The Thirty Nine Steps

“I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a little.”

Buchan has been criticized for including antisemitic attitudes in his works. In this early scene, Hannay listens to Scudder voice those views and responds with this quip. The sardonic tone suggests Hannay disagrees with Scudder and rejects his biases.

“If you’re going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing.”

Scudder makes this claim as part of his long explanation to Hannay about the forces at work and their different motivations. Though he is referring to villainy, the quote also speaks to the kinds of individualism that motivate Scudder, Hannay, and (as Hannay realizes at the end) some of the members of the Black Stone.

“It was the wildest sort of narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales which had turned out to be true, and I had made a practice of judging the man rather than the story.”

Hannay’s response to Scudder’s strange tale is echoed later by characters who hear similarly unbelievable stories from him. This quote ties to the theme of Appearance and Reality in that, while inviting the characters and audience to suspend their disbelief to enjoy the drama of the story, he acknowledges how stories may misrepresent truth.