Given the novel’s taut psychological edge, it’s easy to understand why The Lodger remains fresh almost one hundred years after its publication. Its influence has been considerable, especially because of the strong way it investigates the psychology of suspicion. Arguably, Alfred Hitchcock’s career and its emphasis on suspicion wouldn’t have been the same if not for his silent screen adaptation of this novel. His 1954 film Rear Window can be seen as a variation on The Lodger, with the suspected killer living in a neighboring apartment rather than in the same household. Interestingly, Cornell Woolrich, the author of the Rear Window source material, was once compared to Marie Belloc Lowndes. This is merely one example of her influence. Although Lowndes is no longer a familiar name, she left a permanent mark on the psychological thriller.

  James A. Moore was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and moved all over the country in his earlier years. He is the author of more than twenty novels, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under the Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring antihero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, Cherry Hill and Deeper. He has twice been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and spent three years as an officer in the Horror Writers Association, first as secretary and later as vice president.

  25

  John Buchan’s

  THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS (1915)

  Janet Berliner

  John Buchan was a prolific author who began life as the first of four sons and a daughter to a Free Church of Scotland minister in Perth, Scotland, in August 1875. After a brief stint in law, he entered politics as the private secretary to Alfred Milner, high commissioner for South Africa and Governor of Cape Province. In 1907, he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, and they had four children. During the First World War, he spent time in the British Army Intelligence Corps and later became director of information under Lord Beaverbrook. In 1935, King George V named John Buchan governor general of Canada. Preferring to have a peer in that position, the king created and bestowed on him the title of Baron of Tweedsmuir. Early in 1940, while shaving, he suffered a stroke and hit his head upon falling. Despite the best medical care available, he succumbed to his injuries on February 11, 1940.

  John Buchan left behind an impressive legacy in print, publishing around one hundred books, including biographies and histories, as well as thirty novels and seven collections of stories and poetry. In 1910, he wrote his first adventure,Prester John, set in South Africa, as many of his works would be. Then, in 1915, he wrote what would become his most famous work,The Thirty-Nine Steps, which almost by itself launched the chase thriller genre. His final work,Sick Heart River, published posthumously in 1941, found a dying adventurer trapped in the Canadian wilderness and contemplating the meaning of life. While we now remember Buchan for his adventure stories, in his day he was as well known for his horror stories such as “Witch Wood” and “The Green Wildebeest.” He was also, for a time, a partner in a publishing company and later founded the Governor General’s Awards, recognizing Canadian literature.

  His works strongly influenced such subsequent political intrigue thriller writers as Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, Ian Fleming, and just about any novelist or screenwriter whose innocent main character is blamed for a serious crime and forced to run from the police or the CIA or whatever while desperately trying to figure out who the real criminal is.

  I first encountered John Buchan’s work through The Thirty-Nine Steps when I was a precocious young girl in South Africa around 1950. Having worked my way through all of the Nancy Drews available in the library in Cape Town, I wandered into the adult section to look for something more to read. My hand fell upon John Buchan’s book largely because it was shelved around my eye level, and it was undauntingly slender. It was my first lesson in less being more.

  The book also had an enormous effect on my future life and my future books. Richard Hannay’s adventures reinforced my natural wanderlust, but also the novel instilled in me a subconscious quest for thirty-nine steps. So much so that when I moved to Grenada for a year, I rented a house because it had thirty-nine steps from the porch down to the beach. More importantly, Buchan’s direct prose and talent for mixing dry humor with suspense would become for me almost a template for how to write a thriller.

  The book itself is significantly different from the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film that so many people in our modern era of short attention spans and DVDs remember. For example, it doesn’t include a female companion for the protagonist. The book, probably not even forty thousand words long, would be considered a novella to current publishers. In that short space, John Buchan takes the reader on a breathless ride.

  Richard Hannay is a man bored by life in London while the rest of Europe seethes its way into what would be the First World War. He becomes an accidental secret agent when his peculiar upstairs neighbor, Franklin Scudder, beguiles him with a tale of intrigue and begs Hannay’s assistance in hiding from unknown enemies. When Hannay comes home to find Scudder stabbed to death, he is forced to go on the run, first in London, and later in the Scottish countryside, trying to avoid the police and Scudder’s mysterious foes while he tries to unravel whatever machinations the dead man has gotten him mixed up into. He takes with him Scudder’s journal.

  Reading the journal, Hannay learns that the United Kingdom appears to be in danger of an invasion by Germany and its allies. He reads about an enemy group called The Black Stone and of something called The Thirty-Nine Steps. After much deliberation, he realizes that the phrase “the thirty-nine steps” could refer to a landing point in Kent, where thirty-nine steps lead down a cliff to the sea. Hannay goes to Kent and finds the spies about to board a yacht. The scheme is thwarted, and the United Kingdom enters World War I, having kept its military secrets from the enemy.

  The inspiration for the title was wonderfully mundane, as Buchan’s son later explained. His father was convalescing from a serious illness at a private nursing home. “There was a wooden staircase leading down to the beach. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are thirty-nine steps.” Some time later the house in Kent was demolished and the original steps were replaced by concrete. A section of the old stairs, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan.

