1915: Richard Hannay is finding London amusements flat as standing soda-water. There are plenty of people to invite him round their houses, but no one to pal around with. His Club is abuzz with talk of the Greek Premier Karolides, who is hated blackly in Berlin and Vienna.
At his flat in Portland Place, he meets the top floor lodger with a story to tell - "You see, I happen at this moment to be dead!"
Journalist Franklin Scudder has come across a plan engineered by very dangerous people - educated anarchists and capitalist financiers - to get Germany and Russia at loggerheads and spark a war. This convoluted plot is ever present but quite obtuse as the novel goes on, there is no concrete plan of action, just the deadly threat to assassinate Karolides when he visits London on June 15. The British Foreign Office cannot simply warn him not to come, for the enemy is always alert. They are not playing this game for candy.
Scudder has faked his own death and although Hannay grants him protection, Scudder is quickly dispatched with a long knife through his heart. Fearing the police will brand him a murderer (they do), and the enemy will assume he knows everything (they do), Hannay hightails it to Scotland to hide out for the next three weeks.
For the next 150 pages, Hannay wanders the rolling green hills of the veld, hiding in the lee of a boulder when he suspects he is being watched, and trying to decipher Scudder's coded notebook. He is helped by farmers, herders, politicians, and innkeepers under various alias', but mostly he hides in ditches of heather when he spies men who could be police or enemy agents, silently and swiftly on his tail. The notebook code yields a major clue: Thirty-nine steps, high tide, 10:17pm. This will mean something when Hannay presents it to the Secretary of War; Hannay alone the only man who knows that among the Cabinet Ministers and Admiralty at the confidential meeting is the leader of the Enemy spy ring himself, known as the Black Stone.
This was written in 1915, combining a political thriller with a man-on-the-run theme, quickly becoming one of Britain's best loved novels. It is the first of five adventure novels featuring Richard Hannay. For me, a better version with a similar plot would be the well-loved Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household (1939) featuring a cross-country manhunt that is timeless.
This I found this lacked momentum, perhaps as it was first serialized, seeming to pass from one escapade to another without tension. There are characters from the Scottish wilds with accents hard to read (I said he maun be thinkin' o' my gude-brither frae the Cleuch that whiles lent me a haun'), and as in many political thrillers at this time, there is the fear of 'the other' - here unfortunately called 'the little white-faced Jew'. There is no getting around the prejudices of the time, I would rather read the novel as written and acknowledge the narrow-mindedness.
The Thirty-Nine Steps was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939 which deviates from the book, the film in 1959 added musical numbers, the 1978 film was the closest to the book, and BBC TV filmed it adding romance and a submarine finale. It was recorded many times for radio, was a play, a tv prequel series, a video game - and Netflix is developing it for a new series.
This is widely available in print, audio, and eBook versions for free online from many sites including Project Gutenberg.
1915 / Hardcover / 254 pages
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