The Thirty-Nine Steps

John Buchan more or less invented the modern chase thriller with this lean, fast-moving tale. Richard Hannay, a Scottish mining engineer bored with London, comes home one evening to find a frightened American in his flat warning of a plot to plunge Europe into war. Days later the man is dead on Hannay’s floor, and Hannay flees north to the Scottish moors, hunted at once by the police who think him a murderer and by the shadowy foreign agents who want him silenced. Armed only with a dead man’s coded notebook, he must stay alive long enough to unravel the secret of the thirty-nine steps. Buchan called it a ‘shocker,’ and it set the pattern for a century of spy fiction. This free edition is available as a PDF and EPUB download.