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In popular imagination John Buchan is generally remembered as the author of a series of thrillers that centre around English country houses and London Clubs, an old-fashioned, misogynistic, snobbish and anti-Semitic writer primarily concerned with the British Empire and Establishment. The reality, as is gradually being recognised, is quite different. His thrillers are more sophisticated, profound, ambivalent, better-written and with a greater width of literary reference than their reputation might suggest, and in any case constitute only a fraction of his writing output, which included historical novels, film scripts, comic romances, military history, a legal text book, children’s books, biographies, poetry, essays, hundreds of articles and – a particular love – short stories.

Writing to his school and university friend Charles Dick in January 1900, he claimed that ‘to a person of my habits the short story is the real form’. By December 1912 The Bookman, in a profile of the thirty-seven-year-old writer, was arguing he was ‘probably the best modern exponent of the short story’ and noting he made ‘the short story what a cameo might be when it is cut by the hand of a master’. Buchan wrote about sixty short stories and the majority of them were published in four collections – Grey Weather (1899), The Watcher by the Threshold (1902), The Moon Endureth (1912) and The Runagates Club (1928). The exceptions were some stories in Scholar Gipsies (1896), in various interwar Nelson Annuals, in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal and some unpublished stories, recently discovered in his private papers. His first published short story, ‘On Cademuir Hill’, appeared in the Glasgow University Magazine in December 1894 when he was still a teenager and soon, having secured the services of a literary agent, he was publishing stories on a regular basis not just in British papers such as Macmillan’s Magazine, Chambers and Blackwoods but also in American journals such as The Living Age. This meant that relatively quickly he found he could support himself from his writing and he soon learnt the importance of a transatlantic appeal.

Another myth, that needs to be scotched, is that Buchan, though born in Perth, should not really be classified as a Scottish writer. What is increasingly becoming clear is that Buchan’s interests, both in his life and his writing, remained predominantly Scottish and he deserves to be remembered in the same way as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson – who were themselves great literary influences on him – as a writer who found fame throughout the world but who drew much of his own inspiration from the country of his birth and especially from its literature, religion and topography. Nowhere is this clearer than in his short stories, half of which are set in Scotland, and which, as can be seen in the following selection, reveal him to be as interested in moorland as Clubland heroes. The stories here largely revolve around the lives of Border shepherds, poachers, gamekeepers and drovers and rely heavily on the use of local dialects. Indeed one of Buchan’s great literary gifts in his novels, as well as short stories, was to capture the different forms of Scottish idiom. His Scots stories are unsentimental and largely about temptation, death and retribution and the role played in people’s lives by religion, drink or the weather. They are a far cry from either the Kailyard or the adventures of Richard Hannay or Sir Edward Leithen.

It is certainly true that after Hutchesons’ Grammar School and Glasgow University, Buchan, like many ambitious Scots before him, headed south and never again lived in Scotland, but the case can easily be made that he retained his love of Scotland and that the country deeply influenced his writing. He regularly visited his parents and siblings, who continued to live in Peebles, and his annual holiday was always spent in Scotland, partly with his family in the Borders and partly staying in the Highlands with friends such as Gerard Craig Sellar on his Ardtornish estate opposite Mull. For twenty years Buchan worked for the Scottish publisher Thomas Nelson and spent some of his time before his marriage in 1907 at their Edinburgh offices. At Nelson he set up a weekly newspaper, The Scottish Review, which was an attempt to create a Scottish version of the Spectator, a return to the tradition of Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. In it he did much to promote both a new wave of Scottish writers, such as Neil Munro, and reassess more established writers; for example he published some hitherto unknown verse written by R.L. Stevenson at Edinburgh University.

When he decided to pursue a political career he chose to stand not for a local English constituency but for Scottish ones, first as the candidate for Peebles just before the First World War and then as the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities from 1927 to 1935. Among his ambitions as an MP was to be Secretary of State for Scotland and he took a keen interest in Scottish debates, often to the point where he took a strong independent line from the Conservative Party. It is sometimes suggested, on the strength of some selective quotation from his speeches, that Buchan favoured Scottish Home Rule. This is not true. Culturally he was a Scottish Nationalist, but politically he was an enlightened Unionist, prepared to cloak his own views in rhetoric that would appeal to all the Scottish electorate. He recognised the need to respond positively to the burgeoning Scottish Nationalist Movement and that if Conservatives were to continue to enjoy support in Scotland they needed to be more sympathetic to Scottish aspirations. He genuinely believed in devolving more power to Scotland, partly from a desire to remedy a long-standing grievance and partly from a belief that some Scottish matters could best be dealt with at a local level. But though he was prepared to devolve some power he believed that Scotland’s interests lay within the Union.

