James Bond and the 39 Steps

I've been reading John Buchan's 39 Steps again, which I've done numerous times since I first encountered it as a boy. It's an exciting adventure story. It's been made into a movie at least four times, the most famous being Alfred Hitchcock's in 1935. This motif of an innocent man on the run, escaping from the many perils imposed by an implacable enemy, established a whole action adventure fiction genre and innumerable movies.

John Buchan wrote the story, which was first published in the summer of 1915, just after the outbreak of the First World War. He himself said it was just a pot-boiler, almost written on a whim, but I don't think this is true. Inevitably, it was influenced by the general political culture and climate of those desperate days when the war was being fought. There was a great deal panic and anxiety, around the outbreak of the war, and the threat the German armed forces posed to the British and the British Empire. All these issues can be seen in play in this apparently sight and inconsequential story.

The latter days of the Nineteenth Century witnessed the rise of Germany as a great power, somewhat later than the British and French colonial empires. This meant that Germany resorted to brute force to push them aside. This atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion of the British Empire under threat infects the ambience of the story. There is an underlying sense of the shift of the rise and fall of empires. This means that there were enemies in the story, such as evil German spies running away with secrets that would give the enemy a massive advantage. Historically, the Germans were the brutal emerging political and military force, leading directly to two world wars scarcely twenty years apart. This narrative can be immediately detected in the novel.

The great German expressionist painter Otto Dix created this nightmarish vision.

The reply to this was Lord Kitchener's famous call to arms. He is pointing an accusing finger at every young man in country: lay down your life for your country!

There are other tropes in the story, the most insidious being a hostility towards the Jews, who in popular newspapers of the time were the real villains, fuelling Germany's war effort. Anti-semitism was widely spread across Europe. Paradoxically, all the nations involved in the First World War were united by a shared antisemitic antipathy towards the Jews. We should not forget that antisemitism was rife in many countries including 'Great Britain' and had been for many centuries. The Dreyfus Affair, a Jewish French military officer, had been wrongfully and vengefully accused of espionage, spending five years on Devil's Island in French Guiana suffering hugely from the oppressive conditions there. Eventually it was discovered that the real culprit was a high-ranking officer called Ferdinand Esterhazy, but this was covered up by the military hierarchy. The whole scandal took fifteen years to resolve itself, from the middle 1890s to the early 1900s.

Richard Hannay, a South African staying in London, is the innocent man who is the hero of the story. He is portrayed below as a typical middle-class British gentleman of that era. But this is misleading. He is an outsider, a South African, coming back to his 'home country' but feels somewhat alienated and frankly bored with the superficial trappings of the English middle-class moneyed class.

The novel begins with the murder of Scudder, found with a dagger in his heart, in Hannay's rented flat. Scudder had shared with him the outlines of a plot in a notebook that contained the plans of the enemy to assassinate an eminent Greek peacemaker, Karilides before he could attend an international peace conference to prevent the outbreak of the war. The main participants in the novel, as in the war itself, are thus a British colonial citizen, Richard Hannay, and their main ally in the war, an American spy, Scudder, representing a significant ally of the British against the German enemy in the First World War.

Hannay is in big trouble when Skudder is stabbed with a dagger through his heart. He is simultaneously being hounded by the enemy, who want him dead to prevent him from escaping with their secret, and by the police, who suspect him of committing the crime. He has to stay alive, avoid capture, and somehow find out who the enemy is.

Scudder entrusts a mysterious notebook to his neighbour in the block of flats; Scudder is then savagely murdered. Hannay is forced to flee his flat, ingeniously pretending to be the local milkman, and from there, flees by train to Scotland, hotly pursued by the police who believe he murdered Scudder and his enemies.

A series of narrow escapes follows, including pretending to be a Liberal parliamentary candidate in an election meeting. Finally, he lets his guard down and is lured into a trap by his mysterious, implacable enemy. After a final ingenious escape, he flies back south to London, reveals the sinister plot to the police, and then leads them to the sea on the 39 steps of the high tide, at a particular time and location, where they prevent a yacht from escaping with their enemies onboard. Bravo! A thrilling yarn brought to a satisfying conclusion. Bravo!

