The Runagates Club came out in 1928, a collection of previously published short stories reframed as after-dinner stories told in a London dining club of close male friends. This clubland setting is the habitat of John Buchan’s leading protagonists Edward Leithen and Richard Hannay and reinforces their social and political values in a fantasy of post-First World War gentlemanly conviviality.
Buchan’s reputation as an author was based on The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916), and The Runagates Club was a continuation of this particular kind of masculine adventure that combined Edwardian and Victorian values in a modern post-war world. The club is Buchan’s affirmation of masculine fellowship and common values. In this world women are all but irrelevant, as are families and children. In contrast, scholarly knowledge and military service have moulded the men’s characters. Within the framework of the club’s history – Lord Lamancha adopts the name of the club from Psalm 68: ‘He letteth the runagates continue in scarceness’, because their dinners were at first ‘execrable’ – the entertainingly nonconformist nature of the men’s adventures reinforces their association as ‘runagates’, vagabonds and wanderers who do not follow the crowd.
The stories’ themes thus contrast with the social assurance of the club setting, and the characters’ secure positions in their world. A further contrast to this deeply felt security is embedded in each story: the dominant emotion evoked in all of them is fear.
‘The Green Wildebeest’
Buchan was a canny marketer of his own product, and this Hannay adventure from 1927 – the only time Hannay appears in a short story – was a strong opener to ensure good sales for the book. With ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ (1910) and Prester John (1910), ‘The Green Wildebeest’ represents Buchan’s African sub-canon, creative expressions from his South African experience as an imperial civil servant reallocating farmland after the Boer War.
One of the least palatable aspects of Buchan’s writing for today’s readers is how his characters make value judgements based on ‘breeding’ and race. In this story, Hannay is adamant that the re-emergence of ‘the aboriginal sap’ of genetic and cultural background makes some people more susceptible to ‘atavistic fears’ than others.
Buchan’s description of the bush setting relies on natural characteristics to suggest eeriness. Things become strange as Hannay’s party nears the great cliff where the priest’s sanctuary sits. Inside the sanctuary the lack of animal life and the silent water welling up from below the surface of the sacred pool is unnerving. This state of mind is encouraged by the stone parapet around the spring, built by a far older civilisation than the wooden huts in the kraal. It is evidence that power and knowledge inhabited this area long before the arrival of whites, which Hannay finds as alarming as the strange events that happen around the shrine.
‘The Frying-Pan and the Fire’
This 1928 story is an upper-class game of orienteering under pressure. Burminster, the quarry, becomes a hunted man in reality and has to fend for himself with few resources. He rises to the challenge by hiding in plain sight, using disguises and confusing his pursuers, a classic Buchan trope from many of his earlier novels. But in this story Burminster is acting out the theory to demonstrate how things can go wrong. He is not in danger of his life, as earlier characters would have been in the same situation, but he can’t reveal his identity without catastrophic social exposure. As such, rather than being a tense life and death thriller, the plot of this story draws heavily on Buchan’s wonderful poaching romp John Macnab (1925), in which the same dilemma of social exposure threatens the characters.
The tone throughout is comic, putting this non-serious character through hubristic experiences designed to shake his self-confidence. The pacing, sentence rhythms and preposterous situations also create comedy, showing how the man of high estate is plunged into low company, which he rather likes, for a short time. But when he realises that he has no money, and is unexpectedly on the run from the police, he is turned temporarily into a man of low estate, a very neat reversal of fortune for a character who represents landownership and Conservative political privilege.
‘Dr Lartius’
‘Dr Lartius’, a 1919 thriller based on wartime disguise, is likely to have been drawn from Buchan’s work as Director of Information in the First World War when he directed and controlled British propaganda aimed at the Home Front and at enemy and occupied populations.
We first observe this British secret agent at work in London, from where he is deported as an undesirable alien to gain him credibility with the Germans. He moves to Munich to continue his work as a superior fortune-teller to the intellectuals and upper classes. He sows doubt about the virtue of war and encourages the desire for peace among the rich and dilettante who come to visit him as a new fashionable thought leader. He is unable, however, to dissemble to those who come to him to ask for news of their missing sons in the army. The sayings of the ‘Wise Doctor’ go viral, producing pervasive propaganda to demoralise the German population and make them demand peace even if it is not their victory. His escape back to the Allied side of the frontier is a classic Buchan adventure in its economy of narrative and telling descriptive details.
‘The Wind in the Portico’
Henry Nightingale reads aloud to the club the story of his encounter with Dubellay, the owner of an obscure Latin manuscript, and his obsession with the proper offerings to make to a god. By establishing the plot of the pursuit of scholarly knowledge Buchan makes the description of what should be an intellectual exercise into a terrifying encounter with a legend.
The scholarly perspective helps the reader understand the dangerous inadequacies in Dubellay’s learning and anticipates his vulnerability before the wrath of a god. Buchan’s supernatural writing tended to follow a pattern of foreshadowing, encounter, human resistance and then the revenge of the uncanny influence, and the structure of this 1928 story maps onto that of ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ of eighteen years earlier.
