The Thirty-Nine Steps

Bored almost to madness after years abroad, the mining engineer Richard Hannay is about to leave a tame and tedious London when a frightened American forces his way into Hannay’s flat with a story of a conspiracy that could plunge Europe into war. Days later the man is dead, knifed on Hannay’s own floor — and Hannay, suspected of the murder and hunted by the killers, takes to his heels with the dead man’s coded notebook and nothing else.

What follows is the original man-on-the-run thriller: a headlong chase across the bare moorland of southern Scotland, by train and car and on foot, in one desperate disguise after another, with a spy ring closing in, an aeroplane circling the hills, and a secret to crack before the guns of August begin. John Buchan wrote it from a sickbed in the first winter of the Great War, and called such tales “shockers” — romances whose incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible.

Fast, lean, and relentlessly inventive, The Thirty-Nine Steps founded the modern spy thriller. Its resourceful amateur hero is the ancestor of every hunted innocent from Eric Ambler to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film to Ian Fleming and John le Carré. More than a century on, it remains the purest example of the form it invented.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition and influence, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.