In his dedication for The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), John Buchan acknowledged that in his thriller the “incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.” (Writing three decades later, Raymond Chandler called this “a pretty good formula” for the genre itself.) All borders were wiped clean with Hitchcock’s 1935 hit film version, which Buchan, ever magnanimous, hailed as better than the original. Graham Greene, by contrast, faulted the director’s “inadequate sense of reality” in adapting the novel. “How inexcusably he spoilt The 39 Steps,” he complained.
Back in 1915, however, Buchan could argue that “the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts” of wartime Europe. By the time a sequel appeared, the following year, he was frankly unapologetic. In his dedication for that book, the superior Greenmantle, Buchan wrote: “Let no man call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism.”
We need not take Buchan at his word. If the plot of either novel were as feasible as the unfolding drama of World War I, then contemporary readers would not have found escape in Richard Hannay’s flight across the Scottish moors or his trek to Constantinople via German-occupied Europe. As one officer wrote Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps: “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.” As