  In addition to Hitchcock’s famous work, Buchan’s story has been adapted into four more films, most recently one premiering in 2008 on BBC television. While the subsequent films are all more faithful to the source work, it will of course be Hitchcock’s version that is most remembered for the meeting of two masters of thrills in works that, while not their first, certainly helped to forge their legacies in the minds of fans.

  For those who know only the film, I cannot advise strongly enough taking the short time needed to read the original book, which has almost never been out of print since its initial publication nearly a century ago.

  Some of the passages may seem offensive to a modern reader. For instance, the murder victim, Scudder, is a vocal anti-Semite, but Buchan did not share those views and arranged for the Jews in the novel to proclaim how crazy Scudder is for obsessing about an imagined Jewish conspiracy. Indeed, later in life Buchan found himself on Hitler’s “hit list” as a supporter of the Zionist “Palestine Parliamentary Group” in the 1930s.

  Readers with more interest in Buchan and his times would do well to read his autobiography,Memory, Hold-the-Door (published in the U.S. as Pilgrim’s Way). The book was one of President John F. Kennedy’s favorite works, which he often quoted to friends and acquaintances. Buchan’s Richard Hannay appeared in several other thrillers, what Buchan called “shockers,” including Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, and The Three Hostages.

  Janet Berliner is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of six novels, including the Madagascar Manifesto trilogy with George Guthridge, and Artifact, her four-way collaboration with friends Kevin J. Anderson, Matthew J. Costello, and F. Paul Wilson. She has sold over one hundred short stories to magazines and anthologies. She is also the editor of six anthologies, including two with illusionist David Copperfield, and one with Joyce Carol Oates. She is a member of the Council of the National Writers Association, a past president of the Horror Writers Association, and a member of the Authors Guild, the International Thriller Writers, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born in South Africa, Janet now lives in Las Vegas, while she plans her escape to the Caribbean.

  26

  E. Phillips Oppenheim’s

  THE GREAT IMPERSONATION (1920)

  Justin Scott

  Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was one of the most popular authors of his day. Born in London and raised in Leicester, he began writing fiction in his teens, an ambition that so distressed his domineering, leather merchant father that Oppenheim was removed from school and forced to work in the family business. Thereafter he devoted nine hours each day to commerce, eight to sleeping, and the remainder to writing fiction. By the time his father died and Oppenheim sold the leather business, his publishing career was so successful that he could afford to leave England and set up housekeeping on the French Rivera. Many of his books, including The Great Impersonation, were dictated, a technique that presents an interesting contrast between the effect of the words on the page as opposed to the way they sound when read aloud.

  Midway in a career that spans sixty years, two world wars, and one hundred and fifty novels, a guy sits down and writes a masterpiece. His sales, already huge, increase dramatically. He continues to write excellent novels. None quite equals the masterpiece, but he enjoys by all accounts a deeply satisfying writing life. The wealth of bestsellerdom permits him to live on the French Riviera among the rich and titled people he loves to write about.

  His name was E. Phillips Oppenheim.

  The masterpiece is The Great Impersonation. It’s a spy story set in 1914 in the fleeting, desperate months before England and Germany fought the Great War that decimated two generations of husbands and sons. He published it in 1920, just two years after the slaughter.

  While beloved by legions of readers,The Great Impersonation is really a writer’s book. Halfway through it dawns on you that not only has he written a gripping thriller; he’s also written an intriguing mystery, a strange and emotional love story, and a Gothic novel complete with a haunted wood and a howling demon. And he’s integrated them so smoothly that you’re straining a wrist to turn the pages. He’s also writing about good and evil, duty to God and country, and redemption. But first and foremost he is writing about that greatest of all human fantasies—the second chance.

  It’s a battle cruiser of a novel, both fast and stately. To propel it, Oppenheim invents a plot device so clever that words like twist or gimmick can’t begin to do it honor.

  It starts when a dissolute English baronet stumbles out of the African jungle into the remote camp of a German nobleman on a mission. A writer is allowed one coincidence early in a plot, and Oppenheim takes full advantage: Not only were Sir Everard Dominey and Major General Baron Leopold von Ragastein at school together at Eton, but when Dominey and Von Ragastein were boys they looked exactly alike. Doubles. The former schoolmates catch up over dinner. Von Ragastein is military commandant of the colony of German East Africa, and Dominey is a drunk living off the last of his wasted inheritance.

  Oppenheim makes it brutally clear that we have not entered the doppelgänger territory of The Prince and the Pauper or The Prisoner of Zenda. The Great Impersonation is not about doubles trading places. It is about war, and there is room for only one winner.

  After von Ragastein and Dominey fight to the death, we meet the victorious von Ragastein in England, where Dominey’s solicitor is astonished. Ten years in Africa have so toughened and matured his wastrel client that he hardly recognizes him. The solicitor is even more astonished that the ever impecunious Sir Everard is not looking for a handout, or to borrow on his already mortgaged-to-the hilt estate, but intends to pay off his debts and restore his Norfolk house and lands to a glory not seen by generations of struggling Domineys.

