Overview

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while he was ill in bed with a duodenal ulcer, an illness which remained with him all his life. The novel was his first shocker , as he called it - a story combining personal and political dramas. The novel marked a turning point in Buchan's literary career and introduced his adventuring hero, Richard Hannay. He described a shocker as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened. Buchan's son, William, later wrote that the name of the book originated when the author's daughter was counting the stairs at a private nursing home in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. There was a wooden staircase leading down to the beach. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are 39 steps. Some time later the house was demolished and a section of the stairs, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan.[3] The mysterious phrase Thirty-Nine Steps, first mentioned by the character Franklin Scudder, becomes the title of the novel and the solution to its meaning is a thread that runs through the whole story.

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