England, because of course with him, it would be Scotland.

• 16:32Speaker 06

  I know, yeah, forgive me, forgive me, John.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Back to his own career. He wins a bursary to Glasgow University when he's sixteen years old. He studies classics like Uteby. He wins another scholarship to Oxford, he studies classics again at Oxford. He's a big star, the university wins loads of prizes, he becomes president of the Oxford Union, so.

• 16:54Speaker 06

  Very impressive, isn't he?

• 16:55Speaker 05

  He is impressive. And basically, everybody at Oxford thinks he's brilliant. He's, even at this point, he's a published author. So he's had stories published in magazines and things, essays. He's making a lot of money from his writing. I mean, this is an age when you can make tens of thousands of pounds in today's money.

• 17:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know, he's already making all this money, and he's so young, and he's doing so much else alongside it. I mean, it's.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a lesson to us all. Yeah, I mean, too late for us, but for our younger listeners. So the nice thing about him, actually, he, even though he's come from a sort of outsider's background, he has no chip on his shoulder.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  No.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  He loses his Scottish accent quite quickly, but he never loses his sense of being a proud Scot. And his friends at Oxford are very well-connected people. So Raymond Asquith, who's the son of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, goes on to be killed in the First World War. Another great First World War character called Aubrey Herbert, who was twice offered the throne of Albania, who was kind of adventurer and Conservative MP.

• 17:57Speaker 06

  He hangs out with Churchill a bit too, Rudyard Kipling.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  Because he's seen as one of the stars of his generation, he gets first, and everybody says he is going to be an absolute titan. You know, he'll, he'll be in politics or he'll do something, and, you know, he'll, his will be a name to conjure with. And he's also very likeable, I think, isn't he?

• 18:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. In the introduction to the edition that I was reading, it said that he was incredibly likeable. He was known for his generosity. He wasn't at all prone to kind of being partisan politically, he was always willing to be polite about the people he was up against or whatever it may be. But the one thing it said, he had a slight superficial weakness, just a foible for, you know, he, he had, he had an eye for the rich and famous. He liked being in their company. But then, that was always countered by, by always being very generous and just a good bloke.

• 18:46Speaker 05

  He becomes a barrister, he's still writing a lot for the newspapers. And then a big development in his life, in nineteen oh one, he decides to go off to South Africa. So you're neck of the woods, Tabby.

• 18:56Speaker 06

  T R A Brew.

• 18:58Speaker 05

  No, I mean, who knows what that meant?

• 19:00Speaker 06

  This is Africa.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 19:02Speaker 06

  Clearly haven't watched Blood Diamond.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  I haven't. So he goes up to South Africa. And why does he go there? The reason is, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Boer War is winding down. So this is Britain against the Boer Republics. And the British government have asked Alfred Milner, who is the High Commissioner for South Africa, we want you to basically reconstruct South Africa and to incorporate the Boer Republics into the new kind of united colony. And Milner decides that he wants the best and the brightest from Britain to be his kind of assistants. And this is not like a backwater or something. I mean, South Africa like absolutely dominates the British imagination in the 1890s, 1900s. Of course, it's gold and diamonds and all of this.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  So easy to forget that, though, because it's because it borders the First World War so closely.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, completely. I think the Boer War is so interesting and really forgotten. And, you know, Milner was a very, very well-known character in Britain, really famous. And the people who he recruited were called Milner's Kindergarten. People kind of coined this mocking nickname for these super-confident, Oxford-educated young men. You know, they're going out in their mid twenties. Milner has recruited them. They're the absolute stars of their generation.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  They're the Avengers.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, to go and rebuild South Africa. And Buckon is one of them. And Buckon goes, you know, for adventure, of course, but also he believes in the British Empire. He thinks the British Empire is a force for good. It spreads Christian civilisation. And he says a bit later on, "Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people. It was humanitarian and international. We believed we were laying the basis of a federation of the world." Now, lots of listeners may scoff at that, especially listeners who are not kind of British. But this was absolutely what Buckon and Milner and people I then thought. We're creating a kind of international federation, a brotherhood with Britain leading the way. Some listeners may be wondering, will he go to Africa? You know, what are his racial attitudes? Actually, I'm happy to say they're relatively liberal by the standards of the day.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  So he was critical of the Boers because he thought they had this sort of sense of eternal superiority over their black African neighbours. And he explicitly said, "We want to see black South Africans," and I quote, "progressing to equal political rights, not immediately, but over time." The other thing, though, I mentioned it already in passing, he definitely sees Africa as a place for adventures.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  I think as a lot of those early kind of African, before this time, but African settlers did. It was, that's why you get the Happy Valley or whatever, it was a playground. But for him, it's purer than that. It's adventure. It's not just.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  Of course. This must speak to you, Tabby, as somebody who grew up in Africa. No, but I mean, I'm serious. Do you not think it's the sense of the sort of the big horizons and the the veldt and all that sort of stuff?

• 21:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think for a lot of people, Africa is like a bug that they can never shake once they've lived there or been there or something, because there is a freedom to the life that people are able to live there, I think.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, that's definitely why he, because he used to go off, didn't he, riding across the landscape? And he would write these sort of lyrical descriptions of, you know, he went off riding from Johannesburg to Pretoria once.

• 22:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 05

  And he had this, he describes how one morning he kind of got up and looked up at the landscape. And he writes of, and I quote, "A harmony so perfect that it transcended human expression, even human thought. It was like a glimpse of the peace of eternity." You know, this sort of sense that he's at one with the landscape and all of that.

• 22:31Speaker 06

  So that's kind of this outdoorsiness again, actually has a deeper meaning for him. But in 1903, he comes back to London, and this is a massive, I mean, I suppose unsurprisingly, given all this, but it's a massive come down. And he feels exactly as Hane feels at the beginning of the book. So you come back from this wild world of, you know, big horizons and having felt you were doing some sort of good, I suppose. And then you come back to London and it's all kind of parties and society. And he feels depressed and alienated and it's all a bit decadent.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  He's come back to your world. Let's be honest.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. This is my happy place. And he tells his sister he's sick of a sedentary London life with clubs and parties and books. It sounds fantastic.

• 23:17Speaker 06

  And he wrote, "I had no longer any impulse to write. I was distressed by British politics, for it seemed to me that both the great parties were blind to the true meaning of empire.

