The Thirty-Nine Steps

The first of five novels by Buchan featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations, the 39 Steps pits the adventurer against German agents in a tense backdrop of a Europe weeks away from the first world war. The story places him in a desperate game of cat and mouth that will lead Hannay from his Portland Place home to the highlands of Scotland, back to London, and to a sleepy holiday village on the coast...