One of his major concerns within this political debate was that Scotland was losing her national identity. He argued in one House of Commons debate: ‘In language, literature and art we are losing our idiom, and it seems to many that we are in danger very soon of reaching the point where Scotland will have nothing distinctive to show to the world.’ Both in his public work and his writing he tried to redress the balance. As President of the Scottish History Society he successfully won increased government funding to index and preserve various Scottish Record collections. He served on the Board of the new National Library of Scotland, the committee to preserve the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, as a Governor of Gordonstoun School and was, in an apparent oxymoron, President of the Scottish branch of the English Association. Throughout his life, even when abroad, he regularly addressed Caledonian Clubs, Burns and Stevenson dinners and in 1923 was President of the Sir Walter Scott Club. His appointment as Governor-General of Canada in 1935 owed much to his successful tenure as Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland in 1933 and 1934. When he chose a peerage he initially considered an entirely Scottish title – Buchan of Tweed, Buchan of Tweeddale, Buchan of Fruid or Lord Manorwater – eventually deciding on a combination of his Oxford and Border links with Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

Much of his writing centres around Scotland. His non-fiction included well-reviewed biographies of Montrose and Sir Walter Scott, histories of the Fifteenth Scottish Division and the Royal Scots Fusiliers, The Kirk in Scotland (1930) and The Massacre of Glencoe (1933). He contributed countless chapters or introductions to books on Scottish subjects: The Scottish Tongue (1924), A History of Peeblesshire (1925), The Face of Scotland (1933), Scots Heraldry (1934), to name a few. Eleven of his novels are either entirely or partly set in Scotland, including his best-known novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Even when the action is ostensibly based elsewhere the landscape is unmistakably Scottish in appearance, whether it is the South African terrain of Prester John (1910) or the Canadian wilds of Sick Heart River (1941). Buchan’s Scottish fictional landscape is very much bound by his own upbringing and experiences. His early historical novels – Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895), John Burnet of Barns (1898) and A Lady of Lost Years (1899) – and the more contemporary The Half-Hearted (1900) are set in the Borders; Prester John (1910) and The Free Fishers (1934) draw on his early upbringing on the Fife coast; Huntingtower (1922), Castle Gay (1930) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) are set in a Galloway remembered from student walking holidays, while John Macnab (1925) and parts of The Three Hostages (1924) and Mr Standfast (1918) come from holidays with friends in the Highlands. It is not just places that are Scottish but also the characters. Who can forget the Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn, the Gorbals Die-Hards, Andrew Amos, Mrs Brisbane-Brown, Lewis Haystoun and Lord Lamanchas as well as the better known Sandy Arbuthnot and Archie Roylance?

Buchan’s interest in poetry is rarely mentioned, yet it is one of the most obvious manifestations of his ‘Scottishness’. Many of them in his wartime collection, Poems Scots and English (1917), are written in the Doric and he was sufficiently highly regarded as a Scottish poet that when Hugh MacDiarmid published Northern Numbers in 1920 and 1921 in an attempt, in his words, to bring together ‘certain living Scottish poets’, Buchan was included along with Neil Munro, Lewis Spence and MacDiarmid himself. In 1924 Buchan edited The Northern Muse: an Anthology of Scots Vernacular Poetry, the first anthology to include some of the poetry produced by the Scottish Literary Renaissance. He was an early champion of Neil Munro, Violet Jacob and of Hugh MacDiarmid, contributing the preface to MacDiarmid’s Sangshaw. MacDiarmid subsequently was to describe Buchan as ‘Dean of the Faculty of Contemporary Scottish Letters’ and write of The Northern Muse that it stood ‘in relation to Scots poetry as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to English’. Indeed one of Buchan’s strengths as a writer in general, MacDiarmid also noted, was that the ‘books abound in loving and delightful studies of Scottish landscape and shrewd analyses and subtle aperçus of Scottish character’.