• 23:27Speaker 06

  London has ceased to have its old glamour, leaving a dull, mercantile, modern place." Although, you know, I joke, but I do slightly, slightly understand that that feeling of coming back from Africa and then coming back here.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 06

  And he thought of being a writer, but he decides against it. He says that writing fiction will be my hobby, not my profession. So he goes back to legal work and a bit of journalism. And then a friend from Oxford offers him partnership in a publishing firm, Thomas Nelson. And they had once published Walter Scott, so that's obviously a big draw. And he takes it and is paid £1,500 a year.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Which is a lot of money in today's money.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. So he's already been making a lot of money from his writing by this point. But I suppose this comes with a slight sense of expectations unfulfilled or something, a bit of a letdown still.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, because he's not quite the star that people expected. He's married well. He's married the cousin of the Duke of Westminster. He settles down.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  Like Dan Snow.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, sister of the Duke of Westminster, I think, in Dan Snow's case. He starts writing fiction, but he's not really going anywhere. He tries to go into politics. He's adopted as the Unionist candidate for Peebles in 1911. And that actually informs a moment in The Thirty Nine Steps where Hane goes to a political meeting. And he meets this guy who's a radical candidate called Sir Henry.

• 24:46Speaker 06

  Who knows nothing about it.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, who knows nothing about it and is very naive and kind of misguided and stuff. And very kind of idealistic. Hane says of Sir Henry, "He was all for reducing our navy as a proof of our good faith, and then sending Germany and ultimatum, telling her to do her the same. We would knock her into a cocked hat." He said that but for the Tories, Germany and Britain would be fellow workers in peace and reform. And obviously Hane is mocking him as John Buchan is mocking him as a sort of Jeremy Corbyn kind of idealist. Your, your style of politics, Tabby.

• 25:18Speaker 06

  I knew that was going to come up. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, when people hear, yeah, when people hear someone with your accent, they say, come on, that person's a Corbynista, definitely.

• 25:28Speaker 06

  You know, you joke, but probably they would.

• 25:31Speaker 05

  I know they would.

• 25:32Speaker 06

  I've got, I've got to let people know my principles somehow.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  So come on.

• 25:37Speaker 06

  Okay. But then soon after this, he, he runs into health problems. And this is actually how we get to the Thirty Nine Steps.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:43Speaker 06

  So in 1912, he comes down with stomach pains. And at first he thinks it's stress, but it turns out to be a duodenal ulcer. And then that summer in 1914, so like we're on the brink of the war here. And so I think that's why a lot of people always think that it's the war that inspired the book. But actually, it's this, and he and his family go to a guest house in Broadstairs, Kent. And he's trying to rest because this ulcer is becoming really debilitating. But his daughter, Alice, who's six years old, is recovering from an operation. And his wife, Susie's cousin, and her family are just up the road in a cliff-top holiday house, has a gate, and it opens onto a wooden staircase that leads down through a tunnel to a private beach. And we will come back to this because it is important.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  The staircase, yeah. Guess how many steps the staircase has.

• 26:31Speaker 06

  Exactly. Just guess. Just imagine. So for much of the holiday, Buckon is in bed. And he's been reading detective thrillers, but he's run out. And he tells Susie, "I should like to write a story of this sort and take real pains with it." Most detective story writers don't take half enough trouble with the characters, and no one cares what becomes of either corpse or murderer.

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  So this is what he starts to write. And he's writing what he calls a shocker, you know, proving that he can do better than these books that he's been reading.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  I love that origin story. So he's, he's thinking about writing as a detective thriller story.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  So it's not quite an adventure story. I mean, because he's thinking about a novel of detection. But then while he's thinking this, something very dramatic happens. So on the 4th of August, 1914, Britain joins the First World War. So as you say, lots of people think, oh, he wrote it because we joined the First World War. But actually, he was thinking about this book beforehand, and then the First World War kind of found its way in.

• 27:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  He writes most of it in London in that autumn. And the reason is that basically his ulcer, which he's now had for two years, has kind of flared up yet again. And his doctors say to him, you have to go to bed and you can't get out of bed. He ends up going to his mother-in-law's house in Mayfair, and he's stuck in bed all day. And he writes this book. So the war was very much on his mind, by the way, at this point. So he, you mentioned, he writes this 24-volume history of the First World War. And basically, the amazing thing about that, I mean, just get your head around it. He is writing as the war is happening. The deal with the publishers is every two months, he has to deliver 50,000 words. So that's 25,000 words a month.

• 28:12Speaker 06

  Extraordinary.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  And basically on what's been going on in the war, like it's like history as it's happening. And over the next four years, he writes a total of 2 million words, 24 volumes, covering the entirety of the war. And I think the general senses, of course, slows that he doesn't know because he's writing at the time.

• 28:31Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 28:32Speaker 05

  But it's actually quite good. Like, it's genuinely pretty good.

• 28:35Speaker 06

  Really? Have you read any of it?

• 28:36Speaker 05

  I've skimmed it. I've barely skimmed, to be honest.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  I'm gratified to hear that. I'm gratified to hear that.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. This shocker that, as he calls it, he's going to write, is obviously going to reflect the mood of the war. And his initial plan, God, so often in this series, a bad title.

• 28:54Speaker 06

  Always.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  His initial title is, he's going to call it The Kennels of War.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  Terrible.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  As in, like, let loose the dogs of war, I guess.

• 29:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess so. But also, why the kennels?

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Well, because the dogs, The Dogs of War are going to come out.

• 29:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  But The Dogs of War was the best title. The Kennels of War is bad.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Shocker, yeah. That is a shocker.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  It is a shocker. In the end, he decides on a new title, and this title is inspired by that wooden staircase that went down to the beach.

• 29:22Speaker 06

  I knew the staircase would come back. I knew it.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  Amazing. Yeah, great foreshadowing. So, his children said later that his daughter, Alice, who was recovering from her operation, when she was up and about, she used to like going down to the beach and she would count the steps going up and going down, and there were 39 of them. And it just sort of works, doesn't it, the 39 steps? I don't know, just something about it.

• 29:44Speaker 06

  It does, but it sounds really good. Maybe it's just because we're all used to it, but 38 steps doesn't work. You're totally right. So then, the book is published in Blackwood Magazine in three parts, from July to September 1915, and then as a complete novel on the 19th of October. And Buckland dedicates it to his friend, Thomas Nelson, who's the publisher, and he says, "You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the dime novel, and which we know as the shocker, the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible. I mean, sometimes not even. And during an illness last winter, I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness and was driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and I should like to put your name on it in memory of

• 30:29Speaker 06

  our long friendship in the days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts." It's a lovely dedication, yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  I like that.

• 30:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's really nice.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  So it comes out, he's just thinking of it, I think, as quite a throwaway book. It's a bit of fun, you know? And it doesn't get many reviews, and the reviews say, yeah, it's fine, whatever. But as with The Wind of the Willows, which we'll be doing on the show in a few weeks, it's a genuine kind of word of mouth, organic hit.

