John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps

"It was one of those days," a friend said, "when the only thing to do is read John Buchan."
John Keegan, introduction to The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (Penguin, 1915).

Does anyone read John Buchan today?  He was once well-regarded (Raymond Chandler was an admirer) but I think he does not date well.  The Thirty-Nine Steps is certainly paranoid enough for our time, with conspirators everywhere on the eve of WWI, but the book is mostly about Richard Hannay hiding in Scotland and being helped by all its eccentric inhabitants (chapters include "The Adventure of the Radical Candidate," "The Dry-Fly Fisherman," etc.). The book is full of delightful descriptions of the landscape (Buchan was Scottish) -- I first saw the pale blue sky through a net of heather, than a big shoulder of hill, and then my own boots place neatly in a blaeberry [blueberry] bush-- but otherwise too contrived even for the "thriller" genre.

The Buchan book is very much in the shadow of Hitchcock's film version, made in 1935.  As Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer say in their excellent book on Hitchcock(Hitchcock: the First Forty-Four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman, Frederick Ungar, 1979): "Numerous changes were made and they were all good ones,"  including a female character to whom Hannay is handcuffed while trying to avoid the police and the conspirators. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941) is closer to Buchan's book than Hitchcock's film is, though it is based on Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.