| Ubicación : | 823.912/B948t | | Autores: | Buchan, John, Autor | | TÃtulo : | The thirty-nine steps| Fuente : | United States of America [US] : Dover Publications, 1994, 88 p. | | Temas : | ENGLISH NOVEL, FICTION NOVEL | | Resumen : | The novel introduces us to Richard Hannay, a Scots mining engineer who has lived in South Africa since the age of six. Now 37, he has returned to what is notionally his homeland but feels ill-suited to life in London and has come to hate it. He vows to give the capital one more day to give him something interesting to do before he abandons it for the colonies, never to return.
It is that day that he meets Franklin P Scudder. Scudder intercepts Hannay at his front door, and Hannay recognizes the nervous, voluble man as his upstairs neighbor. Scudder tells Hannay that he’s a freelance spy, that he’s been digging into the “subterranean” networks of powerful people manipulating Europe and the world, that he’s dug deep, that he’s dug too deep. He has intelligence of vital importance and a looming deadline—June 15, the day only a few weeks hence when an organization called the Black Stone will assassinate a crucial European leader during his visit to London, pin the blame on a rival power, and drive all sides into war.
Hannay finds himself liking Scudder but still treats his claims with polite skepticism. He allows Scudder to lie low in his flat for a few days and carries on with his own business, right up until the night he comes home from dinner to find Scudder dead: “a long knife through his heart . . . skewered him to the floor.”
Scudder’s murder presents Hannay with a quandary: at least some of what Scudder had told him has turned out to be true, and the powerful people Scudder feared have proven powerful enough to find Scudder at Hannay’s flat, and it is the clear intent of whomever killed Scudder to frame him for the murder. Hannay flees.
But before he flees, embarking upon weeks of adventure, he finds Scudder’s encrypted notebook hidden in his tobacco jar. If this notebook was important enough to get Scudder killed, it’s important enough for Hannay to preserve. So he goes to ground in Scotland, the place in the British Isles still wild and empty enough to give him, with his decades of frontier experience and veld-craft, some kind of advantage over his pursuers. And Hannay is pursued—by the police, by locals, by a foppish old acquaintance from whom he steals a car, and by mysterious men who speak perfect English but confer among themselves in German.
What else is coming? How can he prove that he didn’t murder Scudder? What will happen on June 15? What do the coded messages in Scudder’s notebook mean? What else did Scudder discover that was so dangerous? And what can Hannay do about it?...leer masleer menos | |
|
Refinar búsqueda Consulta a fuentes externasThe thirty-nine steps / Buchan, John
