The Thirty-Nine Steps
READING AGE 16+
(1915)
This is the first of Buchan's novels to feature Richard Hannay.
Dedicated To Thomas Arthur Nelson (Lothian and Border Horse); My Dear Tommy, You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the 'dime novel' and which we know as the 'shocker'-the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and was driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and I should like to put your name on it in memory of our long friendship, in the days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts. J.B.
Unfold
A pink and blue June morning found me at Bradgate looking from the Griffin Hotel over a smooth sea to the lightship on the c**k sands which seemed the size of a bell-buoy. A couple of miles farther south and much nearer the shore a small destroyer was anchored. Scaife, MacGillivray's man, who had been in the Navy, knew the boat, and told me her……
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