Amazon.com description: Product Description: One of the first espionage novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps immerses the reader in the tensions of early 1914, that fraught period with Europe on the very brink of war. Richard Hannay, an Englishman newly returned from Rhodesia, is cast into a cauldron of intrigue and danger: framed for the murder of a freelance spy, Hannay is hunted across England and through the wilds of Scotland by both the British Police and 'The Black Stone', a shadowy German spy ring that will stop at nothing to retrieve a notebook containing their plans for the downfall of the British Empire.