When 39-year-old John Buchan, recuperating from a duodenal ulcer, turned to writing (in a matter of weeks) a "shocker" or "dime novel" in the first months of the first world war, he was already the ...

3 IN 1924, John and Susan Buchan paid a visit to the States. I drove them around New Hampshire, which reminded them of the Highlands of Scotland. We climbed Chocorua, and John, a member of the Alpine ...

Regarding Nancy Goldstone’s comments on John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (Five Best—on the British secret service, Books, Aug. 22): It is distressing so literate a publication in so excellent a ...

Best known to American readers as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle and other "shockers," as Buchan referred to them, John Buchan's protean life and work encompassed a great diversity ...

We examine the enduring legacy of John Buchan’s thriller, with Robert McCrum and Kate Macdonald A hundred years ago this month, John Buchan's spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps made its first ...

John Buchan's hero, Richard Hannay, was a patriotic precursor of James Bond whose appeal is undiminished nearly a century after he was created. Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, celebrates ...

In The Thirty-Nine Steps and his other yarns – with their decent chaps in scrapes and men on the run – John Buchan invented the modern spy novel. By William Boyd John Buchan (1875-1940) is a member of ...

"There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark." I can remember the frisson I felt when I first read that line, as I can recall the faint sense of absurdity that ...

John Buchan wrote the iconic book The 39 Steps - and now there's a museum dedicated to one of the most famous of all Scottish authors. The John Buchan Story in Peebles charts the writer's life, his ...