How Racist John Buchan Is Remembered Thanks To A Sex Harasser

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I've finished The Thirty Steps by John Buchan. Having read Prester John was expecting heaps of racism in this book too. So it's a surprise to say that there is no racism in the book.

There is instead anti-Semitism. Mainly in the first chapter. But it's there. All you need to find now is sexism (which I'll come back to in a moment) and homophobia and you'll have a connect four of bigotry.

But ignoring all of that what's surprised me about this book is how bad it is. The style is pedestrian and lazy, I've seen cotton reels more tense than this supposed thriller. I think I've written before that some bestsellers are badly written but the power of the story pulls it through. Not so here.

So then we have to ask why it is that if you ask people who've heard the name John Buchan they remember this novel and are very unlikely to know of any of the other stuff he wrote?

The answer, it occurred to me was in the all round (in the very literal sense) form of serial sex harasser/film director Alfred Hitchcock who made the book into a movie

Now let me say I've never seen the full film but I know from the bits I have seen already that it's better than the so called thriller that it was based on? How? Well there are two things I already know that make it better.

Firstly there are women in the film. In the novel there are, wait for it, no women at all. Indeed I can only recall one female character actually being mentioned in the entire book, and that was in passing. So any female readers expecting to pretend to be whatever character Madeleine Carroll played in the movie, you're going to be disappointed. And to the male readers out there, trust me when I say the lack of any women in this book doesn't improve it at all. So I would suggest the sexist counter mentioned earlier is dropped here through omission.

Secondly the climatic finale to the film, which I have seen but won't spoil for you, doesn't exist in the book either. The ending is in fact rather dull.

So before John Galsworthy and The Forsythe Saga or Michael Dobbs with House of Cards here is arguably the first case where the moving picture version was better than the bad book it was based on. But because it was so much better, it allowed the inferior original version to live on in the memory.

So a sexist/racist/anti Semite should thank a sex harasser. Such is the world we live in.

Until the next time.