The Thirty-Nine Steps

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish writer John Buchan, first published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1915 and the first of five books about Richard Hannay.

Hannay is a mining engineer who has made a modest fortune in Rhodesia and returned to London, where he is bored and considering leaving England for good. A frightened American neighbour, Franklin Scudder, tells him of a conspiracy that would bring Britain into a European war, and days later Hannay finds the man stabbed to death in his own flat. Knowing that the police will treat him as the murderer and that the plotters intend to remove him as well, he slips out of London and heads north with very little to work with: a notebook he cannot fully read, a description of a man, and a growing suspicion that the details which would expose the plan are hidden somewhere in the coast and hills he is crossing.

The novel was serialised before it appeared in book form and has been adapted for film and stage many times, and it set the pattern for the chase thriller in which one man has to prove his innocence and prevent something larger at the same time.