The Thirty-Nine Steps

Summary

Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in. Scudder has faked his own death and explains that he has uncovered a plot: agents of a German ring called the Black Stone mean to murder the Greek premier Constantine Karolides in London on 15 June and set Europe at war. Four days later Hannay comes home to find Scudder pinned to the floor with a knife through his heart. Knowing that the police will suspect him and that the killers will come for him next, Hannay borrows the milkman's cap and overalls, slips out of the building, and takes the train to Galloway, carrying Scudder's little black notebook. In the Scottish hills both the police and the enemy hunt him, the enemy even from a monoplane. At a lonely inn a young innkeeper who longs to write adventure stories hides him, and Hannay cracks Scudder's cipher with the key word Julia Czechenyi; the notebook reveals that the real plan is to steal British naval plans when a French general visits London. Escaping in his pursuers' own car, he crashes to avoid Sir Harry, a young Liberal candidate, and has to give a political speech in his place. Sir Harry sends him to his godfather Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office. On the run again, Hannay passes himself off as a drunken roadman, Alexander Turnbull, under the eyes of his enemies, and steals the car of the snobbish Marmaduke Jopley. He then blunders into the moorland house of a bald, kindly-seeming archaeologist who turns out to be the man Scudder most feared, the one who could hood his eyes like a hawk. Locked in a storeroom, Hannay blows his way out with an explosive called lentonite, hides on top of a dovecot, discovers a secret airfield, and reaches Turnbull's cottage, where the roadman nurses him through a bout of malaria. At Bullivant's Thames-valley cottage he is believed. Karolides is shot, and at a secret conference in London Hannay realizes that the First Sea Lord who has just left the room is an impostor, one of the Black Stone in disguise. Working from Scudder's note about thirty-nine steps and a high tide at 10.17, he traces the spies to a villa on a Kentish headland whose private staircase to the beach has exactly thirty-nine steps. Over a game of bridge he sees through their disguise and has them arrested; one escapes down the steps, but their yacht, the Ariadne, has already been seized. Seven weeks later war breaks out and Hannay joins the army. Written while Buchan was ill in the first months of the war, the novel was serialized in Blackwood's Magazine and published as a book by William Blackwood and Sons in 1915.

Top Lessons

• Carrying on another man's work

  Hannay has no duty to Scudder beyond four days of hospitality, yet the sight of the dead man's face makes him resolve to finish what Scudder began. Buchan presents courage as an ordinary man's decision to keep faith with someone who trusted him, not as fearlessness.

• Strangers who help

  Almost every stage of Hannay's escape depends on someone who chooses to trust or help a stranger: the milkman, the innkeeper, Sir Harry, Turnbull and the drover Hislop. Turnbull's silent nursing in Chapter VII is the quietest and most generous act in the book.

• Disguise and the inner part

  Hannay learns from an old Rhodesian scout that a disguise works only if a man thinks himself into the part. The same principle explains the enemy's success: the spies at Trafalgar Lodge are dangerous because they have become, for the moment, the comfortable English gentlemen they pretend to be. Recognition finally comes from a small habit that no disguise has erased.

• Reasoning from scraps

  In Chapter IX Hannay works out the meaning of Scudder's note by writing down what he knows, what follows from it, and what can be ruled out, then asks the right expert, a coastguard. Buchan shows careful reasoning winning out where force and luck cannot.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is incidental in this adventure, but a few episodes are concrete. After blowing his way out of the storeroom in Chapter VI, Hannay suffers nausea, giddiness, a swoon and a crushing headache from the explosive fumes, with his shoulder and arm feeling as if struck by palsy. In Chapter VII he recognizes the return of malaria, presumably acquired in Africa, brought out by a wet night; Turnbull puts him to bed in a box-bed and nurses him for the better part of ten days, after which he is out of bed in five days but slow to recover his strength. Turnbull's own hangover after his daughter's wedding in Chapter V, and his sober Sabbath dress afterward, are drawn with comic sympathy. Bullivant's portrait of Scudder as always shivering with fright yet brave is an interesting lay description of chronic anxiety mastered by purpose; it is a character sketch, not a diagnosis.

• Chapter VI

  Hannay escapes the storeroom after the lentonite blast, sick, giddy and half-poisoned by the fumes, and swoons on top of the dovecot.

• Chapter VII

  A bout of malaria lays Hannay low at Turnbull's cottage, and the roadman nurses him for about ten days.

• Chapter V

  Turnbull, still drunk from his daughter's wedding, fears losing his job and gladly lets Hannay take his place.

• Chapter VII

  Bullivant describes Scudder as half crank, half genius, always frightened yet never deterred.