Feeling now bestowed with the responsibility to foil the plot, as well as in mortal danger himself, Hannay takes up Scudder's encoded little notebook and escapes his apartment under watch by the plotters by disguising himself as the milkman the next early morning.Īrriving just in time at St. Nonetheless, Hannay finds Scudder murdered in his flat a few days later. Police discover the fake suicide, but suspect nothing. Hannay, convinced of his honesty, lets Scudder hide in his flat. Scudder claims to be following a ring of German spies called the Black Stone who are trying to steal Britain's naval defense plans for the outbreak of war and are also after him. Scudder, is a freelance spy, and reveals that he has faked his own death with a corpse in his flat. The man appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, beginning with a plan to assassinate the Greek Premier, Constantine Karolides, during his forthcoming visit to London on the forthcoming 15 June. One night, his neighbour, an American who claims to be in fear for his life, asks if Hannay can let him in. In late May 1914, when World War I is imminent in Europe, Richard Hannay returns home to London after having lived and worked in Rhodesia as a mining engineer. 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. It marked a turning point in Buchan's literary career and introduced his adventuring hero Richard Hannay. The novel was his first " shocker", as he called it-a story combining personal and political dramas. They were replaced by concrete, and this set, now numbering 108, still runs from the garden to the beach.
When the original steps were later replaced, one of them, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are 39 steps." There were actually 78, but he halved the number to make a better title. "There was a wooden staircase leading down to the beach.
Buchan's son William later wrote that the name of the book originated when the author's daughter was counting the stairs at St Cuby, a private nursing home on Cliff Promenade in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. 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 Thirty-Nine Steps first appeared in All-Story Weekly magazine of 5 and 12 June 1915
0 kommentar(er)
