Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out

of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Alfred Hitchcock's favourite serial killer, Neville Heath, was a sadist who went about under a name robbed from one

of the brightest of the fallen, group captain Rupert Brooke. Heath liked to strangle and slash his

victims. He liked novels, too. In the condemned cell, he read one book twice over. John

Buckens, the 39 steps. American thrillers, he said, were too violent for his

taste. Hitchcock has planted his great bulk on John Buckin's novel. For most people, the story

means Robert Donat and Madeline Carroll hiding their police handcuffs from the landlady of a remote country inn.

It means Mr. Memory, the music hall turn, with details of British military tech buried in his brain,

declaring that the 39 steps is an organisation of spies before being gunned down in the footlights.

You won't find this stuff in the book, written in 1914, published in Blackwoods magazine a year later,

and one of the most profoundly popular novels of the Great War.

That popularity is partly why we're devoting a programme to it now.

Bucken's thriller nestled in countless kit bags,

along with letters from Mum, a postcard of Ivy Close,

and a strip of Harrod's heroin gel.

But the bits we tend not to remember are the other reason,

the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,

the puzzling gaps in the story,

the strange mental state of its hero, Richard Hane, the colonial legacy that haunts the book.

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