The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Written By John Buchan
The Thirty-Nine Steps
- John Buchan
$19.99
Six days to stop a war before it starts.
Richard Hannay returns to London restless and bored, a mining engineer back from Rhodesia with nothing to do. Then a stranger named Scudder talks his way into Hannay’s flat, half out of his mind with fear, claiming he’s uncovered a plot to assassinate a foreign statesman on British soil — the opening move in a larger scheme to drag Europe into war.
Three days later Scudder lies dead on Hannay’s floor, and Hannay is the only suspect the police have. With Scudder’s coded notebook in his pocket and the killers closing in, he boards a train to the Scottish moors. Somewhere on the coast a rendezvous is being planned that could hand Britain’s defenses to its enemies, and Hannay has days to work out what the notebook’s thirty-nine steps mean before it happens.
Buchan wrote his “shocker” in a fortnight, laid up with illness, and produced something closer to a new form than a variation on an old one: the innocent man on the run, racing a conspiracy he only half understands, trusting nothing but his own resourcefulness. Nearly every spy thriller written since has worked from Buchan’s blueprint.
“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”
About the Author
- John Buchan
John Buchan was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of a Free Church minister. He began writing as a student at the University of Glasgow, publishing his first novel before moving on to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he continued writing essays, novels, and poetry while studying law.
Buchan practiced as a barrister before serving as private secretary to Lord Milner’s postwar reconstruction efforts in South Africa. After two years, he returned to England, where he worked in law, journalism, and publishing. During the First World War, he directed British war propaganda and information services — direct experience that gave The Thirty-Nine Steps its texture of institutional pressure and wartime unease. Its 1915 publication made him famous and launched the modern spy thriller genre.
Buchan produced four more Richard Hannay novels and dozens of other books, while his public career carried him further still: he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Tweedmuir and served as Governor General of Canada until his death in 1940. His classic The Thirty-Nine Steps inspired one of Alfred Hitchcock’s early defining films and has never been out of print.
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