The 39 Steps is a breathless, exhilarating series of adventures. But in doing this, Buchan achieved far more. We should not forget that he is an extremely fine writer. Born and raised in Scotland, he writes brilliantly and, at times, with the great lyrical beauty, of the Scottish hills and dales where Buchan himself grew up. Hannay brought with him from South Africa many of the tracking 'veldtcraft' skills which were to prove vital to him in his desperate attempts to avoid capture.

Buchan went on to write further adventures of Richard Hannay and another character close to his heart, Sir Edward Leithen, a history of the First World War in twenty-four volumes, biographies, a couple of historical romances, and much more. He displayed immense literary energy throughout his life. Professionally, he held many roles and posts, including an MP and finally as Governor-General of Canada. Buchan became an eminent Victorian, both in real life in which he completed his career as Governor General of Canada, and as a writer where he continued to publish prolifically. Four movies have been made of this iconic story.

The great British director Alfred Hitchcock made the first movie in 1935, starring Robert Donat as Richard Hannay. Dianne Carroll features in the the billboard advert for the movie, but in the film itself, she is killed off very quickly!

The 1935 movie could not replicate this, as films then could not move much outside the studio.

Apart from being a prolific writer, he led a very active public life, serving for a while as an MP. He was appointed by King George 6th Baron Tweedsmuire and died in 1940. He led a long and productive life. From 1907 to his death, he married Susan Grosvenor, who died 30 years later in 1977. They had four children. They seem to have been a devoted couple who had a long, successful and productive marriage.

Richard Hannay and James Bond

The 39 Steps has had an enormous impact on literature, particularly the action adventure novel, especially on later adventure spy novels such as Ian Fleming's James Bond. The outcome is that Buchan established the prototype of the action-adventure hero. Richard Hannay has many qualities as a character. Young but mature, virile, athletic, undaunted, ingenious, brave, patriotic, ingenious, able to endure hardship and pain in pursuit of the greater glory, the defeat of the implacable enemy. He seems to have represented the nation's ideal at the time of 'the hero'. Young ladies hardly figure at all. It is assumed that they would be highly attracted to such a stalwart but do not seem to get the chance to prove it!

Richard Hannay and his successor, Ian Fleming's James Bond have much in common. They both emerged as literary creations shaped by world wars: Richard Hannay by the 1914 World War and James Bond by the Second World War, 1939-45. Both are shaped by the culture and background of their creators. John Buchan was born and grew up as a Victorian gentleman, in the heritage and legacy of the British Empire. He was British, bound by a strong sense of duty, and felt bound to protect the Empire in whatever way he could.

Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming played an active part in the Second World War.. He was Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence. In July 1943, he attended a high-level Anglo-American naval conference in Kingston, Jamaica. German U-boats were causing havoc in the Caribbean, and vital shipping routes from the Gulf of Mexico and Africa were threatened. His boyhood friend Ivor Bryce was also there, and he was actively involved in naval intelligence.

After the war, he bought a beautiful house which he called Golden Eye and it was here he wrote his James Bond novels.

It had been a long and bumpy ride to get to this position by 1943.

Fleming was a devilishly handsome young man and held a strong attraction for them which was certainly reciprocated! Like many writers, he put a lot of himself into his stories, and the man he chiefly wrote about, James Bond. Like him, James Bond was a devilishly handsome ladies' man who would always win over the ladies, or several of them, by the end of the story, and the movies.

Fleming was born in May 1908 in Mayfair, at 27 Green St, just off Park Lane. His grandfather, Robert Fleming, had risen from a poor working-class background in Dundee to found a bank and accumulated a fortune investing in American Railroads. His father, Valentine Fleming, was killed on May 20th, 1917, at Gillemont Farm near Epeye on the Somme front in the First World War. Ian Fleming was only 9 when he lost his father. He kept a picture of his father on his desk at Goldeneye along with a letter of Commendation from Winston Churchill, who recognised and gave tribute to his bravery.

