Kim is where the spy novel's basic materials first appear together: the Great Game named as such, an agent who passes as a local, a network of informants, and espionage treated as an imperial administrative activity rather than as a crime. Buchan knew Kipling's work well and The Thirty-Nine Steps takes the parts that suit a thriller: the hunted man crossing country, the disguises, the assumption that the enemy is competent and everywhere. What he drops is Kipling's interest in the boy himself. A MEDIUM weight because this is a genre debt within a generation rather than a borrowing Buchan set down on the record.