John Buchan "The Thirty-Nine Steps"
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John Buchan
As Richard Hannay walks home to his flat in London, he is feeling bored. Nothing exciting ever seems to happen in England, he thinks. Perhaps he’ll go back to Africa. But that night he has a visitor, a man called Scudder, who has a strange story to tell.
A week later Hannay is lying, hungry and exhausted, in the heather on a Scottish moor. Above him a small plane circles in the blue sky, flying low. Hannay lies still, hoping desperately that the plane will not see him, and thinks about Scudder’s little black notebook in his pocket. Who are the people chasing him - the mysterious ‘Black Stone’ that Scudder writes about? What is so important about ‘the thirty-nine steps’? And what is going to happen in London on the 15th of June?
But Scudder has been murdered, and Hannay must find his own answers, while his enemies chase him night and day through the hills of Scotland. If they catch him, they will kill him...
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Text Analysis: Unique words: about 1,400. Total words: about 17,280
Hard words: ally, biscuit, candidate, carriage, clue, code, crawl, direction, disguise, election, evidence, evil, explosive, fuse, government, harbor, hawk, heap, heather, hedge, hood, lisp, malaria, milkman, moor, navy, nervous, officer, path, point, politics, Prime Minister, relaxed, risk, rude, Scotland Yard, servant, shave, shutter, stream, submarine, telescope, tide, timetable, tobacco jar, tower, trust, whistle, wine, wire, yacht
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