• 30:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  So for the men in the trenches, this is, what, 1915, there are now hundreds of thousands of men in the trenches, kind of Kitchener's New Army, as they were called, which were recruited to replace the original men who'd all been killed. And they're looking for escapism. You know, they're looking for something short and fun that they can take with them, and this is perfect. So in her biography, Ursula Buckland quotes a letter that her grandfather got from an officer on the front, who said, "It's just the kind of fiction for here. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells."

• 31:34Speaker 06

  You can see why, and also, I suppose, it puts the baddies of this novel are the baddies that they're kind of up against in the trenches, and you kind of want to feel

• 31:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 06

  sort of justified in what you're doing. It's interesting as well, because that's how Gatsby became famous in the Second World War, isn't it?

• 31:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, with soldiers, exactly. Because you've got a captive audience, I suppose, and they want something to read. And you can imagine soldiers exchanging books, maybe, "Oh, have a read of this one, it's really good fun." And this is the sort of book that I think would be accessible to readers who don't necessarily want something forbidding, who want something short and very entertaining. So it sold tens of thousands of copies by the end of 1915. People who previously thought of John Buckland as a lawyer, or as a politician, or as a sort of imperial civil servant, they now start calling him the novelist John Buckland, the guy who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, that kind of thing. And the publishers say, "Would you like us to do us more Hane books?" And he says, "Fine." And he goes on, and he writes books like Greenmantle, which is a great book, and other Hane thrillers. And

• 32:30Speaker 05

  he enjoys doing them. He says to his old classics tutor, "It's the most restful and delightful thing in the world to write that stuff." That's how I felt when I wrote Adventures in Time, Tabby.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  Oh, is it? That's so nice.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  But it was, yeah, restful and delightful. Exactly.

• 32:44Speaker 06

  Well, it comes through. It comes through in your prose.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  Thank you. Oh, that's kind. And you haven't even read them. So, I mean...

• 32:51Speaker 06

  I've read them all, cover to cover. But like Adventures in Time, why is this so successful? And Buckland himself admits that he's drawing on an established formula, and it's actually there in the book. So in chapter three, which is called The Adventures of the Literary Innkeeper, Hane tells this story to this young innkeeper who's dying to be a writer. And the innkeeper says, "By God, it is all pure Ryder Haggard and Conan Doyle."

• 33:13Speaker 05

  It is, really.

• 33:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. It totally is. You can see the influence of both stamped on every page. Haggard, you know, they're all about quests, and they're a big adventure story set in Africa, and most famously of these is King Solomon's Mines, but also Arthur Conan Doyle, who we've done on the show. And he's in his pomp at this point. Holmes and Watson are venturing out of London to random parts of Britain, and they're having mad adventures, crazy plots. There's always codes, clues, disguises. And this is, yeah, all over The Thirty-Nine Steps. He's constantly dressing up, Hane, isn't he?

• 33:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  And cracking riddles.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  This completely makes sense as something that you would read if you'd been, for the last 10 or 15 years, or longer, you've been reading Sherlock Holmes stories, I think. And there's a definite Sherlock Holmes influence on the character of Hane. But actually, there's another influence that I think is really interesting, that some listeners may not be so aware of, because it's not really talked about now. A huge element of this book is, obviously, there is a German plot to undermine Britain's defences and to win the war. That's the basic dominating idea of the book. And this is not a new idea. This was a very familiar idea to people in 1915, because there was a particular genre that doesn't really exist anymore, and hasn't existed since the First World War, called

• 34:29Speaker 05

  invasion literature, that has been enormously popular in Britain since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. So basically, the first example of this was a book with the very, perhaps, unpromising title, The Battle of Dorking, which was published in 1871 by a guy called George Tompkins Chesney. And Chesney was the captain in The Royal Engineers, and he thought, you know, he looked at what happened in the Franco-Prussian War, where the Prussians basically won, and they created Germany, they smashed the French, they united Germany, and Germany became the great power in Europe. Chesney looked at this, and he said, "Oh, Britain's falling behind. We need to galvanise public opinion." So he writes this story about a German invasion of Britain. So the Germans destroy the Royal Navy with

• 35:12Speaker 05

  torpedoes, they land troops in Sussex, there is a climactic battle with the British Army in Surrey, and then they, they basically subdue Britain and impose crippling peace terms.

• 35:23Speaker 06

  It's bedknobs and broomsticks. That's essentially what it is.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Yes. I guess bedknobs and broomsticks has a slight element in that. I'd never thought of that. But bedknobs and broomsticks is much later, isn't it?

• 35:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, much, much later. It's about the Second World War.

• 35:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. But this book, The Battle of Dorking, inspired hundreds of other invasion novels and short stories over the next 40 years. The most famous examples are a guy, there's a guy called William Le Cue, I think his name is. I can never really work out how to pronounce it, but I think it's William Le Cue. He wrote a book called The Great War in England, which involved England being invaded by the French and the Russians. And then when he decided we would probably end up in a world war in alliance with the French and the Russians, he basically rewrote it as the invasion of 1910, in which we're invaded by the Germans.

• 36:08Speaker 06

  Oh, very canny.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  And the invasion of 1910, this is a brilliant detail, which I know you'll enjoy, Tabby, was basically commissioned and serialised by the Daily Mail. And the Daily Mail said, "It would be much more effective if, when the dramas fade, they go through towns with loads of Daily Mail readers." And this is basically the list of our circulation. Could you make sure they go through...

• 36:30Speaker 06

  You would have been brilliant at this.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  I know. I wish I'd done this. I would have loved doing this.

• 36:34Speaker 06

  You've missed out.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  So the Germans, the Germans in the book end up sacking all these towns with large quantities of Daily Mail readers in their own counties. And it sold more than a million copies. It was like a huge thing.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  And now it's totally forgotten. I always think it's so interesting when that happens.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Although there is one of those books that is slightly more remembered. Again, not massively read, but maybe some listeners will have heard of it. It's The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  I think that's quite famous, yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, because it's seen as one of the first real spy stories. So that was published in 1903. And in The Riddle of the Sands, you've got two mates, and they're on a sailing holiday in the Frisian Islands, which are kind of the Netherlands, North Germany, these sort of islands that nobody's really ever heard of off the coast, in the sort of North Sea. And they're on a sailing holiday there. It sounds like a terrible place for sailing holiday. Amid the foggy mudflats of their holiday destination, they find that the Germans have prepared this massive fleet, and the fleet is going to transport an invasion army to Britain. And they're being helped by a former British officer, who is disguising himself as a sort of suave, debonair, German businessman.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  Michael Fassbender, from Inglourious Basterds. Literally is.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  So for the first readers of The Thirty-Nine Steps, you've got all these books, and when they read The Thirty-Nine Steps, they're like, "Ah, this is going to be one of those." But in a sort of detective-adventury format, which is great. The twist, though, is that most of these books are forgotten today. So the question, I guess, is what makes The Thirty-Nine Steps different? Why is it not forgotten? What's the secret formula, or whatever?

