When published in October 1915, it was a hit, not least among soldiers at the front: “It is just the kind of fiction for here,” one officer wrote to him. In August 1914, the month Britain entered the war, JB began writing The Thirty-Nine Steps while on holiday with his family in Broadstairs.

As Ursula Buchan puts it, his marriage introduced him to a large network of “agreeable connections”, though he still earned all the money. Back in London, he hobnobbed with influential types and in marrying Susan Grosvenor, a bookish girl from a notable aristocratic family, revealed a mild inclination for mountaineering in the social heights. Buchan got a first, studied for the bar and then went out to South Africa tasked with reconstruction of the Boer republics, an unhappy experience that exposed him to the dark side of British colonialism. He enjoyed the hijinks of student life, once saving an American friend who passed out with shock after a Roman candle was put down his “Oxford bags”. Bright but shy, JB was both a sportsman – he loved golf, hiking, fishing, mountaineering – and a bookman, earning money from novels and reviews even when an undergraduate at Oxford. A son of the manse, he was raised in a loving atmosphere by a cheerful Free Church of Scotland minister and a mother whose neediness and ambition would never let him be. The best parts of it are those years when the young JB was finding his feet, and his voice. Sadly, that equation works out mostly to the reader’s disadvantage: her love, our labour. She has paid him a due that would make her illustrious forebear proud – a labour of love. Ursula Buchan, his granddaughter, has made efforts to animate this new biography of “JB”, as he was known, has read the work with impeccable care (more than 100 books) and traipsed in his far-flung steps around the colonies (South Africa, Canada) where he pursued an administrative career. Like many writers, he lived his best and most fulfilling life in his head, among his characters his actual life could not compete with it. There was action in it, but not much drama, and that want may have inspired his stories of derring-do, of spies and adventurers and innocent men wronged. John Buchan (1875-1940) led a full life, blessed with friends and family, decorated with all sorts of honours and achievements. They are, from an artistic point of view, quite unsatisfying, which is why fiction was invented. In retrospect one may discern a shape, but they have no pattern or orchestration.

The thirty nine steps by john buchan