The Thirty-Nine Steps

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure spy novel by John Buchan written in 1914. Told from the first-person point of view, it relates the adventure of "ordinary fellow" Richard Hannay, who is thrust into a plot involving the theft of crucial military intelligence by German anarchists. Richard Hannay's ordinary life is shattered when he receives a frantic visitor, Scudder, who tells Hannay of a sinister plot by anarchists to assassinate the Greek Premier.