When Richard Hannay returns from a long stay in Africa, he becomes caught up in a sensational plot to precipitate a pan-European war.After the discovery of a Corpse in his flat, Hannay flees the attentions of both the conspirators and the forces of the law, and the pursuit turns into a thrilling manhunt.Set against the hot summer which precedes the outbreak of the First World War, The Thirty-nine Steps is one of the finest and most highly admired thrillers ever written.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is the first of five novels which have Richard Hannay as their hero, (the others being Greenmantle, Mr Standfast,The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep). It was written, as Buchan says in his dedicatory epistle, to pass the time during the winter of 1914 when he was suffering from a recurrence of the ill-health that plagued him for much of his life. The book is a remarkable thriller involving murder, chases, capture, escape and cunning deception set largely in the Scottish Border country, evoked by Buchan in loving detail. Hannay himself is thought to be based principally on Buchan"s friend Field Marshall Lord Ironside (1880 - 1959).

We first meet the thirty-seven year-old Hannay in the Spring Of 1914. He is a sturdy, though perhaps a touch unimaginative, mining engineer who, having made a modest fortune in Africa, has returned to London after thirty years, but is bored to distraction. Coming back one evening to his rooms in the West End he is accosted by Franklin Scudder, a frightened American neighbour, who prevails upon Hannay to listen to the story of a terrifying conspiracy which has been hatched with a view to precipitating a pan-European war.Scudder is aware that the conspirators intend to kill him, and he has contrived to have a body found in his apartment in the hope that it will be assumed that the corpse is his. Hannay agrees to shelter the American until he can make his escape to warn the authorities, but when he returns to his rooms a couple of nights later "my guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife through his heart which skewered him to the floor".

1. The man who died

2. The milkman sets out on his travels

3. The adventure of the literary innkeeper

4. The adventure of the radical candidate

5. The adventure of the spectacled roadman

6. The adventure of the bald archaeologist

7. The dry-fly fisherman

8. The coming of the Black Stone

9. The thirty-nine steps

10. Various parties converging on the sea