The Thirty-Nine Steps

⚖The case for it

The ur-text of the action thriller: a man on the run, pursued by both villains and authorities. Richard Hannay's frantic flight across Scotland invented a genre template that Hitchcock used repeatedly and every thriller writer would follow. Extraordinarily still gripping; the moors feel as dangerous as they did in 1915.

— the canon

✕The case against

The conspiracy Scudder whispers in chapter one comes wrapped in the casual antisemitism of 1915 clubland; the book half-retracts it later, but it is on the page. The plot runs on coincidence: whenever Hannay is cornered, Scotland provides a passing stranger with a motorcar. Hitchcock kept the title, invented the rest, and improved it, which is not a sentence one gets to write about many classics.

— the honest librarian