Ergebnis für "The Thirty-Nine Steps" in Spionage

John Buchan takes us back to Edwardian Britain on the eve of the First World War in the modern thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. An inexplicable murder drives the innocent Richard Hannay, on the run from a manhunt that never seems to end, to hide in remote Scottish moorland. Disguise and deception are his only weapons, as he struggles to decode the clues left by the murdered man to prevent the theft of naval secrets by an unfriendly foreign power.

Perhaps more than any other book The Thirty-Nine Steps has set the pattern for the story of the chase for a wanted man. And, of the many writers who have attempted this kind of thing since Buchan, only a very few, like Graham Greene, have managed to sustain the tension in the same way. The story's extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name.

Richard Hannay is an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances. A bored expatriate returning to London, he finds his life upended when a mysterious American stumbles into his flat with a terrifying secret—a secret so dangerous that men are willing to kill for it. When the man is murdered, Hannay becomes the prime suspect, forcing him to flee for his life. Pursued by both the police and a shadowy network of spies, he races across the rugged landscapes of Scotland, deciphering cryptic clues and dodging deadly enemies.

John Buchan himself stated that he set out to write a book in the style of the ubiquitous American “Dime Novel”. What he actually succeeded in creating was a relatively unique and new genre for British literature, the Spy Novel. Those thrilling elements of the fleeing innocent man hunted through the wilds by sinister and undefined dark forces have been explored countless times in books and on screen ever since.