• 38:08Speaker 06

  And we will find out after the break.

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• 39:51Speaker 06

  Welcome back to the book club, everybody. So we promised before the break that we would be unpicking exactly what it is that makes the 39 steps so effective and unusual and something new when set aside the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle. So Dominic, what is it? Tell us.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  Let's start with the plot. So did you not say to me the other day, Tabby, that you've seen all the James Bond films?

• 40:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, I definitely have seen all the James. I mean, hasn't most people really? I don't think I've seen the kind of the older ones for a good 10 years or so. Because I really like the Daniel Craig ones, but yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  If you've seen any Bond film, you will know that the action, you know, it's normally about four or five locations, moves very quickly between them. You know, one minute you're in Bolivia, the next minute he's gone to Macau or something.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  And then you're in a helicopter and then you're in a totally, there's a lot of moving around between locations.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Different forms of transport in exotic locations with a sort of breathless pace and change of scene. You don't really get that in Conan Doyle. So in Conan Doyle, the Holmes and Watson might be in 221B Baker Street, but then they'll go out to a place and then they stay at that place.

• 40:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Or in Ryder Haggard, who we also mentioned, Alan Corderman, who is the hero, who is brave and intrepid and blah, blah, blah. He goes on a quest to Africa, but he just sort of stays in Africa. He doesn't then go to Mauritius or to, you know, Bengal or something. He's just in that one place.

• 41:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, or the Scottish Highlands.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  Or the Scottish Highlands. John Buckland invents this idea, I think, of the rapid change of pace from different locations. So the book is basically in four parts. So the first part is in London, isn't it? So you were describing the, he's in London and he's all miserable, isn't he? Because he's come back from Africa.

• 41:31Speaker 06

  The boredom, the latitude, the longing for open air. Then, you know, Scudder comes, sees him, tells him of this elaborate conspiracy theory. And then something happens to Scudder and Hane decides to flee London by train for Scotland for reasons that are never entirely plausibly explained. You know, I mean, let's face it, you're going to get away with hiding a lot easier among the crowds and the busyness of London than a single figure on a lone kind of Scottish moor. But nevertheless, that's kind of the first shift, isn't it? From London to Scotland.

• 41:59Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 42:00Speaker 06

  And as we said, reflecting Buckland's experience of returning to that kind of urban life of society from the excitement of Africa.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  Exactly. And then he goes up to Scotland, he goes up to Galloway and Tweedale in Scotland in the lowlands. He's been chased by the Blackstone and by the police. And he has a series of, not, I mean, you would get this sometimes in a Bond film, you would get a series of sort of strange encounters with slightly bizarre characters.

• 42:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 05

  So in this case, there's an innkeeper, there's a bloke who's like building a road, there's this guy, Sir Henry, who wants to be a liberal politician.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  Hilarious figure.

• 42:35Speaker 05

  I mean, in one of the sane moments, which I think would be too insane even for the scriptwriters of a Bond film, by complete coincidence, he ends up in the house of the man behind the entire conspiracy.

• 42:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, the whole of Scotland.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. And the one house you arrive at.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  But you know what? I actually won't diss it because I loved that bit. I had, I had literal chills reading that.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  So those are the chapters, I think, when people talk about the 39 steps that they recall most vividly. Most people, I think, when they think of it, think, oh, it's set in Scotland, isn't it? And there's basically a chase across Scotland.

• 43:08Speaker 06

  As I did, yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 05

  You know, meeting mad people and like running across the heather. And actually, this is only, I think, maybe a third of the book, the Scottish section in terms of total length of the chapters. And after that, he moves on to another location. I mean, we're always in Britain, but he's moved back south, doesn't he?

• 43:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, to the Thames Valley. And this is when he's escaped Scotland and has gone to see the Foreign Office head, Sir Walter Bullevant. And he lives in an idyllic, bucolic, English pastoral setting, very wind in the willows. And he speaks to him. And then from here, he goes right back to the beginning and he's back in London again. So that's three different locations.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  And again, that's reflecting Buckland's youth. Because when he was a student at Oxford, he had explored the Thames Valley, he'd gone kind of fishing and rambling and whatnot. And it's very kind of green and very nostalgic, the landscape. You said it was like the wind in the willows. It absolutely is actually, isn't it?

• 44:03Speaker 06

  It's the perfect vision of the English countryside and a perfect English summer's day, isn't it?

• 44:07Speaker 05

  It completely is. And it's the England that you get in First World War propaganda posters. They put pictures up of their countryside with a countryman standing and it would say, this is your England, fight for it or something. And then the final showdown. So this happens at location number four. He goes from London to the south coast, basically to Kent. And this is obviously where he came up with the idea for the book, when he was in Broadstairs. And in Kent, it's seaside villas, it's people kind of donkeys on the beach, it's people playing tennis, it's people drinking gin and tonic before dinner.

• 44:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  It's very, very different atmosphere from the, from the earlier chapters.

• 44:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, weirdly enough, there's kind of a submarine like waiting in the bay.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  Lurking off there, exactly.

• 44:51Speaker 06

  Meanwhile, these kind of German spies are campy, gallivanting around a tennis court.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  But the big innovation with this, we were, you know, we introduced the second half by talking about what made the 39 steps different. The big innovation here is how quickly the narrative moves between these different locations. And it must have seemed to the readers of 1915, I mean, captivating, you know, almost breathless, because no sooner does Hane become involved in the story than he's dressing up as a milkman and he's on the run and he's hopping on a train. And then he's dressing up as someone else and then he's, you know, it's a really short book as well. I can't believe how much he manages to pack in. So contrary to what Buckland originally said the book would be, it's not a detective story, it's not like a detective story of the day really at all, in that it's not set in one location.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  So you think about the Hound of the Baskervilles, we're in the moors, we stay there, we basically move around this small perimeter throughout the course of the book. And he's not spending his time kind of leisurely sniffing for clues and interviewing suspects or sifting through evidence. It's not that cerebral. Although there is a murder early on, it's not a whodunit because Hane isn't trying to solve the murder. He's not even trying to crack the case really. It's fortunate that he has this notebook, which means that he, and he's good at puzzles, but it's not the point. He's not investigating it. He's trying to escape essentially. And he's trying to inform the authorities of what he discovers accidentally.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  It's not a whodunit, it's not a detective story by any means. And actually, as you say, the, I think the pace is partly the point. And that's heightened. And again, I think this is a massive innovation that all spy stories have copied since is the use of technology. So if you think about Buckland's heroes, Walter Scott, you know, Walter Scott is backward looking, his stories are set in the past.