Nightingale’s role in the story is to offer rationality to the reader. Buchan heightens the story’s uncanniness by juxtaposing the strangenesses against Nightingale’s rather desperate rational hypotheses. When Dubellay cautiously asks him for a translation of a deconsecration ritual Nightingale still refuses to accept what the reader has long suspected, and thus his reaction to the god’s revenge is described by fresh eyes exposed to horror.
‘“Divus” Johnston’
The opening anecdotes about Gandhi and Lenin in the Runagates version of this 1913 story bring the original up to date, since Lenin had died in 1924. It is a brief yarn with comic details, with a political nip in its tail. Johnston is a shipwrecked sailor who becomes a temporary god to the people of a South Sea island, and the point of the story is his rescue and retirement to a sedate Glasgow suburb on the lucrative proceeds of inadvertent godhead, derived from looted treasure from the island.
Johnston funds foreign missions and the building of churches, but is wary when adopted by the Liberal Party as their constituency candidate, ‘for how could the Party of Progress have any confidence in a man if they heard he had once been a god?’ This dig at the Liberals is typical of Buchan: he does it in all his political fiction. The fear embedded in this story, of social exposure through accusations of moral degeneracy, is thus neatly associated with Liberal woolliness.
‘The Loathly Opposite’
In this 1927 story set during the First World War, Channell the code-breaker harbours fantasies about his German opponent, code-named ‘Reinmar’, imagining her to be ‘a she-devil, young and beautiful, with a much-painted white face, and eyes like a cobra’s’. Given that Hannay had talked excitedly about Buchan’s most famous female villain Hilda von Einem in similar terms in Greenmantle (1916), Buchan is probably laughing at his earlier sensational excesses.
As with ‘Dr Lartius’ and Greenmantle (1916), ‘The Loathly Opposite’ is sympathetic to the sufferings of the German people in the later years of the war. Embedded in the plot of this story is the tragedy of children dying when wartime malnutrition prevents them surviving otherwise preventable disease.
‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’
This 1928 story has unexpectedly strong potential for a mischievous false reading, beginning with the epigraph (‘anonymous desires and pleasures’), compounded by the magazine’s subtitle in its original publication: ‘Sir Edward Leithen tells the tale of a Romantic Hour with a Reckless President’. But although Leithen the bachelor lawyer takes a walk at night through a poorly lit Hyde Park, offers money to a strange young man, and invites the man back to his rooms, where the man immediately takes off his (wet) clothes to participate in the rest of the story in his underwear, this is merely the set-up for a classic Buchan coincidence. Leithen believes he is offering charity on a wet night to a tramp, but the young man in rags is President Pelem, on the run from assassins. He remembers Leithen from a Harrow cricket match in which they both played, and had discarded his clothes to fight his anticipated assassins unencumbered (admittedly, this last details strains the reader’s acceptance).
Leithen and Pelem are natural friends and allies. They’ve met in the same social circles, which guarantees Pelem’s social and moral credentials. The multiple coincidences in the plot are to be enjoyed as a demonstration of storytelling insouciance, much as an excess of puns will transcend the initial effect of wit to produce admiration for the technique. By demonstrating that Pelem is part of Leithen’s world Buchan reiterates the social closeness and inherent loyalty among its privileged population.
‘Ship to Tarshish’
Subtitled ‘The Story of a Struggle’, this 1927 story of a failure of nerve and obsessive redemption is set just before the Depression. Jim Hallward runs away from a financial crash, struggles to survive in Canada as a logger, and returns to face life in a business world that he doesn’t like or understand. Pride and apparent hereditary grit keep him going, as well as the strong sense of personal responsibility that is the sign of a gentleman in Buchan’s world.
The arenas in which Jim has had to fight his demons are boarding-houses in Canadian cities and towns, living hand-to-mouth, struggling to maintain basic standards in clothes, and the inexorable slide into degradation and poverty. Buchan’s readers are shown the fear of slipping past that line, and the mechanisms by which such ill fortune happens, and could happen to anyone.
‘Skule Skerry’
Hurrell the ornithologist tells this 1928 story of seemingly paranormal experiences from his younger days, one of Buchan’s most accomplished tales. It is truly unnerving as it depends on suggestion and the responses from the reader’s imagination — a truly limitless field of possibilities.
He begins by suggesting extremes, a tiny bird flying vast distances, which could induce a feeling of mental vertigo. He develops this theme with a suggestion from his short story ‘Space’ (1911), that postulates invisible corridors across land and sea that are imperceptible to humans but not to animals. Embedded in this rather esoteric discussion is a key phrase: ‘I was walking very near the boundaries of the things we are not allowed to know’. Buchan then performs a familiar trick of injecting highly abstruse knowledge into his story. As well as reading the works of the early medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen, Hurrell has taught himself Icelandic so that he will be able to read the Norse Sagas. Thus ancient texts becomes treasure maps, to the treasures of the mind as well as of experience. Latin is also used to plant a hint: the island is the location of ‘the Abyss’. This is a warning of Miltonic foreboding, and Hurrell seems to sense this when his mind connects the words — island, abyss, hell — to arrive at ‘the grave’. However, as a scientist, he ignores everything but rational explanations.
