The 39 Steps

After all the Serious Literature I’ve been reading lately, I thought I’d reward my brain with some literary fast food in the form of a classic spy thriller. I should have been more careful what I wished for. The gentility of the main characters combined with the looseness of the structure somehow makes the suspension of disbelief utterly unattainable; I don’t think it’s any more preposterous than most spy novels, but evidently it’s easier to believe in a highly trained killing machine with amnesia being hunted by various hostile governments than to believe that a person wanted by the police traipsing through the Scottish moors could encounter quite as many benevolent strangers as populate this book. Continue reading The 39 Steps