The Thirty-Nine Steps
Richard Hannay comes home to find a murdered spy in his flat and a secret that could start a war. Now both the police and the killers are hunting him across Scotland. The original man-on-the-run thriller. By John Buchan (1915). A public-domain classic.
Content warnings: Violence
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How it begins I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick. I couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. “Richard Hannay,” I kept telling myself, “you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.”It made me bite my lips to think of the plans I had been building up those last years in Buluwayo. I had got my pile—not one of the big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest of my days. Keep reading →About this story
Richard Hannay, a bored mining engineer in London, comes home to find a dead spy in his flat and a secret that could start a war. Now both the police and the killers are hunting him across Scotland. It is a book that is almost entirely a chase, over hills, in country inns and on a moor.
John Buchan published it in 1915, in the first year of the First World War. It is often called the first modern thriller, with a hero who is an ordinary man in over his head. It was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. Buchan later became Governor General of Canada.
- Themes
- A man on the run, spies, courage, a race against time
- Good for
- A fast adventure to read in a weekend; fans of spy stories
- Worth noticing
- How Hannay disguises himself and how often it is by luck.
Chapters
- 1The Man Who Died21 min · 9 Oct
- 2The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels11 min · 9 Oct
- 3The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper21 min · 9 Oct
- 4The Adventure of the Radical Candidate19 min · 9 Oct
- 5The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman16 min · 9 Oct
- 6The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist27 min · 9 Oct
- 7The Dry-Fly Fisherman18 min · 9 Oct
- 8The Coming of the Black Stone13 min · 9 Oct
- 9The Thirty-Nine Steps12 min · 9 Oct
- 10Various Parties Converging on the Sea24 min · 9 Oct