Runagates Club
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€17.50
The Runagates Club is John Buchan's last collection of short stories, and is a classic of British interwar short fiction. These twelve stories were written from 1913 to 1927, when he was at the peak of his powers.
Buchan's most popular character Richard Hannay battles an ancient curse in South Africa in `The Green Wildebeest'. Edward Leithen tags along in an assassins' war in `Sing a Song of Sixpence'. The Runagates Club features First World War spy and code-cracking thrillers `The Loathly Opposite' and `Dr Lartius'; tales of supernatural possession in deepest Wales, comfortable Oxfordshire and the House of Commons, in `The Wind in the Portico', Fullcircle' and `"Tendebant Manus"'; and stories of survival in the far North and in Depression-era Canada with `Skule Skerry' and `Ship to Tarshish'. There is farce too, in `The Frying-Pan and the Fire' and `"Divus" Johnston', and the riotous journalistic romp of `The Last
Crusade' is the last word on fake news, for all eras.
What makes The Runagates Club special is that Buchan designed it as a showcase to bring together the best of his magazine fiction. He repurposed these stories with new beginnings, framing them as after-dinner stories told over the port in a late 1920s private gentleman's dining-club. The narrators are a ready-made cast of storytelling characters, and Buchan filled out their backgrounds to fit the patrician, clubland background. This is interwar story-telling at its very best, with a critical introduction by Kate Macdonald.
John Buchan was born in 1875 in Perth, the son of a Presbyterian minister. After attending Glasgow University he took a Double First in Great at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford, read for the Bar, served in South Africa's reconstruction after the Second Boar War, worked as a reviewer and political commentator and briefly as deputy editor of The Spectator, entered publishing with Thomas Nelson & Sons, and developed the British government's propaganda as Director of Information during the First World War. By 1928 Buchan was Deputy-Director of Reuters, a Member of Parliament, and in 1935 would become Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada. He died in 1940, and is buried in the churchyard in Elsfield, Oxfordshire, near his home.
Kate Macdonald (author of the Introduction) is a literary historian and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Eglish Literature at the University of Reading. She has published widely on twentieth-century British book history and publishing culture, on publishing during the First World War, and on the fiction and professions of John Buchan. Her most recent books are Novelists Against Social Change (2015) and Rose Macaulay, Gender and Modernity (ed. 2017).