Set in 1914, during World War I, «The Thirty-Nine Steps» is a novel by Scottish novelist, historian, biographer John Buchan (1875 – 1940): Richard Hannay, the protagonist and narrator and an expatriate Scot, returns to his new home, a flat in London, after a long stay in Rhodesia to begin a new life. One night he is buttonholed by a stranger, a well-travelled American, who claims to be in fear for his life.
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John Buchan. The Thirty-Nine Steps
CHAPTER ONE – The Man Who Died
CHAPTER TWO – The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels
CHAPTER THREE – The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
CHAPTER FOUR – The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
CHAPTER FIVE – The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
CHAPTER SIX – The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
CHAPTER SEVEN – The Dry-Fly Fisherman
CHAPTER EIGHT – The Coming of the Black Stone
CHAPTER NINE – The Thirty-Nine Steps
CHAPTER TEN – Various Parties Converging on the Sea
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THOMAS ARTHUR NELSON
(LOTHIAN AND BORDER HORSE)
.....
‘No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes detectives and double the police and Constantine would still be a doomed man. My friends are not playing this game for candy. They want a big occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe on it. He’ll be murdered by an Austrian, and there’ll be plenty of evidence to show the connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin. It will all be an infernal lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the world. I’m not talking hot air, my friend. I happen to know every detail of the hellish contrivance, and I can tell you it will be the most finished piece of blackguardism since the Borgias. But it’s not going to come off if there’s a certain man who knows the wheels of the business alive right here in London on the 15th day of June. And that man is going to be your servant, Franklin P. Scudder.’
I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a rat-trap, and there was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he was spinning me a yarn he could act up to it.
