John Buchan

J'achevais de d jeuner et je bourrais ma pipe lorsqu'on me remit la d p che de Bullivant. Ceci se passait Furling, la grande maison de campagne du Hampshire o j' tais venu terminer ma convalescence, apr s la blessure re ue Loos. Sandy, qui s'y trouvait dans les m mes circonstances que moi, tait, ce moment pr cis, la recherche de la marmelade d'oranges. Je lui jetai le t l gramme qu'il parcourut en sifflant. - Eh bien Dick, vous voil la t te d'un bataillon... moins que vous ne soyez vers dans un tat-major Vous allez devenir un sale embusqu et vous d daignerez les malheureux officiers de troupe Quand je songe votre mani re de traiter les embusqu s autrefois

Los 39 Escalones By John Buchan, Editorial Oneness (Edited by)

De retour d'Afrique du sud, Richard Hannay s'ennuie en Angleterre, et pense repartir mais un locataire de son immeuble, Franklin Scudder, l'en dissuade en lui offrant un travail digne de Sherlock Holmes, et lui donne un carnet contenant une nigme. Scudder est assassin entre temps. Que sont donc ces 39 marches?...

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It first appeared as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form in October that year by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations. John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while he was ill in bed with a duodenal ulcer, an illness which remained with him all his life. The novel was his first "shocker", as he called it - a story combining personal and political dramas. The novel marked a turning point in Buchan's literary career and introduced his adventuring hero, Richard Hannay. He described a "shocker" as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened. Buchan's son, William, later wrote that the name of the book originated when the author's daughter was counting the stairs at a private nursing home in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. "There was a wooden staircase leading down to the beach. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are 39 steps." Some time later the house was demolished and a section of the stairs, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan. The mysterious phrase Thirty-Nine Steps, first mentioned by the character Franklin Scudder, becomes the title of the novel and the solution to its meaning is a thread that runs through the whole story.