• 46:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I should, I can imagine Chevalier Rick.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, Ryder Haggard, when, you know, they go on the adventure in King Solomon's Mines. Again, you know, they have guns, but it's like they're going back in time when they go to Africa and there's kind of these, you know, people with spears and there's the temples and lost kingdoms and things like that. It's the modernity of the 39 steps, I think, that makes a difference. So, you know, at one point, you know, Hane gets an express train to Scotland and when he's there, he steals a car. Cars, you know, there are maybe 100,000 cars on the roads at the point when this book comes out. Cars are new, cars are very exciting. They're the equivalent of what a phone would be, an iPhone for us today. They're about that old, I guess.

• 47:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 05

  And he's also, I mean, this is really new fangled, he's chased by a plane. So the plane chase is one of the things that people really remember. He notices a plane overhead. I mean, how new would that have been in 1915? And it's such a memorable detail that when Alfred Hitchcock turned this into a film in 1935, the plane is a big element of it. And then Hitchcock took that and he stole it and he used it again, very famously in North by Northwest in the 1960s, where Cary Grant is being chased by the crop duster.

• 47:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, the ominous moaning of the engine overhead and he's stuck out in the open and there's nowhere to run to or there's nothing to hide behind. I think that's a, that's a great detail.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a brilliant detail.

• 48:04Speaker 06

  It makes you feel hunched and chased.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  It does.

• 48:07Speaker 06

  It's like a nightmare.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  Completely, it does. Yeah, exactly that. You're kind of rushing for cover, but there's no cover to be found.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  And that element of being, the villains using technology against you is such a crucial element of any modern thriller. So anybody who's watched, you know, a Bond film, the Jason Bourne films, I mentioned Slow Horses, you know, think how often they're using technology of one kind or another to track somebody, to chase somebody or being chased themselves. They've all taken that idea from this book, which is the first one to do it. And actually, the villains, talking of the villains, that brings us to another element, another element that Buckland has basically invented, and this is the, the nature of the villains. So in King Solomon's Mines or in Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson or whatever.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Villains often tend to be kind of embodiments of ancient evil of one kind or another, or they're kind of very, very backward looking. The thing about this is the villains are modern people and their villainy comes from the newspaper headlines of the day. So rather like in a Bond film, when Bond goes to see M or something and M explains, you know, what's going on in the news, well, this, we're tracking this guy who's a businessman and he's probably a bad guy or whatever. Here, the first chapter, a lot of it is an information dump about the geopolitical background, about the assassination, all of that. And that's something that readers would have found really, really familiar in 1915, knowing what they, as they did, how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand had led to the First World War.

• 49:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'd never really thought about it from that perspective, the fact that they're reading it so soon after he was writing it, i.e. you know, he was writing this history of the First World War as the First World War was going on. It must have been so strange to read an imitation of real life events in the pages of a thriller. I wonder how it warped people's imaginations. I bet it did play with people's imaginations, the invasion fear and all that.

• 50:04Speaker 05

  I guess imagine if you read a thriller now about Vladimir Putin and the plot to invade Ukraine or something. That would be the equivalent, I guess.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. But then there's a, there's an element of the book that I think modern readers would find very unsettling. And this is where Scudder explicitly blames the plot and the conspiracy and everything that's going on, on the Jews. Because when he first explains the assassination plot to Hane, he says, the Jew is behind it. If you're on the biggest kind of a job and are bound to get to the real boss, 10 to 1, you are brought up against a little white faced Jew in a bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir. He is the man who is ruling the world just now. Classic conspiracy theory, isn't it? And he has his knife in the empire of the Tsar because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one horse location on the Volga.

• 50:53Speaker 05

  You're dead right. It's a classic conspiracy theory that Scudder is telling Hane. And when you first read it, and I have to put my hands up here and say I'm as culpable as anybody, when you first read it, you think to yourself, oh, John Buchan, you've really let yourself down.

• 51:07Speaker 06

  I thought it this time without the, without the context, without understanding. I was like, oh.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  So as a casual reader at this point, you think, gosh, this is reflecting this sort of antisemitism that was so common in the early 20th century. You know, maybe Buckon is just a product of his time, blah, blah, blah. But you're quite wrong, actually, because Buckon is toying with you here. He's playing a trick on you. Scudder is not right. Scudder is wrong.

• 51:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  And it later turns out, so Walter Bullevent, the head of the Foreign Office, says, oh, Scudder had a massive bee in his bonnet about Jewish conspiracies.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  He was a bit of a nutter, Scudder. He's, he's not like a martyr to the, the course of justice and the saving of Britain or whatever. He's a bit, he is a nutter.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  No, he has uncovered a plot, but it's not the plot that he thinks it is. He's like a crank, isn't he? And Bullevent says, oh, this is all eye wash, this stuff about the, about the Jews. Actually, Scudder has, because he's been blinded by his own antisemitism, which is not Buckon's or Hane's antisemitism, it's Scudder's. Because of that, he's misunderstood what the real conspiracy is. And actually, on John Buchan, John Buchan actually turns out to have been, I think, I mean, there's lots of stuff about that. Ursula Buckon writes about it in her biography. He seems to have actually been quite keen on the Jews. He was a Zionist. He supported the Zionist project in the 1930s.

• 52:24Speaker 06

  He's like one of five people or something that has had his name commemorated by.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. He's got, he's commemorated by some Zionist institution or something as a friend of the State of Israel or whatever. Anyway, the talk of conspiracies brings us to the villains. So those are not the anarchists, the Jewish anarchists of Scudder's fevered imagination. But there is a sort of paranoid side to this. So what they are, they are foreign agents hiding in plain sight and pretending to be British. And clearly.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  In a very camp manner.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  In a very camp manner, I know.

• 52:55Speaker 06

  I can't help saying.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  They're like a kind of, what, a German caricature of what, how British people would behave.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  And obviously what this reflects is it's 1915, there's a kind of general panic about German spies. But actually, this is, I was thinking about how influential this is, because we mentioned Bond. In Ian Fleming's books, the villains are often foreigners pretending to be British.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  So, or Goldfinger.

• 53:19Speaker 06

  And gentlemen as well.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  And gentlemen, they're pretending to be posh, exactly. Or Hugo Drax in Moonraker, in the book of Moonraker, I mean, in the film it's slightly different. But you're right, they're always people who are sort of like, so in Goldfinger, Goldfinger is not, he tries to dress as a gentleman, he tries to behave as a gentleman, but he's actually boorish and vulgar. And, you know, he's, and that gives him away. And this is the same thing here, isn't it?

