Richard Hannay

The Thirty-Nine Steps is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of tricky situations. In late May 1914, when World War I is imminent in Europe, Richard Hannay returns home to London after having lived and worked in Rhodesia as a mining engineer. One night, his neighbour, Franklin P. Scudder, an American who claims to be in fear for his life, asks if Hannay can let him in. The man appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, beginning with a plan to assassinate the Greek Premier, Constantine Karolides, during his forthcoming visit to London on the forthcoming 15th June. Scudder, a freelance spy, faked his own death with a corpse in his flat. He claims to be following a ring of German spies called the Black Stone who are trying to steal Britain’s naval defense plans for the outbreak of war and are also after him. Hannay, convinced of his honesty, lets Scudder hide in his flat. Police discover the fake suicide, but suspect nothing. Nonetheless, Hannay finds Scudder murdered in his flat a few days later. Feeling now bestowed with the responsibility to foil the plot, as well as in mortal danger himself, Hannay takes up Scudder’s encoded little notebook and escapes his apartment under watch by the plotters by disguising himself as the milkman the next early morning. Arriving just in time at King’s Cross Station, Hannay takes a train. The novel follows Hannay on the run, at an inn in Scotland, in a stolen car, at an election meeting, and in the countryside, as the search posse closes in. He finds a cottage and enters, desperate for cover, and the occupant calmly welcomes him. Unfortunately, the man turns out to be Hannay’s very enemy, the spy ring’s chief. After a brief interrogation where Hannay plays fool, he locks him into a storage room. The room in which Hannay is locked appears to contain bomb-making materials, which he uses to break out of the cottage. Badly shaken by the explosion and intoxicated by the fumes, he crawls to the top of a building nearby where he waits until dawn while everyone has gone to look for him, then runs off at night, narrowly escaping a few traps around the property. After another section on the run, Hannay returns to London, clears his name in Scudder’s murder at Scotland Yard, but gets into an altercation and comes across one of his pursuers posing as an official. Desperate to stop the imposter from escaping with the secret information, Hannay and the other officials comb Scudder’s notebook. They reason that the phrase “the thirty-nine steps,” along with the date and tidal information (high tide at 10:17 PM), must indicate the location of the escape point for the conspirators. They find an area near the shore with several sets of steps, one of them having 39, and an anchored yacht nearby. They eventually identify the saboteurs. The United Kingdom enters World War I three weeks later, its secret naval defense plans intact, and Hannay commissioned captain.