Was there no end to his talents?

John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher; one of Lord Milner’s ‘young men’, charged with the reconstruction of South Africa after the second Boer war; director of propaganda 1917–18, a Member of Parliament; lord high commissioner (i.e. the king’s representative) to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland; governor-general of Canada. Yet the title of this excellent biography by his granddaughter is to the point. He is best known today as the author of a thriller he wrote in a few weeks in 1914 which, more than 20 years later, was made into a film by Hitchcock.

The book is still read; the film, which Buchan thought better than the book, still watched. As a girl, Ursula Buchan was surprised to find it had given rise to a Bingo call: ‘39, all the steps.’ In 2003, she tells us, ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps came 44th in the Observer’s list  of the greatest novels of all time, one above Ulysses.’ Remarkable.

We know a great deal about Buchan. There have been previous biographies. The first, excellent like this one, was Janet Adam Smith’s in 1965. There are no secrets in his life. Yet there are mysteries. First, how did this son of a Free Kirk manse, speaking for choice as a child the broad Scots of the borders, become so easily a member of the British establishment? Oxford helped, of course. So did marriage to Susan Grosvenor — but he was in his mid-thirties by the time they met, and an already an accepted figure.

Second, why did this intrepid mountaineer, a man of so many and such varied talents, never quite scale the topmost heights except — arguably — as a writer of the kind of novels he himself dismissed as ‘shockers’.