Spy Masters combines two classic cloak and dagger thrillers, Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and John Buchan's "The Thirty-Nine Steps". In The Secret Agent we find London, turn-of-the-century. Quiet, but not peaceful. A cadre of revolutionaries is busily at work. At the center, unsuspected, lurks a secret agent. It's his job to trick the radicals into some brainless violence. In The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), the best-known of John Buchan's thrillers (made into a popular movie by Alfred Hitchcock), the author introduces his most enduring hero, Richard Hannay, who, despite claiming to be an "ordinary fellow," is caught up in the dramatic and dangerous race against a plot to devastate the British war effort.