Single Author Syllabus: John Buchan

A Suggested Syllabus for Teaching John Buchan Kate Macdonald, University of Ghent, [email protected]

Three Reasons to Teach as a Thriller Writer  He invented the modern spy thriller novel  He was commercially successful and continually reprinted  He was innovative in many other fields that enriched his thrillers Brief Biography John Buchan (1875–1940) was born the eldest son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister in Perth, Scotland, and died in Ottawa as governor-general of Canada. He studied at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, trained as a barrister, and served after the Boer War in South Africa (1901–03) in land reassignment as a civil servant under Lord Milner. From 1900 he was a regular reviewer and deputy editor of the weekly Conservative newspaper the Spectator, but in 1907 entered publishing as a literary adviser for the Edinburgh firm of Thomas Nelson & Sons. He married Susan Grosvenor in 1906 and had a daughter, Alice, and three sons (John, William, and Alastair). When World War I broke out, he began working on war history and journalism for Nelson’s and the Times, moving to the War Office in 1916 as a writer of official war communiques for General Haig. In 1917 he became director of the department of information, later a ministry, and was in charge of British propaganda. His most famous work, The Thirty-Nine Steps, was published in 1915 and was his eighth novel. He had been publishing novels, short stories, essays, biographies, works of history and a book on taxations since 1893. The second and third Richard Hannay novels, Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919), were also written in wartime, as were the 22 volumes of his Nelson’s History of the War. After the war, Buchan moved with his family to a country house near Oxford and published a novel each year as well as biographies and histories. He was elected to parliament in 1927, and in 1933 and 1934 was the King’s Lord High Commissioner to the general Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in Edinburgh. In 1935 he was ennobled as Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and appointed as governor-general of Canada. He died of a brain hemorrhage in early 1940, and his state funeral was held in Westminster Abbey. His last novels, Sick Heart River and Lake of Gold, were published posthumously. Five most important works in terms of the history of the thriller  The Thirty-Nine Steps: for bringing the genre into the 20th century  Greenmantle: for inventing the war thriller  Castle Gay: for bringing political excitement and international intrigue into local elections  The Island of Sheep / The Man from the Norlands: for showing that old thriller heroes die hard  The Three Hostages: for classic “Buchaneering”

Links to other writers in the thriller genre Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Geoffrey Household, Dennis Wheatley

Multimedia materials Film versions of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935, 1952, 1978) BBC TV versions of Huntingtower (1927), and The Three Hostages (1978) Various radio versions of The Thirty-Nine Steps  BBC version (2007, with David Robb and Tom Baker)  Lux Radio version (1937, with Robert Montgomery and Ida Lupino)  Mercury Theater version (1938, with Orson Welles)

Just for fun: “The 39 Stairs,” Monsterpiece Theater (Sesame Street) Other Resources

Bibliography of fiction Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895) John Burnet of Barns (1898) Grey Weather (1899) Lost Lady of Old Years (1899) The Half-Hearted (1900) The Watcher by the Threshold (1902) A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906) Prester John / The Great Diamond Pipe (1910) The Moon Endureth (1912) Salute to Adventurers (1915) The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) ‘The King of Ypres’ (1915) The Power-House (1913, 1916) Greenmantle (1916) Mr. Standfast (1919) The Path of the King (1921) Huntingtower (1922) Midwinter (1923) The Three Hostages (1924) John Macnab (1925) The Dancing Floor (1926) Witch Wood (1927) The Runagates Club (1928) The Courts of the Morning (1929) Castle Gay (1930) The Blanket of the Dark (1931) The Gap in the Curtain (1932) The Magic Walking Stick (1923) A Prince of the Captivity (1933) The Free Fishers (1934) The House of the Four Winds (1935) The Island of Sheep / The Man from the Norlands (1936) Sick Heart River / Mountain Meadow (1941) The Long Traverse / Lake of Gold (1941)

Bibliography of Critical Works Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (Oxford University Press, 1965, 1985) David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House (Thomas Nelson, 1975) Andrew Lownie, John Buchan. The Presbyterian Cavalier (Cassell 1995) Kate Macdonald, The John Buchan Companion (McFarland 2009) Kate Macdonald (ed.) Reassessing John Buchan (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell (eds) John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (Pickering & Chatto, 2013)