The 39 Steps

The Thirty-Nine Steps was published in1915. The action of an adventure novel by John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, a Scottish Unionist politician and novelist, takes place during the First World War. It became the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous habit of getting himself out of sticky situations. Here the Canadian is accused of the murder of a young woman who was killed in his hotel room; and tries to solve a mystery of “th