Show Notes
In this After Dark special, host John Ault speaks with Ursula Buchan, granddaughter of novelist John Buchan and author of the definitive biography Beyond the 39 Steps, about how elections shaped her grandfather's fiction. Before becoming famous for his spy thrillers, Buchan spent years as the prospective Conservative and Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk, visiting every farmstead in the Scottish Borders and attending hundreds of village political meetings—experiences he would mine for his novels.
The conversation explores the most famous election scene in British fiction: Richard Hannay's impromptu speech in The 39 Steps, where an innocent man on the run gets dragged onto a political platform and must improvise a rousing address. Ursula explains how Buchan used this device to satirise the Liberal candidate "Sir Harry" spouting aspirational nonsense about the German menace while Hannay knows there's a real spy ring operating—Buchan's way of suggesting Liberals were dangerously unworldly about what was coming in 1914.
But The 39 Steps isn't Buchan's only election novel. In John McNab, three eminent men behaving badly hide out during a poaching adventure while attending a political meeting in a Masonic Hall packed with 2,000 people—where Buchan skewers both the witless Duke who introduces the speakers and the cabinet minister who spouts the same platitudes he's said a hundred times before. In Castle Gay, published in 1933, Buchan explores the rising threats of communism and fascism through another by-election, having recognised that these movements could manipulate "the plain man who now has a vote."
Ursula reveals how Buchan understood media power long before most—writing press communiques from GHQ under Field Marshal Haig, serving as Lloyd George's Director of Information, and overseeing propaganda films including The Battle of the Somme. When Hitchcock adapted The 39 Steps in 1935, Buchan famously told British Gaumont directors it was "much better than the book"—understanding that film was a different medium requiring different storytelling, and that media could be harnessed for good or corrupted for ill. From political humbug to the power of newspapers, this episode explores how a man who never actually fought a general election became one of the great chroniclers of British democracy in fiction.
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