• 53:43Speaker 06

  They always have a tick, a physical tick or a tell that gives them away. You know, it could be cashmere cardigans or glasses or.

• 53:54Speaker 05

  The cashmere cardigans thing is mad because first of all.

• 53:57Speaker 06

  Or checkered shirts. It could be anything like this.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  Okay. Just on the cashmere cardigans. I don't know any cardigan. This is like the tweed slander. This is the tweed slander again.

• 54:06Speaker 06

  Sorry. Cashmere v-necks.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  I don't see what's problematic about a cashmere v-neck. Say to me what's wrong with a cashmere v-neck.

• 54:12Speaker 06

  Nothing.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  Come on, fashion consultant.

• 54:14Speaker 06

  I think, I think it's great. But to get back on track, the chief villain of Blackstone, of the Blackstone conspiracy in this, Scudder warns, I actually find this very sinister. Scudder warns Hane, he's an old man with a young voice who could hood his eyes like a hawk. And I actually think, you know, we said that this isn't like the villains of Ryder Haggard or whatever, who are sort of, have this primal supernatural malice to them. And that is true of the villains of this. They are rooted in the real world. But I do think there's almost something slightly supernatural about that. It's like, it's like the villains in the Moonstone of Brisingman or something. And anyway, it's this that gives him away. And so when Hane walks into his trap, improbably, arguably,

• 54:55Speaker 06

  where he walks into his cottage by mistake in the Highlands, he realizes that this is the man that Scudder has warned him about because he sees his eyes hood. What happens when one's eyes hood?

• 55:05Speaker 05

  I think I've got slightly hooded eyes, actually, it's a bit.

• 55:07Speaker 06

  Do you? Okay.

• 55:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 06

  Classic Bond villain.

• 55:10Speaker 05

  So I think it's where your eyelids are not really very visible.

• 55:15Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 55:15Speaker 05

  So if you look at me now.

• 55:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  I mean, you can see my eyelids now, but often you can't. This is what my wife claims, anyway.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  You should just wear an eye mask, just.

• 55:23Speaker 05

  I mean, how mad is that, by the way, that he walks into this guy's house by accident? And then the guy has hooded eyes. He says, oh my God, this is obviously the chief villain. Because actually, quite a few people have quite hooded eyes.

• 55:33Speaker 06

  I actually think it's quite creepy because he's also very gentlemanly and he kind of says, I will help you, Mr. Hane. Come, come into my lair. And then he's trapped. But then the thing that's slightly dense his malice is how easily he's convinced to doubt Hane's identity. Because the minute Hane puts on a Cockney accent and pretends to be someone else, he's like, hmm.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. He's very, you know, in the trip, when they're doing impressions of Scaramanga, come, come, Mr. Bond, you enjoy killing just as much as I do.

• 56:01Speaker 06

  Totally, he is. Smoking a, smoking a cigar as Bond walks in, yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 56:05Speaker 06

  But the passage is, which I find quite unnerving, is, as he spoke, his eyelids seemed to tremble and to fall a little over his keen gray eyes. In a flash, the phrase of Scudders came back to me when he had described the man he most dreaded in the world. He had said that he could hood his eyes like a hawk. Looked to Sandbrook, then I saw that I had walked straight into the enemy's headquarters.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  See, that's a nice detail. But apart from that, the villains are quite underdeveloped, aren't they? We don't really know their names. We don't know anything about them. Does this guy with the hooded eyes even have a name? I don't think he does.

• 56:37Speaker 06

  No, never. But in a way, though, that makes him a sort of a more frightening, shadowy figure.

• 56:42Speaker 05

  I think the more fun characters, obviously, are the sort of cameo. So each chapter brings in a new kind of mad character that Hane meets. Who's your favourite? Of course, your favourite is somebody very posh.

• 56:54Speaker 06

  So my favourite is this guy called Marmaduke Joplie, Marmy. And Hane describes this bloke as an offence to creation. And he's this upper class London stockbroker. He kind of personifies everything that Hane has grown so bored and tired of, you know, urban, social climbing, parties, superficial frippery, all this. He's a chin, so, you know, sort of a posh lout. He's a crawler.

• 57:19Speaker 05

  He's a red trouser man.

• 57:20Speaker 06

  He's a.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  He wears a quarter zip, no?

• 57:23Speaker 06

  He'd look good in red trousers. He wears a quarter zip, he wears tweed, he loves the bloody bull, he loves polo. So Hane steals his car from him in order to make his escape. And he goes, good God, the murderer. And then, and Hane is very cool here, very cool indeed. He says, I'm going to wring your neck, savvy. So obviously, he comes out of this very well, and Marmy comes out of it very badly. And it's just a total pastiche of kind of a very posh, public school boy. Who's your favourite?

• 57:50Speaker 05

  Well, Sir Henry, it's the liberal candidate. So Sir Henry is slightly Bertie Worcester-ish, isn't he?

• 57:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, that's very fair.

• 57:55Speaker 05

  He's like Bertie Worcester with Zach Palansky's politics.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  And he says to, Hane arrives, oh, he meets Hane, and he says, my God, a colonial. My dad, you're the very man I've been praying for. Are you by any blessed chance a free trader? And basically, it's free trade versus tariff reform, which is the big political issue of the early 1900s. And this guy is very idealistic, and he gets Hane to come and give a speech for him. And Hane despises this guy's politics, and basically puts him right, doesn't he? He converts Sahari, he converts him from his liberalism into something more like Toryism, which is kind of a fact.

• 58:31Speaker 06

  Doesn't take much.

• 58:32Speaker 05

  No, it doesn't take much. Basically, Hane just says to him, look here, the Germans are bad people, and you know, we should arm and stand up to them. And this guy says, oh, well, in that case.

• 58:41Speaker 06

  Because he doesn't actually know much about the politics about which he's preaching.

• 58:45Speaker 05

  Well, this is the thing, you see, it's political satire, obviously, but Buckon is such a good natured writer. You said earlier on, didn't you, when you were talking about him at Oxford, that he wasn't very partisan?

• 58:53Speaker 06

  No.

• 58:53Speaker 05

  He's such a sort of generous spirited writer, that other than, it's not like one of my Daily Mail rants, where I would portray the other side as absolutely malign and demented.

• 59:04Speaker 06

  Spitting poison with every word.

• 59:05Speaker 05

  Exactly. There's no poison in this at all. Like Sahari is just a little bit naive.

• 59:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, and a bit thick. And he helps Hane enormously, actually.

