Imagine you’re a runaway bearing important knowledge. Your escape will determine the final fate of the world and the war that will start in a month. Both the police and the German enemy are after you. You trust everyone you can but make clever hideouts and tactics to escape. This was the story of the secret bearer of World War I, and a man determined to deliver this piece of information to the government and defeat the enemy, the Black Stone, at the same time averting the police. One of my favorite scenes in this book, The Thirty-Nine Steps, is the final scene on pages 144 to 146 about the capture of the Black Stone and how Richard Hannay had done it. The author magnificently combines intriguing imagery, taking the smallest details from the earlier parts of the story to create the solving of the mystery, and he finally conveys the term “The Thirty-Nine Steps” to mean more than only the steps that led down to the beach.
To begin with, the intriguing imagery in the final few pages is stunningly cleverly used. An ominous tone is conveyed when Hannay can not yet prove the three men are from the Black Stone: “It couldn’t be acting, it was too confoundedly genuine. My heart went into my boots, and my first impulse was to apologize and clear out.” (Buchan 141). For all three men to be completely, genuinely innocent was too much of a deal. Even the most innocent and naive boy could not have acted themselves so calmly and so gullible. This might not be true itself without the proof, but the average Englishman must have stammered, looked scared, or revealed some tiniest movement that might suggest the smallest chance of them committing the crime. As Hanny kept referencing Peter Pienaar, which told him that acting had to be done in the best intervals, to the best degree, for it to be most genuine. Hannay was still scared in the situation, so it wasn’t until he relaxed at the game of bridge that he was able to associate these three people and their weirdly perfect acting to the murders and pursuers he had in the last month. Buchan cleverly picked a third person limited point of view because in many other parts of the story, Hannay’s ignorance of what was happening due to many emotions contributed a lot to the suspense and the plot line. In this example, though, he makes a logical explanation of why the people were from the Black Stone look sudden but completely backed up with logic and the previous storylines, an extremely stunning achievement. This surprisingly perfect acting was also backed up by the fact that the three’s invitation to Hannay for a game of bridge was merely to put him at ease, to calm him and to make him unknowing of the fact that they were actually the real criminals, but it did exactly the opposite: “My partner was the young dark one. I play a fair hand at bridge, but I must have been rank bad that night. They saw that they had got me puzzled, and that put them more than ever at their ease. I kept looking at their faces, but they conveyed nothing to me. It was not that they looked different; they were different.” (Buchan 143). This was the last second when Peter Pienaar returned to Hannay, the moment when he figured out everything because of the details, the tiniest details in their wording, form, and the specific actions they had done to confound Hannay into thinking that they were not criminals. The use of “different” is peculiarly hard to understand- on the surface, it was just after they had been put at ease since they had puzzled Hannay (or they thought they had), they felt different, and their thoughts and emotions were different. A deeper layer of Buchan’s word choice was that their souls were different, on the surface hand. When Hannay was accusing them of murder, they had remained naive and extremely gullible, unknowing of anything and treating Hannay like a good guest. When they started the game of bridge, though, the threes’ primary focus was to confuse Hannay and Hannay noticed this purpose just in time to figure out that the Black Stone was merely just acting against him. The stunning use of imagery is the first reason why I like this scene in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
In addition, the tiniest details in the earlier part of the book also contributed to Hannay figuring out what evil deeds which man had done. When the old man had captured Hannay, “There was something weird and devilish in those eyes, cold, malignant, unearthly, and most hellishly clever.” (Buchan 82). Interestingly, this hellish cleverness could be directly related to the person’s perfect acting and his cunningness made him the least suspected of all three people. He made perfect excuses, spoke like a total Englishman, and mostly didn’t overact anything, contrary to the other two. The relation between these two old men was something that Hannay couldn’t recall until the game of bridge, due to the old man’s greatest care and cunning. Ronald Reagan once said, “You can tell a lot about a man’s personality by the way he eats jelly beans.” This applies, and Hannay must have seen the old man pour out a little by a little of this hellish cunningness towards the game of bridge, the reason that Hannay kept losing every round even though Hannay himself was a fair player. Additionally, remember Peter Pienaar said that “A man wants to act opposite of what his true personality when he is acting well”? The second man, who could only be described as a good-humored and friendly man, would have been the ruthless murderer if he truly was acting. The third man, as Hannay described, spoke perfect English, but Hannay realized that he should have lisped due to Scudder’s description of him: “I wondered if he was the fellow who had first tracked