Richard Hannay

Alma worked on the adaptation too, of course.

Robert Donat played Richard Hannay, an innocent man pursued by both the police and a spy ring.

The chase took him from London to Scotland, across the Forth Bridge and into the Highlands.

Madeleine Carroll played Pamela, who becomes his unwilling companion.

It really is.

So we have Robert Donat playing Richard Hannay.

Now, Hannay is just a guy.

He is literally just a guy on a vacation in London trying to take in a show.

It is all shadows, literal and metaphorical.

And he is willfully ignorant.

Unlike Richard Hannay running for his life out of self-preservation, Holly Martins is actively walking into the danger out of a misplaced sense of loyalty.

He chooses to be there.

Yeah.

Uh, there's a lot of Richard Hannay in James Bond.

They're what, uh, critics call clubland heroes.

So people are used to the, um, the idea of a hero who basically swans around in Mayfair, in St. James's, in London, who, uh, fights sort of th- subversive threats and brings his sort of public school gentlemanly code to bear against dastardly foreigners.

Right.

Wow, that's a twist.

So Bond owes a lot to Richard Hannay and also to a character, um, from the 1920s called Bulldog Drummond, who is nastier and harder than Hannay.

And Bulldog Drummond, um, was created by a writer called Sapper, and Bulldog Drummond fought Bolsheviks and Jews and Germans and various people who didn't fit in Sapper's very reactionary view of kind of Stanley Baldwin's Britain.

I've always felt like it's...

It's the next step on from John Buchan and Richard Hannay and the 39 Steps and those kind of books that were written earlier in the 20th century.

Do you feel that about Fleming, really? Because I know he hasn't always...

Back at the time, he wasn't necessarily critically...

I really enjoyed this adventure romance.

The pace was brisk, the characters different and interesting.

It put me in mind of John Buchan's The 39 Steps and his dashing character Richard Hannay.

Marianne, you chose this book, obviously an old favourite.

And so we will tonight.

Tom, the landscape is a character in this story.

What did you think of the characters created?

Well, the landscape is very descriptive in its language, and even some of the scenes, whether it's a porting scene or even a dining scene, or dare I say it, some of the little scenes are quite descriptive, but not in modern terms, I suppose, really.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Protagonist podcast, where each week we look at a great character in a great story.

I'm Joe Dorowski, and this week we're discussing Richard Hannay from the novel The 39 Steps.

And joining me for the discussion is returning guest John Darowski.

Welcome back, John.

Hello.

The 39 Steps is probably most famous as an Alfred Hitchcock film, but we are talking about the 1915 novel written by John Buchan that tells the story of Richard Hannay on the run from both criminals and cops.

And he's got a secret that he's trying to get to the right people, and he's worried that he's going to be stopped by both the goodies and the baddies along the way.

Classic.