• 59:13Speaker 05

  Well, everybody helps Hane, don't they? John Keegan says of the whole book, "The Buckon firmament is people by characters who are instinctively patriotic, romantically unselfish, and ready at a moment's notice to abandon everyday duty to do service to the cause." And so for readers in the First World War, they're reading about this spy story in which innkeepers and road workers,

• 59:35Speaker 06

  And milkmen.

• 59:36Speaker 05

  And milkmen will do their bit to help the hero, because they're kind hearted, they're patriotic, you know, all of this. And it's sort of stirring, I think.

• 59:45Speaker 06

  But in a way, Hane himself is just as noble, and he's always, he's so very able.

• 59:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 59:52Speaker 06

  Because, you know, he's called upon to make a speech at the last moment, he can do it. He's called upon to dress up and pretend to be someone else at the last moment, he can do it. He can survive on a ration of stale biscuits over the course of two days, and he can do it. And I think that the success or failure of this book, it hinges on him. And I think that Hane as the hero is probably Buckon's most influential innovation. You know, as we said, he'd originally planned to write a detective story. But Richard Hane is of course not a detective, he's far from it. He's a very ordinary man. It's not what he does. He's not brilliant in any way. He doesn't investigate the murder that kicks it all off. He doesn't even really investigate the conspiracy.

• 1:00:35Speaker 06

  He does puzzle about it, but it's not the point, it's not, he's on the run essentially. His priority is to escape the authorities, to escape the Blackstone. And above all, he's a man of physical action. He is so very physically robust. And obviously, this is a big contrast to one of the other great heroes of the age, who we've already spoken about, and that's Sherlock Holmes. Because Hane has none of his qualities. We're told he's been in the British Army, intelligence, but he's not especially clever. He's just an ordinary bloke, really. He's exceptionally ordinary, but very capable, very resourceful. And in spite of which, he actually does some pretty bonkers things, doesn't he?

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  Well, the plan, the plan to hide in Scotland is mad.

• 1:01:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, he has a night to think it over, and he settles upon the open air of the Scottish Highlands, rather than the hustle and bustle of the streets of London. So he's much more likely to be spotted. And he does really flamboyant, ostentatious things, like stealing cars that draw attention to himself, and keeps doing things that means he can be tracked. And also, if you're on the run, if you're on the run, why would you run straight into a cottage? High risk, seriously high risk.

• 1:01:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, Hane's plan is, he hasn't thought it through. Because if you're on the run, you would disguise yourself, and then you'd go somewhere in London where you couldn't be tracked. He goes to a place and steals a car where, you know, a plane from above can see his car, because it's the only car for miles around or whatever in the Scottish Highlands.

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

  He's likeable, he's very likeable.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  He's very likeable, he's very brave, isn't he?

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  He's hardy.

• 1:02:07Speaker 05

  He's an engineer, isn't he? He's quite modern. He's not like Quartermaine in Ryder Haggard, in King Solomon's Mines, who's just an adventurer. Hane uses his ingenuity and his professional skills. So for example, when he's locked up by the villains, because he knows about mining explosives, he's able to trigger an explosion that will enable him to escape the house. He's a fun character, and I think the key thing about him is, what you said, his orderness, he's one of us. So in that respect, he's, he's actually quite like a lot of Alfred Hitchcock heroes when they're on the run. They're just kind of every men, they're kind of ordinary people. And you can see why for people in the trenches in 1915, who think of themselves as ordinary, you know, we're just doing our bit for our country in the First World War, that's what he is.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  I think the other thing about him, it's interesting how he's a slight outsider, I think. So he's not that posh, he's a self-made professional man, because he's a mining engineer. He is not English. I mean, it's really such an important part of this, he's Scottish.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's part of the reason that he sneers at and looks down on the likes of Marmaduke, who I mentioned, because he's your classic upper class Englishman. And Hane is more than that, he's an outsider, and there's something slightly superior about him. Like, his physicality, something about his physicality is much more robust than your average Englishman.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  I completely agree. And that's where the combination of Scotland and Africa is so important to his character. So the Scottishness is basically kind of Walter Scott, outdoorsy, you know, history, the landscape. We're told that his father took him to South Africa when he was a boy, I think when he was six, and he's never been back. He's grown up outdoors on the veldt, you know, the adventures in watering holes with animals or whatever they do.

• 1:03:50Speaker 06

  It's also a handy literary device, though, because whenever he finds himself in a corner, it's not entirely improbable, because you say, ah, but this reminds me of the time that I was hunting on the veldt or svelte, or whatever it is. And it means that he's got something up his sleeve, which means he can wriggle out again.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  Exactly. Now, where I think this is so influential is this is James Bond in Embryo. Because James Bond, half Scottish, half Swiss, James Bond in the Fleming books, he's always blathering on about how much he despises modern Britain. Basically, Bond is always saying, like, 1950s Britain is very decadent, and everybody's gay, and he doesn't like it, and all of this.

• 1:04:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  A lot of which, not surprisingly, is not in the films.

• 1:04:31Speaker 06

  No, but also, they have the same kind of masculine cynicism to them. You know, they're never shocked, they're never rattled, they kind of smile and go, you know, it's like, do you expect me to talk? You know, and they're just never up against a wall, really.

• 1:04:46Speaker 05

  But Bond is much more sardonic and cynical than Hane is. Hane is good hearted, whereas James Bond, certainly in the books, is more as a harder.

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  Sneering, I suppose, yeah, hardened, yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  So you can see why this, people think this is so massively influential, because especially this character. I mean, the one thing that, the element that of spy thrillers it doesn't have is sex. So Buckon just isn't interested in that, there's no romance, there's no love interest. This is a book for an age of kind of male camaraderie and stuff, isn't it, I think? And he would probably think that that would just get in the way, I guess.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  It's so interesting, though, because obviously, this is, Buckon kind of thought of this as a romance.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  But it's not a romance in the sense that we would think about it, where it's, you know, romantic, or has lovers or anything like that. I suppose it's romance in its, in its sort of chivalric daring do, or something like that, maybe? It's the Walter Scott inspiration.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, a little bit. And in later books, Hane has like a little posse, a sort of Avengers style group. So there's a guy called Sandy Arbuthnot, who's a master of disguise, and there's a couple of other characters. There's a South African kind of tracker called Peter Penar, and they all sort of team up and they defeat the Germans in various adventures or whatever. And that's a slight sort of Avengers assemble element to it, I think. So anyway, it's hugely influential, for all these reasons, on Bond, on Hitchcock, on all of this kind of stuff. But what about in its own terms? Let's get to our verdict. Does it stand up? I mean, it's very short, you can read it, you could probably read it in an evening.

