When Richard Hannay finds the corpse of freelance spy Franklin P. Scudder in his London flat, he goes on the run, fearing that his life is in danger. Scudder had previously revealed that he was investigating a ring of German spies, who were conspiring to sabotage Britain's war capability. Hannay becomes both hunter and hunted as he struggles to unravel the tangled threads of this plot while staying one step ahead of his pursuers, who will stop at nothing to keep their nefarious secrets.
First published in 1915, John Buchan's definitive spy novel was the first in a long line of espionage thrillers to delve into the underbelly of the British establishment. Over a hundred years later, The Thirty-Nine Steps remains resonant, and the various film, television and theatre adaptations of this classic – most notably Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version – are a testament to its capacity to thrill.

John Buchan (1875-1940) was a polymath who lived in the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras, through the Boer War and the First World War. As well as being a writer for over forty-five years, he was a civil servant, a journalist, a publisher, a war propagandist, a historian and biographer and a politician and diplomat. His wife, Susan Grosvenor, was a cousin of the Duke of Westminster and connected with much of the landed aristocracy of the British establishment. Buchan’s own family was of respectable but not wealthy farming stock from the Scottish Borders. He was the eldest of six siblings, a father of four, and a devoted son to a most trying mother. He studied Classics at Oxford, read for the Bar, worked in South Africa as an Imperial civil servant, was deputy editor of The Spectator, went into publishing, and in the First World War became Britain’s Director of Intelligence. He became deputy-director of Reuters, and was a Member of Parliament until he was ennobled by George V and became Governor-General of Canada. He died in 1940.

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“An archetypal English spy thriller.” —Robert McCrum