I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.
The narrator is Richard Hannay, recently retired mining engineer whose boredom with the pace of life back home in the British Isles has him on the verge of returning back to the dark continent. Just when things look their bleakest, however, a frightened man shows up with a strange story. Fate walks through the door to deliver Hannay a reprieve from both boredom and the long voyage back to South Africa.
He talked, too, about a Black Stone and a man that lisped in his speech, and he described very particularly somebody that he never referred to without a shudder; an old man with a young voice who could hood his eyes like a hawk.
The “he” referred to here is Franklin Scudder, a private investigator from America. The “Black Stone” is not a stone at all, but rather a sinister organization of spies laying the groundwork for a planned German invasion of England. The man with strange optical abilities is a character best left to discovery by the reader. This single paragraph, however, reveals the skill with which the author slowly builds tension by crafting dramatic elements in advance of their full revelation.
“Thirty-nine steps—I counted them—High tide 10:17 p.m.”
Once Scudder is killed, the only clue that Hannay has to go on to stop the Black Hand from their nefarious plot is a scrawled note of seemingly endless possibilities and bottomless mystery. It is up to Hannay to figure out the meaning of the thirty-nine steps and their relation to the location of a late night high tide.
Three weeks later, as all the world knows, we went to war. I joined the New Army the first week, and owing to my Matabele experience got a captain’s commission straight off.
As any reader of adventure fiction might suspect, Hannay solves the mystery and saves the day and Germany is not overtaken by the Black Hand of Germany. But his story does not actually end here. He would, in fact, reappear just one year later in what many regard as a much better novel than the The Thirty-Nine Steps. In fact, the general critical consensus is that Hannay’s adventures in Greemantle represent the peak of the author’s talent. Nevertheless, Hannay would be a major figure in three more novels as well as showing up in two other books as a minor character.