  Equally astonished is Von Ragastein’s former mistress, the Hungarian Princess Stephanie Eiderstrom who refuses to believe that he is Dominey and threatens to expose him if he won’t resume their affair.

  Similarly, Dominey’s wife, who has vowed to kill him if he ever sets foot in their house again—having been insane since Dominey evidently killed a man before he fled to Africa—is sufficiently confused by the changes in her husband that she decides not to stab him in his sleep and instead throws her dagger down a well.

  You can be forgiven for wondering if this entire situation could be fodder for a comic stage farce, particularly when wrapped gaily in the trappings of wealth and privilege: elegant restaurants, splendid palaces, town houses, pheasant shoots, cellars of old brandy and ancient port. In fact, one character actually raises the point. But the stakes are so high. The horrific war looms. And the German spymaster running von Ragastein reminds him, and us, how the love and hope of Dominey’s wife is something too fragile to be abused.

  The writing, too, rises above farce. Oppenheim is subtle, yet clear. Dominey and his beautiful older cousin, the Duchess Caroline who is married to Duke Henry, were obviously very fond of each other before Dominey went to Africa. We feel a wonderful heat between them, or is it merely flirtation?

  Oppenheim is as subtle with his action scenes. There are a grand total of two instances of violence on stage. First, when Dominey/von Ragastein awakes to the aforementioned dagger at his throat in a terrifying moment. The second occurs at the end, a sudden attack that would seem tame if it weren’t so rare in the novel.

  The main reason that The Great Impersonation never descends to farce is that Oppenheim exploits the doppelgänger device to a new degree by placing the reader in the same position as the characters who are stunned and fascinated by Dominey’s miraculous improvement. How could a man have changed so much? How does a wastrel become an upright citizen? At the same time, the reader asks when will some Englishman realize that this newly constituted Everard Dominey is too good to be true. How long can a spy hide in plain sight?

  Which leads the reader to the big and constant question that weaves relentlessly through the novel. Will he get caught? The German plan is for their impersonator to influence British war decisions at the highest level. He can’t be a secretive spy. He can’t skulk. To be effective, he must be charismatic, even larger than life, a man who makes people curious. He has to march boldly through British society.

  The Germans are glad to put up the money to pay off the mortgages on Dominey Hall because that transforms him into a nobleman of substance—a public figure to influence public figures. A high point in his effort is a weekend party at Dominey Hall attended not only by the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, but a powerful cabinet minister. Of course—Oppenheim being Oppenheim—also showing up for the weekend are the Hungarian princess and Dominey’s wife newly sprung from the asylum.

  Will he get caught? I won’t tell you. You’d hate me for it. Just as you’d hate me if I revealed Oppenheim’s miraculous plot device, one of the most stunning revelations in thriller history. I will say that part of the pleasure comes from wondering just how Oppenheim plotted his thriller. What did he know at what point while writing? Was it all laid out, or was he making decisions on horseback? I repeat—this is a writer’s novel, filled with great writing lessons, especially about pacing and twists. You don’t have to be a writer to be thrilled by it, though you may want to become one after you read it.

  Justin Scott has written twenty-four thrillers, historicals, and mystery novels, including The Shipkiller and Normandie Triangle. With many books set at sea, he has been called “the Dick Francis of yachting.” He writes the Ben Abbott detective series (HardScape, StoneDust, FrostLine, McMansion, and Mausoleum), and has been twice nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. His main pen name is Paul Garrison under which he has written five modern sea thrillers including Red Sky At Morning, Sea Hunter, and The Ripple Effect. He has collaborated with Clive Cussler on the Isaac Bell novels, The Wrecker and The Spy.

  27

  Richard Connell’s

  “THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME” (1924)

  Katherine Ramsland

  By the time he was ten, Richard Edward Connell, Jr., (1893–1949) had a role model for his future as a writer: his father, who edited the Poughkeepsie News-Press in Poughkeepsie, New York. In high school, Connell, Jr., wrote features for the paper and covered baseball games, absorbing material for short stories he would later compose. He was only eighteen when he became city editor. Although he began college at Georgetown, he quit to be a secretary for his father, now in Congress. Connell, Sr., died less than two years later, so Connell, Jr., entered Harvard. There he edited the Harvard Lampoon and the Harvard Crimson. Enlisting during World War I, Connell penned items for the camp newspaper,Gas Attack. Later, his work in advertising inspired other short stories, and he sold his first one in 1919, the same year he got married. Five years later, he published the biting tale that would gain him lasting renown: “The Most Dangerous Game.” Even as he became one of the best-known short story writers of his time, he moved to California, where he tried his hand at novels and screenwriting. In 1941, he received an Oscar nomination for best original story for Meet John Doe. However, his career ended prematurely in 1949 when a heart attack took him at age fifty-six.

  Average men rising to a challenge is a theme that populated most of the short stories that Richard Connell, Jr., penned during the 1920s. He usually wrote for the masses. Yet it was only when he took up a truly sinister subject for “The Most Dangerous Game” that he ensured his philosophical legacy. A contest Connell described between the hunter and the hunted that had seemed nearly unthinkable in 1924 has inspired numerous imitations, both fictional and actual.