Hurrell looks for the forgotten offshore island from the Norlands, which are modelled on the Faeroe Islands and will be reused as a setting in The Island of Sheep (1936). Hurrell’s island ‘has ‘an air of concealing something’, and local feeling about it reinforces this impression: ‘It has an ill name […] Folk dinna gang near it,’ says the boatman John Ronaldson. Ronaldson tactlessly mentions the ‘Muckle Black Silkie’, a giant and uncanny creature of the sea, as the ultimate fear, which preys on Hurrell’s mind, and he wakes to impending bad weather and no birds on the island — always an ominous portent in Buchan’s writing.
‘“Tendebant Manus”’
Although this 1927 story is set in the First World War it reworks an idea explored in two earlier Buchan works. ‘The Kings of Orion’ (1906) and A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906) both explore the idea that the most extraordinary alternative lives can be dreamed and enacted by the most prosaic of people.
In the two earlier uses of this motif the two worlds are not connected, but in ‘”Tendebant Manus”’ they combine, and one brother joins the other. Narrated by Sir Arthur Warcliff, whom the reader has previously encountered in The Three Hostages (1924), this story is unusually full of poetry quotations about the voices of the dead. Given that Buchan had spent the early 1920s writing about the war in regimental and war histories, ‘“Tendebant Manus”’ probably emerged from his research into who had died and who had survived.
Parliamentarian and staff officer George Souldern is unable to accept the fact of his brother Reggie’s death in wartime because he is living the fantasy that the famous soldier Reggie still exists on a different plane. The things that George was good at are not considered or barely mentioned. He fails in the public, political world of men’s and national affairs, so naturally, or unnaturally, he imagines a continued life for Reggie that will, inexorably, pull him over the edge.
‘The Last Crusade’
Subtitled ‘A Journalist’s Yarn’, this superb 1928 story of journalism and fake news is as relevant today as it was in the 1920s. Buchan – Deputy-Director of Reuters at the time – reveals the manipulation of facts for commercial imperatives, how the power of a media empire is based on an uneducated readership, and why big newspaper companies choose crime and piety as the horses to back to win the newspaper war. By orchestrating a bubble of news sensation, Buchan shows how Presbyterian parishes could be set alight by an idea, given the right fuel.
This story is a fantasia on the power of the Press, and Buchan has a lot of fun inventing pseudonyms for Reuters, Associated Press and other newspaper institutions of the day. He also writes some outrageous headlines, and some of his characters use vocabulary no longer considered appropriate. The story’s historical contextualisations encourage us to believe narrator Willinck’s exaggerations about, for instance, Russian peasants reading Milton. Willinck’s unscrupulousness in playing a joke on the world’s reading public depends upon a tremendous crescendo of manipulation, and no fact-checking. The climax is undercut by an anti-Bolshevik stance that privileges British literary and religious culture above those of all other nations, and mocks modern ‘Middle-Western’ Puritanism. The readers are encouraged to fear the power of the Press when it falls, too easily, into malevolent hands.
‘Fullcircle’
‘Fullcircle’ from 1920 is a celebration of English country living and traditional social values, the story of three visits to a small country house in Oxfordshire and of the changes observed by the narrator over a number of years. It is a beautifully crafted account of the insidious but benign possession of the owners by the seventeenth-century spirit of the house. The story is also a satire on the do-goodery of the Fabian Society and the earnestness of the Modernist urbanite transplanted into traditional English countryside.
The house of the story – inspired by Weald Manor at Bampton, Oxfordshire – is a ‘wicked little house’ that forces religious as well as social change on its owners. Although the Giffens begin as earnest humanists, over a brief number of years they are taken on a journey through the Church of England, to Anglo-Catholicism, and finally to Roman Catholicism, the religion of the house’s original owner. The changes in how the Giffens use the chapel signpost their progress. First used as a committee room and then a library, in its final incarnation as a place of religious worship the narrator realises that it is now ‘a more pagan place than when it had been workroom or smoking-room’.
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Buchan does not signal his literary conceits in his short stories; he merely plants them and allows them to grow. By the time the reader reaches the end of The Runagates Club, the range of fears that the stories explore, and the underlying opposition between the security of the society depicted, and the insecurity experienced by the characters when things go awry, have grown to encompass much of human experience.
The Runagates stories also have a connection to Buchan’s most often-used trope, that of the thin line between civilisation and the destructive and terrifying forces of anarchy. He began writing about this at the turn of the century, and it remained his principal theme, with an obvious connection to fear in The Runagates Club.
Why did Buchan focus for so long on this idea? His imaginative engagement with social, political, cultural and technological changes throughout his lifetime would have fuelled his awareness of how change affects people, and societies. In The Runagates Club, his last collection of short fictions, Buchan foregrounds the urbanity of his assured, secure social settings to allow the characters to go forth and explore the uncertainties of the worlds beyond. They find wonders and achieve marvels, but they are close to being terrified out of their wits.
