Showing results for title "The Thirty-Nine Steps", by author "John Buchan" in Espionage

Perhaps more than any other book The Thirty-Nine Steps has set the pattern for the story of the chase for a wanted man. And, of the many writers who have attempted this kind of thing since Buchan, only a very few, like Graham Greene, have managed to sustain the tension in the same way. The story's extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name.

Richard Hannay, Buchan's hero in this 1915 thriller, stumbles across a dark plot to attack England by the German Reich (of World War I vintage) but has to flee when his discovery becomes known. He then engages in several hot pursuits and narrow, if theatrical, escapes, but all's well that ends well.

Richard Hannay is bored—until his neighbor shows up with a wild story of espionage, an impending war, and a mysterious organization called the 39 Steps. Hours later, the man is dead, and Hannay is the prime suspect. Framed for murder and hunted by both the police and a deadly network of spies, Hannay races across the Scottish countryside, decoding clues, dodging capture, and trying to stop a conspiracy that threatens the fate of Britain itself. Fast-paced, sharp, and endlessly gripping, The 39 Steps is the original man-on-the-run thriller—a template for everything from Hitchcock to Bond.

The Thirty-Nine Steps begins John Buchan’s series of spy novels featuring adventurer Richard Hannay. Having just returned from South Africa, he finds life dull until a mysterious American tells him about an assassination plot before being murdered in Hannay’s London flat.

John Buchan takes us back to Edwardian Britain on the eve of the First World War in the modern thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. An inexplicable murder drives the innocent Richard Hannay, on the run from a manhunt that never seems to end, to hide in remote Scottish moorland. Disguise and deception are his only weapons, as he struggles to decode the clues left by the murdered man to prevent the theft of naval secrets by an unfriendly foreign power.

As war looms in Europe, Richard Hannay returns from Rhodesia to his home in London. His neighbor, an American freelance spy named Franklin Scudder, claims to know of an assassination plot to destabilize Europe. When Hannay finds Scudder dead in his flat, he is drawn into a fast-paced labyrinthine adventure that takes him from the hills of Scotland to an unassuming location by the sea.

May 1914: Europe is on the brink of war. London is riddled with spies. Richard Hannay has just returned from Rhosesia, and intends to begin a new, quiet, sedentary life. But a shady man named Franklin Scudder calls on him for help. Scudder is a freelance spy who has just uncovered a German plot to murder the Greek Premier, thus forcing Europe into war. He is the only man living to have penetrated into the ring of German spies who call themselves the Black Stone. Scudder tells Hannay all he knows. The next day, Scudder is murdered in Hannay's apartment.

John Buchan himself stated that he set out to write a book in the style of the ubiquitous American “Dime Novel”. What he actually succeeded in creating was a relatively unique and new genre for British literature, the Spy Novel. Those thrilling elements of the fleeing innocent man hunted through the wilds by sinister and undefined dark forces have been explored countless times in books and on screen ever since.

Richard Hannay lleva tres meses aburriéndose en Londres. Antes vivía en Sudáfrica donde tenía una vida mucho más activa interesante. Cuando ya está planteando la posibilidad de irse algún otro sitio, un buen día, al volver a casa por la noche un vecino le está esperando y de forma un tanto misteriosa le comenta que tiene algo importante que contarle. El extraño le va a contar a Hannay toda una trama de espionaje y conspiración, muy enrevesada que supuestamente desembocará en una guerra que involucrará a Alemania y a Rusia.