The Novel That Invented the Modern Thriller
When Richard Hannay discovers a murdered spy in his London flat, he becomes the most wanted man in Britain. He is hunted by police as a killer and by German agents as a dangerous witness. His only chance: flee to Scotland, crack the dead man’s coded notebook, and expose an international conspiracy before war erupts across Europe.
John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, was published in October 1915 just months into the First World War. It established virtually every convention of modern spy fiction. The innocent man wrongly accused. The desperate flight across hostile terrain. The cryptic clue that must be deciphered. The race against time to prevent catastrophe. The climactic confrontation where nothing is as it seems.
Alfred Hitchcock called it “the best source material I ever had” and adapted it into one of cinema’s greatest thrillers. Ian Fleming acknowledged that without Buchan’s Richard Hannay, there would be no James Bond. Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré all credited Buchan with inventing their genre. Every modern thriller featuring an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary danger from North by Northwest to The Bourne Identity descends from this breathless adventure.
But Hannay is no polished gentleman spy. He’s a colonial mining engineer, rough-edged and practical, uncomfortable in London drawing rooms but supremely capable on wild Scottish moorland. Buchan created a new kind of hero. The resourceful outsider whose frontier skills prove surprisingly relevant to modern espionage. In doing so John Buchan changed thriller fiction forever.
This Pete Sumner Edition provides
Major essays on spy fiction’s origins, pre-WWI espionage, Buchan’s South African experience, Scottish landscape, intelligence tradecraft, Hitchcock’s adaptation, and the novel’s prescient depiction of Europe on the brink. Complete with chapter-by-chapter annotations to explain historical references, decode Scottish dialect, and provide the context that transforms a thrilling read into a fully understood classic.
Experience the novel that started it all—in the edition it deserves.
PETE SUMNER EDITION: Literary Archaeology for the Modern Reader