Essay Questions

What are the thirty-nine steps and what is their relevance?

The title turns out to be, not terribly surprisingly, a reference to actual steps. The significance of the steps is their initial presence as a vague, coded entry in a notebook which private investigator Scudder leaves in the hands of the protagonist, Richard Hannay. Hannay is continually frustrated by his inability to decipher “one queer phrase which occurred half a dozen times inside brackets. (`Thirty-nine steps’) was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran—(`Thirty-nine steps, I counted them—high tide 10.17 p.m.’).” Hannay manages to decipher the meaning of the last part of the code as meaning that the German spies would meeting at “some place where high tide was at 10.17 p.m.” and then proceeds to narrow down the location to certain stretch of coastal England. All that needs to be done is locate such a place that has exactly thirty-nine steps and the search finally brings them Trafalgar House which meets all the considerations except one: there are no Germans, just some British gentlemen who seem incapable of being spies. But it is the only house with exactly thirty-nine steps, so…

What is the original motivation for Hannay to pursue Scudder’s investigation?

Although the plot twists wildly to send Hannay into various episodes which increase the danger to his life and bring about more threats he must avoid and additional information he must pursue, he sets off on his adventure to accomplish just one primary goal. The leader of Greece, Constantine Karolides, is scheduled to come to London on June 15. His presence as the strongest leader in Europe has been putting a dent in plans of a secret group called the Black Stone to manipulate a war between England and Germany. After Scudder dies, Hannay takes it upon himself to go into hiding until the 15th and then stop the assassination from taking place at the last minute since he can’t trust government officials who may be in on the plot.

The novel has been attacked as anti-Semitic by some. What would prompt this charge and how is it countered by the text?

When Scudder is laying out the template of the plans to manipulate war in Europe, he makes some quite disparaging remarks commonly considered anti-Semitic in nature. Behind all the anarchists and capitalists with a common interest in provoking war—but for different reasons—sits, though sometimes so hidden as to be almost impossible to get to, “a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake.” The rationale behind the Jewish presence is the conspiracy is their desire to bring Russia into the war as moral restitution for the pogroms and the persecution. Scudder sums up the broad outline by concluding that it is the Jewish banker “who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.” Is Scudder really anti-Semitic or is he just presenting the case from the perspective of the bad guys to Hannay? Later on, Hannay will conclude that Scudder’s story was dramatized for effect to a certain point and that it was clear that told the story with certain biases imprinted within it: “Jews, for example, made him see red.” Hannay himself—the protagonist of the story and as such the most likely alter ego of the author’s mindset—never expresses such anti-Semitic prejudice which seemingly counteracts any accusations not attributable to one single fictional character within it.