John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while he was ill in bed with a duodenal ulcer, an illness which remained with him all his life. Buchan's son William later wrote that the name of the book originated when the author's daughter was counting the stairs at St Cuby, a private nursing home on Cliff Promenade in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. "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 39 steps." The tunnelled stairway through the cliff actually consisted of 78 steps, but Buchan halved the number to make a better title. When the original oak steps were later replaced, one of them, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan.[6] The concrete steps now number 108, still running from the garden to the beach.[7]
This novel was his first "shocker", as he called it – a story combining personal and political dramas. It marked a turning point in Buchan's literary career and introduced his adventuring hero Richard Hannay. He described a "shocker" as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened.[6]
