The Thirty-nine Steps - Audiolibro Gratis

John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is a short adventure thriller first serialised in Blackwood's Magazine and published as a book in 1915. Set in the tense weeks before the First World War, it introduced Richard Hannay, a mining engineer recently back in London from southern Africa, who would return in four more of Buchan's novels.

Bored with city life, Hannay is drawn into danger when a nervous neighbour named Scudder confides that he has uncovered a conspiracy against Britain. When Scudder is found dead in Hannay's flat, Hannay becomes both a murder suspect for the police and a target for the conspirators. He escapes north to the moors and hills of Scotland, carrying Scudder's coded notebook and a puzzling reference to "thirty-nine steps," and must keep moving, adopting disguises and improvising his way out of traps while he works out what the plot is and whom he can trust.

The book helped shape the modern chase thriller: an ordinary, resourceful man pursued across open country by enemies he cannot always identify. Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film made the story widely known, though it changes much of the plot. Readers who enjoy brisk espionage stories, wartime fiction or Scottish landscapes will find the original quick, vivid and full of incident.