The Thirty-Nine Steps
A man comes home to find a dead body in his flat and a notebook full of coded warnings, and within a day he is on a train to Scotland with both the police and a spy ring behind him. Buchan wrote the novel in a few weeks and it invented the modern chase thriller.
The plot is implausible and the pace is the point. Buchan's politics are visible, and some of the assumptions about class and empire have aged badly. But the structure, a civilian on the run using his wits in a landscape he knows, has been copied ever since. Read it in an afternoon.
Public-domain status
First published in 1915. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; John Buchan died in 1940, so this work has been free to republish there since 2011.
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