The Thirty-Nine Steps

Richard Hannay has come home to London from Rhodesia with money in the bank and nothing to spend it on. He is thirty-seven, bored to the point of booking a ship back to Africa — and then a frightened stranger from the top-floor flat asks to come in. Franklin Scudder is an American who has faked his own death. He has traced a conspiracy that means to murder a Greek statesman in London on the fifteenth of June and push Europe into war, and he begs Hannay for four weeks of hiding. Four days later Hannay finds him on the smoking-room floor with a knife through his heart.

Wanted by the police for a murder he did not commit, and hunted by the men who did it, Hannay walks out of his own building dressed as the milkman and takes the first train north. What follows is three weeks of open-country chase across the moors of southern Scotland — on foot, by stolen car, by bicycle, under a monoplane that quarters the hills like a hawk. He is sheltered by a young innkeeper who wants to write novels, makes a political speech he does not understand a word of, spends a day breaking stones by the roadside while his hunters question him to his face, and walks into a lonely white house on the moor to find the one man Scudder feared most sitting quietly behind the desk.

All the while he is decoding the little black notebook Scudder left in a tobacco jar. What it says is worse than a murder: a foreign ring calling itself the Black Stone intends to steal Britain's naval defence plans and leave no trace that they were ever taken. By the fifteenth of June Hannay must persuade the men who run the country that he is neither a murderer nor a madman — and then work out what a dead man meant by counting thirty-nine steps down to the sea at high tide.