Fleming himself grew up in an affluent household. His father went to Eton, having a townhouse in Mayfair and a country estate with his own pack of beagles. It may be that Fleming was somewhat uncomfortable with the 'nouveau arrive' lifestyle he inherited, but he certainly learned to enjoy the fruits of it! He hated school and was always a rebel. Inconveniently, perhaps for the schools he attended, he was an outstanding athlete, winning seven out of ten events at Eton's junior sports competition, two years running. From his later adolescence, he had an eye for women and constantly got into trouble. He was expelled from Eton a term early through getting into trouble with a maid, and later on at Sandhurst, training to be a military officer, he was expelled for similar reasons. This confronted his strong-willed mother, Eve, with a series of challenges. She was described as beautiful and immaculate; she pierced you with her penetrating beady eyes.

She was vain, domineering and extravagant. Possibly frustrated with his constant embarrassing exploits, she tended to humiliate him in public. They did not have an easy relationship. In his teens, he seems to have developed a reserved, defensive reclusiveness, no doubt serving to defend himself against his demanding, difficult mother. In 1921, he followed his father to Eton, where he was expelled a term before he was due to leave for getting involved with a maid. At Eton, he also had to endure the bullying of a particularly sadistic House Master. But at Eton, he did make lifelong friends, one of whom, Robert Harling, put the violence and sadism which Bond is subjected to down a similar trait of Fleming's emotional repression to the need to defend himself from the persistent criticisms of his mother. Given that he persisted in getting into trouble, first at school, then in Military College at Sandhurst, it is in a way admirable that his mother never gave up on him. He had started well at Sandhurst, where one of his teachers commented that he should do well as a soldier, provided the ladies don't ruin him. But he didn't like the aggressive military discipline there, which led to him bunking off school to go to London, where, in one episode, he caught Gonorrhoea from a prostitute. His mother did have a lot of problems to deal with with her difficult middle son. Fleming eventually had had enough of Sandhurst, and he resigned a term early in August 1927. What would his mother do next with her difficult son, who displayed a pattern of serial failures through scandalous escapades? She tried the civil service next, but Ian had a year off, where he reported that 'Austrian women have a weakness for young English men'. After Austria, Ian moved to Geneva to study the entrance exams for the civil service. Fleming did quite well, but not well enough, and didn't get in. His indefatigable mother now got him a job in the news agency Reuters. This proved decisive in his career as he learned to write well, cogently and quickly. Finally, Fleming, with huge persistence from his mother, could see the outlines of his career. Determined to gain financial independence from the constant, necessary but resented cash handouts from his mother, Fleming tried to make a career in the City as a stockbroker. Expertise learned there found its way into his first Bond novel, Casino Royale. However, he was as much a failure in this career as an investment banker in his other attempted careers. The 1930s, in some ways, was a lost decade for this troublesome and troubled young man, going from one romantic involvement and escapade to the next, but no signs of a successful career. The outbreak of the Second World War rescued him from this life of a handsome, debonair rake. The war led to a kind of breakthrough. Thanks to his banking contacts, he was recruited by Naval Intelligence to work as the personal assistant to the Head of Naval Intelligence, who later became a template for 'M' in his Bond books. However, he was no nearer to settling down to a 'respectable married life'. He started a long affair with the recently married, bohemian, beautiful and attractive Anne Charteris, qualities remarkably similar to his mother! By his late twenties, Fleming had become a difficult, somewhat withdrawn and well-defended. Brilliant and widely knowledgeable, he could effortlessly entertain guests at dinner parties or other social events. But mysteriously unknowable. There was also an element of sadomasochistic abuse in Fleming's own personal history. He had been mercilessly bullied at Eton by a sadistic teacher, and similarly at Sandhurst. His seemingly enviable upper middleclass upbringing had a shadow side of abuse and bullying. Inevitably, perhaps this finds its way into the Bond Books and Bond films.

A man alone, even in company, and the life and soul of the party, he was restless and ill at ease and had no established home. He finally found his lifetime home, Goldeneye in Jamaica, where he was with his friend Ivor Bryce on a mission for Naval Intelligence. He was there for a week and ten days, and the weather was atrocious, sheeting down with rain for ten solid day. On the plane back after his visit, he turned to Bryce and told him this is where he wanted to live.

