The 39 Steps

More on that archetype: the idea that a young man could go off to Africa or Australia or India, face physical and mental challenges, maybe make their fortune, is such a wild thing; this feels as foreign as any kind of historical setting as I can imagine. The kind of hero that we have here in 39 Steps, and likewise H. Rider Haggard's adventurers like Allan Quatermain, is never the young version - it's always the adult man, who has seen some struggle, and is now the competent, campaign-hardened, even-keeled hero. Gross colonialism aside, I really love these characters.

I'm sure there's a lot of overlap here with the American Cowboy archetype, but I just aesthetically dislike Westerns so much that I mentally rule them out of this category.

Noted on April 29, 2025

Despite my obvious enjoyment of the early-20th-century adventure novel, I have never read John Buchan. This is mostly because about a decade ago I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Prester John, the mythical priest-king of the east. One of Buchan's most famous novels is called Prester John, but it's a pulpy adventure set in Africa, and I was always frustrated when that book would clutter up my searches for much more obscure scholarly stuff.

But! My recent read of Rogue Male, which I loved, turned me on here. The back of that book noted that Rogue Male's author Household owed a debt to books that came before like The Riddle of the Sands and The 39 Steps. So I picked it up!

This is very fun; a page turner, a romp, and it's got an H Rider Haggard protagonist who did a bunch of manly stuff in the African colonies and is now applying his omnicapability to an adventure in England.

Noted on April 29, 2025