Apart from their own intrinsic literary merits, Buchan’s short stories are interesting for a number of reasons. First, they show how he responded to the environment around him. The early stories, which are included in this book, draw from holidays spent with relations around Peebles and the life of the Upper Tweed Valley. Later his protagonists will be young Oxford scholars finding mystery, first in the Scottish countryside and then abroad, particularly in Africa where Buchan spent two years on Lord Milner’s staff. The First World War, during which Buchan served as a war correspondent on the Western Front and then ran a government propaganda organisation, would inspire five stories, while further tales would be drawn from his postwar sojourn in the Cotswolds. It is interesting, in tracing themes in Buchan’s work, to see just how many of his own current interests or those of his family are ascribed to characters or are central to the books. They include mountaineering, fishing, birds and walking, all of which figure in the stories, as well as the novels. As the critic Patrick Cosgrave has put it: ‘He did not metamorphose his personality when he came to write adventure stories; he merely relaxed, and indulged some of the whims of his temperament and imagination.’ Two of his stories, for example, have a mountaineering background. ‘Space’ combines Buchan’s fascination with the metaphysical teachings of Bergson and Poincaré with the practical difficulties of climbing the Chamonix Aiguilles to produce a haunting story about the nature of reality, while ‘The Knees of the Gods’, reproduced here, touches on the hallucinatory effects of climbing.

Secondly, many of the stories are explorations of themes subsequently developed in the novels, themes which remain constant even if the locations change. ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ are early prototypes of the novel, Witch Wood (1927), ‘Fountainblue’ has similarities with The Half-Hearted (1900) and looks forward to Sick Heart River (1941), and ‘The Frying-pan and the Fire’, which revolves around a sporting bet, has parallels with John Macnab (1925). It is often assumed that Buchan’s preoccupation with the fragility of civilisation comes after the First World War or dates from The Power House (1916) with Lumley’s famous remark, ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Satan.’ In fact Maitland, the central figure in ‘Fountainblue’, a story written in 1900, expresses his concern about the ‘very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors’, adding, ‘you call it miles of rampart, I call the division a line, a thread, a sheet of glass. But then, you see, you only know one side, and I only know the other.’

The theme of the precarious balance between the civilised and the primitive becomes more explicit in the course of Buchan’s writing career. Where in the early short stories the contrast has been between England and Scotland, later it is to be found, for example, between Britain and Africa. Many of the characters exhibit dual personalities, desperate to attune themselves to their more primitive sides, especially the more conventionally successful they become. As one character puts it of Maitland in ‘Fountainblue’, who turns his back on success to die forgotten in Africa, ‘… he saw our indoor civilisation and his own destiny in so sharp a contrast that he could not choose but make the severance.’ Many of Buchan’s stories are about the undersides of our personalities. Ladlaw in ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’, ‘a good landlord and respectable country gentleman, now appeared as a kind of horrible genius, a brilliant and malignant satyr’, once he becomes possessed by the devil. It is this dual personality, later to figure so prominently in Buchan’s villains, to which one of the characters in another of Buchan’s short stories, ‘The Kings of Orion’, refers when he says, ‘There’s our ordinary self, generally rather humdrum; and then there’s a bit of something else, good, bad but never indifferent – and it is that something else which may make a man a saint or a great villain.’ Characters are often possessed by powerful atavistic urges as a reaction to the civilised lives they enjoy – so, for example, Maitland in ‘Fountainblue’ realises that ‘the sad elemental world of wood and mountain was far more truly his own than this cosy and elegant civilisation’.

There is often a sacred place, temenos, in Buchan’s writing, most obviously in the novels Witch Wood (1927) and The Dancing Floor (1926), but it is also to be found in the stories, either in Scotland as in ‘The Green Glen’, or in Africa as in ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’. Place is integral to plot and theme in Buchan, often personifying the border between the primitive and the civilised. As a review of ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ put it: ‘The mountains are no mere piles of rock, they are the abodes of mystery, of romance, of haunting presences and insubstantial forms.’ In that story, for example, the dark mysterious Perthshire woods at More are contrasted with the ‘green pastoral country with bright streams and valleys’ over the hills at Glenaicill.

Reviewing Buchan’s novel, Sick Heart River (1941), Graham Greene drew attention to Buchan being ‘the first to realise the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men’. He was referring to the thrillers, but his comment could equally apply to the short stories, even these early ones set around Peebles, where the menace comes from the familiar and trusted – streams that flood their banks, hosts who are not what they initially appear, sons who make unusual demonstrations of filial love. Greene also noticed the ‘completeness of the world’ Buchan created in his books. Buchan’s fictional world is already taking shape in these stories, long before many of the people or places appear in the novels. The Clanroyden family are introduced in ‘A Reputation’, ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and ‘Fountainblue’, the Sempills in ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ and Lady Amysfort in ‘The Green Glen’. The Radens, who figure so prominently in John Macnab, are in ‘The Far Islands’ while the Manorwaters appear in ‘The Far Islands’ as well as the novels, The Half-Hearted and The Dancing Floor. Even characters who do not appear in the novels tend to reappear in different stories, so Lady Afflint is in both ‘A Reputation’ and ‘The Far Islands’, Gideon Scott is the eponymous hero of one story and appears as Gidden Scott in ‘The Herd of Standlan’, while Jock Rorison features in both ‘Streams of Water in the South’ and ‘Comedy in the Full Moon’. The town of Gledsmuir makes an appearance in six stories and there are numerous references to Clachlans, Callowa, Aller, the Gled, the Forest of Rhynns and St Chad’s College at Oxford. Castle Gay, the title of a 1933 novel, is mentioned in ‘The Rime of True Thomas’, a story written in 1897, and then in ‘The Green Glen’, Glenaicill is in ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and Machray is referred to in ‘Fullcircle’.