Scudder, and left his card on him. Scudder had said he lisped, and I could imagine how the adoption of a lisp might add terror.” (Buchan 144). The three opposites of what the three men seemed to be like could coincidentally fit together into the perfect three that would match the Black Stone, however Hannay was too befuddled to recall this quote by Pienaar quick enough to outsmart his enemies. These small details from before would piece together to form the completely accurate description of the Black Stone themselves. Buchan uses this stunning method to make this abrupt knowledge logical and backed up, in the tiniest but most important ways. A couple more important details was the fact that Hannay’s team had already tracked down and occupied the Arianne even though it didn’t seem important. There would be no chance of the enemy escaping by boat- the coast was heavily monitored and guarded by Hannay’s people, and the most evident escape for the Black Stone would be by land. No one except for Hannay’s few people knew that they were actually criminals and it would take a while, at least another day, for the story to get onto the news. This tiny detail 10 pages earlier contributed a ton to the end, when Hannay was captured. If Hannay’s men hadn’t controlled the Aridane, Franz would have gotten away because there wasn’t a chance the pursuer would catch up to such a nimble and limber little man: “‘I hope Franz will bear his triumph well. I ought to tell you that the ARIADNE for the last hour has been in our hands.’”(Buchan 146). This is another stunning example of how the Buchan uses small details into the large plot line. As many people say, “any noun, verb, or adjective that does not play a part in the story itself, even if used for pure elaboration, is unnecessary”, and all of these small details stack up into large triumphs for both Hannay and the Black Stone. The usage of small details to convey the large plot line is another reason why this scene is my favorite in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Finally, the reason why Buchan picked the title The Thirty-Nine Steps would seem ambiguous until this final part of the story. The Thirty-Nine Steps has two shades of meaning- first of all, it itself was the escape for Franz that did not succeed, but there’s more to the thirty-nine steps. Think of the word steps itself: there were thirty-nine steps, precisely thirty-nine steps to the success of Hannay in defeating the Black Stone. Notice these steps aren’t actually part of the plot line but details and thoughts that helped Hannay to his victory. The first step was the mention of the lisp that Scudder told him about. This helped him to identify the plump man as the person who had threatened Scudder and was a crucial part in the book. The second step was the recording of high tide, 10:17 P.M., and the 39 steps from Scudder’s notebook. This helped Hannay’s men locate the hiding place of the Black Stone later on in the book. The third step was the blabbering about Sir Henry and the Free Trade. Remember that Hannay had traced his own roots back to South Africa and all he had done there. The free trade helped Hannay reference Peter Pienaar, which gave him crucial advice to solving the mystery of the Black Stone. The fourth step all the way to the eleventh step were details of his pursuers and the people that he had encountered, including the old man, the railway worker, and Turnbull, which were all actually people who knew about the pursuers, who gave him crucial information and work to be done in order to figure out the final mystery. There were a lot more to these steps, including the phone call, Sir Allda, the capturing of the Arianne, the mysterious naiveness of the three people as mentioned in the second paragraph. The thirty-nine steps were a symbol for the three men too- 39 divided by 3 is 13, and every man had thirteen details, escapes and plans for his own. The thirty-nine steps also represented the great thoughts of the Black Stone which had failed and been overpowered by Hannay’s thirty-nine steps. The thirty-nine steps are wisdom that can change the world, the magnificent details that Hannay had pieced together to capture and recognize the black stone. The title of this book, The Thirty-Nine Steps, earns its true meaning here when the veil is lifted, and all the steps become clear to us and their origin. The utter vividness of these thirty-nine steps used in context in the last conversation is unspeakably beautiful, where every detail adds a piece to the puzzle- the cabin at high tide, the cunningness of the man, the scardiness of Turnbull against the old man and the Black Stone, etc. After reading this part of The Thirty-Nine Steps, you gain an understanding of the true purpose of this novel and why it was so popular, so famous, and was considered the “father of thrillers”. The revealing of the true meaning of the thirty-nine steps is the final reason why the final scene is my favorite in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
In conclusion, my favorite scene from The Thirty-Nine Steps is the final scene where all secrets are revealed. The reasons for this are that the author uses extremely useful word choice and imagery, the smallest details play the greatest role, and the true meaning of the thirty-nine steps is revealed. As a final reminder to everyone, remember the thirty-nine steps and the great amount of help they have given to Hannay, and search for your own thirty-nine steps in your life. Guaranteed, these small details and the things you see in your everyday or dramatic life will someday play a great cause. Remember, the Thirty-Nine Steps.
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