The 39 Steps (Richard Hannay, #1) by John Buchan
Published 1915 · 37,500 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Spy fiction, Adventure, Thriller, Mystery
How hard is The 39 Steps (Richard Hannay, #1) to read?
The 39 Steps (Richard Hannay, #1) scores 22 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Buchan writes in clean, accessible Edwardian prose. The vocabulary is period-appropriate but rarely demands a dictionary—occasional Scottish dialect words (bothy, glen) and colonial idiom add flavour without obscuring meaning. Nothing like the specialized jargon of Moby-Dick or the invented coinages of Finnegans Wake.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Sentences are short to medium, declarative, action-driven. Buchan modelled his style on R. L. Stevenson and the adventure-story tradition: propulsive clauses that move the reader forward rather than Jamesian subordination or Proustian loops. A confident reader of any secondary-school level will find the syntax comfortable.
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- The 39 Steps is almost entirely concrete narrative—chase, disguise, action, encounter. There are no philosophical digressions, no sustained symbolic meditation. Hannay's interiority is practical (how do I escape this valley?) rather than existential. Closer to Asterix than to Brothers Karamazov on the abstraction dial.
- Information density: 33 out of 100
- The novel is packed with incident rather than ideas—each chapter delivers a new predicament, disguise, or revelation. Readers are not asked to track complex backstory or multiple plot threads; one man, one conspiracy, one chase. The density is kinetic, not cognitive.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Hannay narrates in direct, reliable first person. He tells the reader what he knows as he knows it, without ironic self-distancing or fragmented memory. The reader pieces together the spy plot alongside Hannay but there is no uncertainty about what is happening or what Hannay feels about it—the exact opposite of, say, Lolita's seductive unreliability.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The novel is strikingly literal for its cultural weight. The thirty-nine steps are an actual location—a tidal staircase on the Kent coast—not a layered metaphor. Buchan plants no sustained symbolic programme; disguise recurs as a plot device but is not developed as allegory. The symbolic density sits near the Diary of a Young Girl end of the scale.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Buchan takes his adventure plot entirely at face value. Hannay is sincere, the threat is real, the heroes are heroes. There is period comedy in Hannay's disguises and some wry British understatement, but no gap between what the text says and what the author means. The irony register is far below Gatsby, let alone Pale Fire.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The ending is as clean as adventure fiction gets: the spy ring is identified and caught, the assassination prevented, Hannay vindicated. Buchan designed the novel as a 'shocker'—his term—meant to satisfy genre expectations completely. No haunting ambiguity, no open questions, no deliberate resistance to closure.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- A single, linear first-person narrative moving chronologically over roughly three weeks. No timeline jumps, no POV shifts, no embedded stories. The structure is classic adventure: complication, flight, escalation, climax, resolution. It sits comfortably with 1984 on the simple end of the structural scale.
How The 39 Steps (Richard Hannay, #1) is regarded
The 39 Steps (Richard Hannay, #1) holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.