This is perhaps why he fell in love with Goldeneye and Jamaica. He could live alone in a beautiful environment and write without interruption when he wanted to. In a way, the rest is history. Jamaica is where Fleming lived out the rest of his life until dying at the early age of 58 in 1964, having written the phenomenally successful series of Bond novels, many of which have Jamaican themes.

In his novels, he bestowed his won qualities upon his hero, a handsome, virile, athletic ladies man, promiscuous who always managed to prove irresistible to the endless succession of 'Bond girls' whose primary role in the movie was to be beautiful but, of course, fall to the charms of this daredevil hero and spy who always won in the last reel.

For a post-World War II audience, newly discovering sexual freedom after the travails of the war, James Bond was the perfect cinema hero. Richard Hannay, paradoxically, represented the values of an earlier generation, the values of British orthodoxy, which were vanishing away in the new dawn of post-World War Two Britain. The 1960s was when the James Bond movies grew into a phenomenon that the movie-going public couldn't get enough of. Fleming wrote all his Bond novels and short stories in Jamaica at his house, Golden Eye, which was wonderfully situated overlooking the sea.

As successful as the screen versions of The 39 Steps have been, the success of the James Bond franchise has been enormous and ongoing.

Returning to James Bond now, there is another important difference. Richard Hannay was not himself a spy. His job was to catch them! James Bond IS a spy. This is because the post-World War II era was precisely the era of the Iron Curtain, in which Russia was the enemy, and every Russian head of State was dedicated to the defeat of Western democracies. One of the most successful Bond movies was From Russia with Love, in which a beautiful Russian spy inevitably falls for Bond's charms. Oh, that the real world was as simple! There is also a sadomasochistic scene in which Bond is captured and tortured; take this scene from Goldfinger.

The Bond franchise has survived five actors playing the part of James Bond. Why? Why has the Bond franchise been so successful? For several reasons, really. Firstly, people go to the movies primarily to escape reality, not embrace it. What can be better than a hero who always wins in the last reel? Also, the Bond movie makers scoured the world for glossy, dramatic locations which, in the 60s and 70's, many people still hadn't been to. The accompanying music tended to feature the excellent John Barry-inspired Bond theme music, which was both exciting and memorable and was a song by the currently fashionable singer of the moment, from Shirley Bassey to Adele.

There are also formulaic elements to look forward to and savour. Perhaps most importantly, M and Q. M is Bond's boss, the authority figure Bond looks up to and reveres, Judy Dench being the most memorable one for me. There have been a series of excellent gadget masters, 'Q', from the wonderfully exasperated Dennis Llewellyn, who knew that however clever his car innovations were, the car itself would end up an utter wreck. Latterly, Ben Wishaw has replaced Llewellyn, with his own take on 'Q'. 'M' in the Bond movies is therefore an important figure, who Bond secretly reveres, but also rebels against. The other iconic figure is 'Q' , the gadget master, who is both a figure of fun but also endows Bond with a secret weapon, whether that be an exploding briefcase or a car with many gadgets hidden within, from an ejector seat to a fully submersible car. The car is highly fashionable and always British, Aston Martin, however much in decline the real British car industry is.

Will the franchise continue in these uncertain times? In real political events, Russia has returned big time to centre stage, and the democratic nations have never been under such threat from a toxic and deadly enemy. A new Cold War has already begun. Will a newly invigorated James Bond return to the screen to fight his battles against a new and ever more deadly opponent? Time will tell. It has arguably been the single most successful movie franchise in cinema history. However, there have been others, such as George Lucas' Star Wars, Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible series and Stephen Spielberg's Indian Jones. Action adventure movies are a staple consumption item for cinemas, but certainly, for James Bond, there has been a long gap from its last cinema outing. It will have to reinvent itself, and time will tell whether there will be another relaunch with another storyline. Time will tell. For those like me who love spy adventure movies, we can but hope!