"I returned to the City about three o‘clock on that Monday afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. " So opens John Buchans The Thirty-Nine Steps and with it he creates a whole new genre: the adventure novel. Richard Hannay, the protagonist, finds himself reluctantly drawn into a chain of events that drags him away from the civilisation of London and into the Scottish wilderness, where he is chased both by villains and by policemen.