Some Penguin Classics come with just the right kind of Introductions. All of them have Introductions, of course, but some of those read very much like schoolroom exercises, dreary duties, or half-aborted doctoral dissertations. I’ve read many hundreds of Penguin Classics Introductions, and the vast majority of them gave the impression that they were trying to convince the wary reader NOT to embark on the book. I’ve read many others that gave the slightly sticky impression of old grievances aired and cranky long-held controversial opinions that have already bored dozens of dinner parties and are now being foisted on a broader reading public. 

But some of those Introductions hit just the right note. For all I know, they may still be tired old chestnuts or thwarted theses, but they certainly don’t read that way. 

A case in point that just recently came under my hand again: John Keegan’s Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, which he opens by writing about a kind of doldrums every reader knows well: the day when nothing really works - “There is work to be done but no motivation, arrangements to be made but no impulse. Letters lie accusingly unanswered.” Every reader will know that when such dim times come, only a few authors will do, and for Keegan, John Buchan has always been one of those authors:

There is a very English recipe for dealing with this condition – fresh air, physical exercise, direct contact with nature. Getting out of oneself is the cure, particularly to the hills, cliffs, high tops, where the turf is springy and the views stretch to distant, blue horizons. Oppressive days come, however, when such escapes may not offer. City streets and crowds surround, unyielding pavements meet one’s feet, horizons can only be imagined. At such times, Buchan opens the door to the world one’s being seeks – a world of thickets refreshed by a recent rain shower, of streams tinkling over boulders smoothed by uncountable winter floods, of the sharp cry of an unseen bird in a bush, of peat smoke risking lazily from the cottage chimney in the calm evening air, a world of nature utterly at peace and yet – here is the key air, a world of nature utterly at peace and yet – here is the key Buchan ingredient – tinged with the menace of man the enemy.

The Thirty-Nine Steps of course requires no introductions at all – that’s true of a great many books, but hardly more true for anything else written in 1915. The little book was an enormous success immediately, got the best of all second winds when it was adapted for the big screen by no less than Alfred Hitchcock, and, most importantly, it’s still every bit as easily readable now as it was when it was written nearly a century ago. Buchan’s sterling hero, Richard Hannay, is still ready to spring into action with a quip or a dash into danger, and when it comes to raw plot mechanics – something of a weakness for Buchan, despite all the practice he gave himself during the long years of his literary apprenticeship – work flawlessly. And Buchan’s strongest point as a writer, his skill at snagging the reader, starts with the novel’s first paragraph:

I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If any one had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. ‘Richard Hannay,” I kept telling myself, ‘you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.’

Maybe part of the pleasure of Keegan’s Introduction comes from the surface incongruity of the thing. After all, Keegan is a first-rate military historian – you’d expect this Introduction to go to a current-day writer of action-thrillers, but instead, this time, it went to somebody who simply loves the author and his “happy and wonderful life.” 

Whatever the reason, it makes for an immensely welcoming invitation. I didn’t need that, since I already love the book, but I was happy to get it just the same.