beyond the thirty nine steps a life of john buchan

The books are how Buchan earned his living, and the work that they took to research and assemble structured his days and his life. While almost all the books are discussed (Buchan published over 100 titles, only a little over half are fiction), this isn’t a critical or literary biography. The biography is arranged along a conventional linear narrative, from Buchan’s birth in a Fife manse in 1875 to death as Governor-General of Canada in 1940.

‘It became a matter of pride to finish it I had a role model and I couldn’t let him down’. Then there was the subject himself, the founder of the Buchan / Tweedsmuir dynasty and a very much-loved figure in her family, although she never knew him. She found that the way to stay sane was to concentrate on one small area ‘until the panic had passed’, and then she could face the immensity of the job again as a whole. Ursula found writing the book a suffocating experience when faced with the weight (physical and emotional) of the material she had to work on, over four years. This embarrasment of riches brings its own problems. JAS and Lownie only had partial access, and weren’t part of the family: Ursula had both. Making sense of them can only be done if you have access to the primary evidence, and if you understand the context. There are far too many myths associated with John Buchan’s works and life: I’ve been wading through them for years in my own research. Her investigative approach bravely took on tackling the vast amount of private Buchan family papers, photographs and artefacts, and she reports with satisfaction that ‘research for this book has inevitably been accompanied by the crump of exploding myths’. Part of the success of Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps (a phrase I used as the subtitle for a collection of essays on Buchan that I published ten years ago) is that Ursula Buchan is an extremely good journalist. A Life of John Buchan, Ursula Buchan’s biography of her grandfather, and it is very good indeed.

And now, after another 20+ year break, we have Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps. Then there was Andrew Lownie’s 1995 The Presbyterian Cavalier, which went deeper into the politics and added a mass of small details only detectable when compared with JAS. Then there was Janet Adam Smith’s 1965 biography, invited and facilitated by the family, which was the standard for many years. Does the world need a new biography of John Buchan? There have been three so far: a very thin and respectful one written a few years after his 1940 death, in an atmosphere of sincere grief and hagiography.

Beyond the thirty nine steps a life of john buchan