Another link with the novels is the use of similar techniques or the reliance on coincidence to drive the plot. In The Three Hostages Dr Greenslade described the recipe for writing a thriller as ‘fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection’ and then inventing a connection. ‘The reader is pleased with the ingenuity of the solution, for he doesn’t realise that the author fixed upon the solution first, and then invented a problem to suit it.’ ‘The Frying-pan and the Fire’ begins with an after-dinner game where ‘you invented a preposterous situation and the point was to explain naturally how it came about. Drink, lunacy and practical joking were barred as explanations.’ So in the story the Duke of Burminster has to explain just how he came to appear on the station at Langshiels in a dishevelled state to be met by an official reception committee and band.

Buchan had a strong mystical sense and a large number of the short stories have a supernatural element. It may be the power exerted by place, especially a house or an island as in ‘Skule Skerry’. Or it may be a spell that only affects certain people and can pass through several generations. Throughout his life Buchan was intrigued by the idea that certain qualities or susceptibilities could be passed from one person to another. His novel, The Path of the King (1921), is about how kingship can be passed through different quite ordinary people. In ‘The Grove of Ashtar-oth’ the central character worships an ancient goddess because of his Jewish blood, while in ‘The Green Wilde-beeste’ Andrew du Preez, with his ‘touch of the tar brush’, is caught in an ancient spell. In ‘The Far Islands’, included in this volume, Colin Raden inherits the vision of ‘The Far Island’ first bestowed on a distant ancestor.

Many of the stories involve some encounter with the forces of the unknown and the way in which the ‘other’ world impinges on the ‘ordinary’ world. Buchan’s susceptibility was heightened at Oxford by attending lectures on pre-Christian cults, by living in rooms at Brasenose, where reputedly a former President of the Brasenose Hellfire Club had been literally snatched by the Devil, and by the influence of Andrew Lang, a neighbour in the Borders, whose Custom and Myth dealt with the survival of ancient customs in a modern society. Buchan was also much influenced by his wide reading of Celtic myths, fairy tales, Border ballads, the Bible and Shakespeare, as well as the work of more contemporary writers such as Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Ibsen, Maupassant and Poe, whose Tales of Mystery and Imagination he edited for Thomas Nelson in 1911. By education and temperament Buchan was a classicist and his grounding in the classics is evident in his stories, marked as they are by a clear and economical prose style and use of classical imagery. He was also a son of the Manse, brought up to accept an omnipotent and benevolent God and a Devil that was half-humorous and half-earthy, and his Scottish Calvinism was to be an important influence on his writing, including the short stories. At the same time part of the creative tension in his work, as in his life, would come from the fact he was also conversant with the teachings of Erasmus, Galileo and Hume.

Buchan’s Scottish stories can be enjoyed at different levels – simply as tales about his own people, as delicate expositions of human character which demonstrate that his gift for strong descriptive writing was apparent from his early twenties, or as explorations of themes to be developed more fully later in his novels. For many of the recurrent Buchan themes are present – the power of place, the use of the sacred place temenos, the importance of landscape to plot, the strong descriptive writing, the emptiness of success, the call of the wild, the contrast between the city and the countryside and between England and Scotland, the narrow thread between the primitive and civilised.

Buchan’s stories cannot be separated from his novels and are integral to our understanding of his fiction, yet they have received very little critical attention and many are not even recorded in the standard bibliographies. The publication of this selection of stories should help to rectify two gaps in Buchan studies – examination of him as a Scottish writer and as a short story writer – as well as introducing devotees of his novels to another facet of his writing. They give an insight into the versatility of his literary styles and the peculiar cast of his imagination and suggest how he could have developed into an archetypical Scottish writer, more interested in social observation than a gripping yarn. Many stories were clearly written to a deadline, others are highly repetitive or imitative, but some have that mark of greatness, the ability to stay in the mind long after the piece has been read. They are a reminder that John Buchan was a far more accomplished and complex writer than his contemporary reputation has allowed.

Andrew Lownie