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Adventurer Richard Hannay has just returned from South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his London life - until a murder is committed in his flat, just days after the victim had warned him of an assassination plot that could bring Britain to the brink of war. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland, where he must use all his wits to stay one step ahead of the game - and warn the government before it is too late. One of the most popular adventure stories ever written, "The Thirty-Nine Steps" established John Buchan as the original thriller writer and inspired many other novelists and filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock.

John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield (1875-1940) Scottish historian, Governor General of Canada, Commander-in-Chief of the Dominion of Canada and author of the infamous thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. (1915)

John Buchan was born at York Place, Perth, Scotland on 26 August 1875 and grew up in the mining town of Pathhead, Fife. He was the eldest son of John Buchan (1847–1911) a jovial and fun-loving Free Church of Scotland minister, and Helen née Masterson, (1857–1937) both of whom would later provide fodder for his fictional characters. Among John's siblings William, Walter and Alistair, his sister Anna Buchan (b.1877) would become the novelist O. Douglas.

Young John's childhood was brightened by his father's love of singing Scots border ballads and playing instruments along with daily family prayers. He would teach all his children the legends and history of Scotland. On the Fife coast, their big grey manse house was surrounded by a railway, a coal-pit and a bleaching works and further away woods to play in. In contrast to his mother's harsh Calvinistic sense of respectability, Buchan's Uncle Willie (d. 1906) would encourage and inspire him in creativity and pursuits beyond his forebears'. At the age of five, Buchan was run over by a carriage, whereupon he lay in bed for the better part of a year and which would leave permanent scars on his otherwise striking features. Summer holidays were spent in the southern sunny Borders region with his maternal grandparents, sheep farmers for many generations, where young John explored the glens, hunted for birds and their eggs, fished for trout in the rivers and met the local people. Daytime revolved around jaunts into the surrounding woods, which Paul Bunyan himself had claimed, and the magic of fairytales told by his father added to the enchantment. These idyllic childhood memories would also provide much basis for his future writings. The concept of a Calvinistic Devil didn't torment Buchan as a child because "The fatal influence of Robert Burns made me regard him as a rather humorous and jovial figure; nay more, as something of a sportsman, dashing and debonair." An avid reader, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was a "constant companion" for John.

Buchan did not follow a conventional schooling due to the family's financial constraints. He first attended a dame's school, where he learned to knit, but because of his spilling a pot of broth was promptly expelled. He entered grammar school in 1888, then went on to Glasgow University on scholarship at the age of seventeen, where he studied the classics, wrote poetry and published essays in the Glasgow University Magazine to defray his costs of tuition. Buchan saw his first publication, The Essays and Apothegms of Francis Lord Bacon in 1894. A year later Buchan, the patriotic Scotsman would go to England, the "sinister and fascinating land" to attend Brasenose College, Oxford University to study law. His then misunderstandings and hesitancy about entering the country caused him some period of adjustment. "I felt that I had been pitch forked into a kindergarten. . . I must have been at that time an intolerable prig." But these worries were soon quelled, as the homey and comforting lodgings, the noble grounds and buildings of the ancient institution appealed to his sensibilities and claimed his heart forever.