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  Is that an evening well spent, do you think? Does it still work as an adventure story?

• 1:06:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that is a fantastic way to spend an evening. It is, and especially, you know, if you read it over the course of an evening, because it reads best when read consistently. It's jumping in and jumping out that can be a little bit off putting, because the implausibility or whatever it is, or the jumping around, I don't know, you lose the thread a little bit. The first three quarters are just so very enjoyable. You know, the hiding, the element of the chase, I love that. The fact that his, you know, when he looks over the crest of the Highlands and sees his trackers closing in on him, I love all that. But it just lost me a bit with that final chapter. It's so rushed, I don't, didn't entirely get what was going on.

• 1:07:07Speaker 05

  The bizarre thing where he, he tracks them down, this is not a massive spoiler, he tracks them down, the villains, to this sort of seaside house.

• 1:07:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  They're playing tennis, he invites himself in, they have dinner together.

• 1:07:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. And he starts doubting himself, and we're like, as the reedy, you're like, oh, come on.

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  We know it's them, it's the same number of people, you've got the bloke with the hooded eyes. And, but it's because they're playing tennis, they're wearing, you know, little white skirts or whatever, and frolicking camply.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  They're wearing skirts? I mean, they're all men.

• 1:07:38Speaker 06

  No, just in my head, they are. It's all so calm, honestly.

• 1:07:42Speaker 05

  But also, the final action.

• 1:07:44Speaker 06

  This is good fun, yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 05

  The final action is done and dusted in about four paragraphs.

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  Literally four paragraphs.

• 1:07:50Speaker 05

  It's literally as if someone said to John Buchan, you've got to be finished in five minutes. He was like, well, well, you know, so.

• 1:07:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, and also, I'm still not entirely clear on what actually happens. Do they, do they commandeer? I don't know, I don't want to spoil it for people. But so because of that, and also the fact that the villains have, I mean, zero characterisations, they're just outlines of people. And it's not, for me, as thrilling as Sherlock Holmes, actually. I'm going to give it a seven.

• 1:08:15Speaker 05

  I've upped my mark.

• 1:08:17Speaker 06

  I've upped my my mark.

• 1:08:18Speaker 05

  This is mad because actually in the course of doing this, I've dropped my mark.

• 1:08:22Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:08:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  No way. I've upped mine by naught point five.

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  Well, I've actually dropped mine by a point because I was thinking while we were recording, probably a bit generous, give me an eight. So I'm actually going to give it a seven as well.

• 1:08:34Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Uh, because I think I gave the woman in white an eight.

• 1:08:38Speaker 06

  You did.

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  And I think the woman in white is a more satisfying thriller than the Thirty Nine Steps. However, I'm not dissing the Thirty Nine Steps, so I'm deducting marks for, I think it's probably not as thrilling as you would think. It's more amusing at times, isn't it?

• 1:08:54Speaker 06

  It is definitely amusing at times.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  Giving a speech for the Liberal candidate or whatever.

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  Or when he's exchanging banter with the innkeeper.

• 1:09:01Speaker 06

  That could be PG Woodhouse, don't you think?

• 1:09:03Speaker 05

  Yes, it could.

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  Bertie getting pulled in to have to do a speech for the Liberals.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  That's exactly what it is. There is a slight element of PG Woodhouse. I mean, it sounds like a mad comparison, but some of the situations are slightly PG Woodhouse like. Being invited to country house parties and being very awkward.

• 1:09:21Speaker 06

  Is there a shade of Roger Xcode about Richard Hannah?

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  Wow. No.

• 1:09:28Speaker 06

  The physicality of the man?

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  No, never. I can't believe that. I think there's more.

• 1:09:34Speaker 06

  I just, I just want to get all of the wires in your brain.

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  I think Richard Hannah is more Jeeves.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's actually a fantastic shout.

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  He's more Jeeves. Anyway, so I'm deducting marks for, it's probably not as high adrenaline, not as tense as I thought it would be. I agree the final act is underwhelming. I agree the villains, if a villain had a name, I feel like would be a better book. However.

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  The hooded eyes.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  I'm giving it massive credit for the opening chapter and the cliffhanger, which is brilliant. The chase in Scotland is great. I'm also giving it marks for being so influential and creating so many, you know, great spy stories that have come afterwards and adventure stories.

• 1:10:13Speaker 06

  The final thing to say before we tell people what's coming up, this is a great, lining the path, if you will. This is like the drummer boy, although it's not just a drummer boy, but two, our episode that we will be doing in the next couple of months at some point on James Bond.

• 1:10:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've got, is it Goldfinger?

• 1:10:29Speaker 06

  We're doing Goldfinger, yeah.

• 1:10:31Speaker 05

  But actually, so that's to come. Let's talk about what else is to come.

• 1:10:34Speaker 06

  We've got My Brilliant Friend by Eleanor Ferrante. We've got Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. We've got For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

• 1:10:44Speaker 05

  By popular demand.

• 1:10:46Speaker 06

  By popular demand. Also by popular demand, Rebecca by Daphne de Maurey. We've got Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and we have got Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

• 1:10:58Speaker 05

  Gosh, so many fun things.

• 1:10:59Speaker 06

  Tasty, tasty, Eleanor.

• 1:11:00Speaker 05

  Very tasty. Brilliant. All right. Before I catch my train to Scotland, because I'm actually on the run myself.

• 1:11:07Speaker 06

  You wish.

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. My, if only my life was that exciting. Actually, do you know what? It is quite exciting because I'm a member of this great book club. And I am guessing.

• 1:11:16Speaker 06

  What book club is this, Dominic?

• 1:11:17Speaker 05

  I am thinking that lots of our listeners may have thoughts about the book club and may want to be part of it.

• 1:11:23Speaker 06

  And if they did, what would they have to do to express those thoughts and be part of a supportive and intellectually stimulating community?

• 1:11:33Speaker 05

  We are launching a thing called Book Club Notes, and that will be a weekly newsletter. It will be like talking points about the books. It'll be book recommendations. There'll be insights from you, from members of the book club, audience, members of our book club community. And that will be delivered to people's inboxes every Saturday morning. It also have tips if you want to create your own book club, away from the show or connected to the show or whatever, how you do it and some ideas for what books you could do and all that kind of thing. So lots of fun things. And Tabby, how can, well, you tell, you know more about this than I do, don't you?

• 1:12:06Speaker 06

  To become a part of this wonderful club, all you need to do is click on the episode. There'll be the title. Underneath the title, you have an episode description, and then there will be a link. And all you need to do is click on that and you can sign up for this wonderful new newsletter.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  All right. Bye, everybody.

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  Bye.

• 1:13:06Speaker 04

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• 1:13:47Speaker 04

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