The Thirty-Nine Steps

by John Buchan, 1stworld Library (Editor)

Overview

A young mining engineer must elude both foreign agents and British authorities to save his own life and expose a plot with catastrophic implications for Britain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421823935
Publisher:	1st World Library
Publication date:	11/02/2006
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

John Buchan was born in Perth in 1875, the son of a Church of Scotland Minister. After being educated locally, he attended Glasgow University and Brasenose College Oxford. He exchanged comparative poverty for affluence by his success as an author, but it was as a lawyer that his reputation began. He went to South Africa to serve as private secretary to the British Colonial administrator, Alfred, Lord Milner and assisted in reconstruction of the country after the Boer War. He entered publishing in 1906 as partner in the firm of his friend Thomas Nelson and married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, cousin of the Duke of Westminster, in 1907. They had four children. Buchan was elected to Parliament in 1911, served in various capacities during the First World War, including writing speeches for Sir Douglas Haig and taking on the role of Director of Information under Lord Beaverbrook. He returned to the House of Commons in 1927 and then in 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada and became Lord Tweedsmuir. He died in 1940. John Buchan was a prolific author and wrote poetry and biographies as well as novels, but he is still best remembered for his adventure stories and in particular the five Hannay novels: The Thirty Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages, and The Island of Sheep.

Table of Contents

I The Man Who Died
II The Milkman Sets Out on His Travels
III The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
IV The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
V The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
VI The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
VII The Dry-Fly Fisherman
VIII The Coming of the Black Stone
IX The Thirty-Nine Steps
X Various Partied Converging on the Sea

Editorial Reviews

Frederick Davidson’s voice is properly sardonic, and his supercilious British articulation is just right. The story’s extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same name.”

AudioFile

Buchan’s technique as a writer is simple enough and well displayed in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He understood that in a thriller…what matters above all is to keep the reader focused on what is going to happen next…It doesn’t matter that the reader has no clue where he is being taken or, when he gets there, how the thing happened as it did. All that matters is that once you’ve started, you can’t put the book down.”

Telegraph (London)

It is the dimension of the mysterious that makes Buchan’s writing so unfailingly compelling.”

author of A History of Warfare John Keegan

It is just the kind of fiction for here. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.”

An officer on the front in World War I

"Lethal, spare, clean and contemporary." —Guardian

From the Publisher