The Thirty-Nine Steps

A bored colonial gets a dead man in his flat and a notebook in cipher, and spends the next three weeks being hunted across Scotland by both the police and the people who did it. Buchan wrote it in bed during an illness in 1914 and invented the modern chase thriller in about forty thousand words. He called such books shockers and was not apologising. A hundred plates of Edwardian and Georgian portraiture, from Philip de László to William Orpen, catch the faces and formal interiors of the world Hannay flees.