The Runagates Club

John Buchan at his desk in 1939

John Buchan June begins its fourth year today! I started this event as a way to reclaim my birth month for something worth celebrating, and it’s grown beyond anything I could have anticipated. This year I’m reading some of Buchan’s more obscure or lesser known novels, another short biography for a taste of his non-fiction, and emphasizing some of his short fiction with three collections of short stories. We begin with one of those today, Buchan’s 1928 anthology The Runagates Club.

The club of the title is The Thursday Club, a London club to which many of Buchan’s recurring characters like Richard Hannay, Archie Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen, John Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha belong. It appears in a few previous books, most prominently The Three Hostages, where Hannay describes its meeting place as “a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street, a pleasant room, panelled in white, with big fires burning at each end.”

That’s the setting. The premise of The Runagates Club is that it is a collection of a dozen stories told by its members in the course of conversation. Like the characters themselves, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, politicians, fighter pilots, scholars, and businessmen, the stories range widely in tone, topic, and form, but they’re never very far from adventure.

The collection begins with Hannay, whose story “The Green Wildebeest” takes place in his pre-Thirty-Nine Steps days as a mining engineer searching for ore deposits in remote stretches of South Africa. While hunting for water during one expedition, Hannay and his companion, a highly-educated, rationalistic younger man, have a chance encounter with shaman, a sacred grove, and an otherworldly animal. The younger man is shaken, and Hannay narrates how his haughty intrusion changed his life for the worse.

After the eeriness of that story, the Duke of Burminster tells a comic two-part story called “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” The story begins with a high-spirited dare between the Duke and Archie Roylance leading to a footrace through the hills of the Scottish Borders and, through mistaken identity and a series of misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous coincidences, ends with the Duke plotting his escape from a mental hospital.

Palliser-Yeates follows with “Dr Lartius,” a story about espionage during the First World War and a mysterious, popular young doctor with mystical powers suspected of being a German spy. That story’s twist ending leads into perhaps the darkest story in the collection, “The Wind in the Portico.” This story concerns a rich eccentric who, having come into possession of a country house with the ruins of a Roman-era temple in the grounds, attempts to rebuild the temple and revive its ancient worship. His efforts get him the wrong kind of attention.

“‘Divus’ Johnston,” the short followup from Lord Lamancha, continues the theme of gods in a humorous vein. A story within a story, it is a tale told to him by a Scottish sea captain who, shipwrecked in Indonesia, was captured and prepared for sacrifice to a local god—who turns out to be an old friend from Glasgow, also shipwrecked.

The story told by Oliver Pugh, “The Loathly Opposite,” concerns codebreaking during the First World War and the obsession one side’s cryptanalysts can develop for their opposite numbers. In this case, a young man working in codebreaking develops an elaborate picture of the mastermind behind German codes, a picture and an obsession that continues after the war with surprising results.

Sir Edward Leithen follows with a story about how a world of adventure can be had without leaving London—shades of Leithen’s debut in The Power-House. “Sing a Song of Sixpence” relates his encounter with a charismatic but embattled South American president named Ramon Pelem and the surprising way he was able to help him both avoid assassination by revolutionaries and keep a social engagement.

“Ship to Tarshish,” one of the most moving and challenging stories, is about a friendly, well-connected, completely useless young man whose wealthy father dies immediately after a crash in the family business’s stocks. Unable to cope with the pressure of righting the ship, he flees to Canada with a small amount of cash and sinks lower and lower through lack of skill and experience. The allusion to Jonah in the title is aptly chosen for a story of manfully confronting unasked for obligation.

The uncanny returns in “Skule Skerry,” in which an ornithologist forces his way onto a remote island—one of the Norlands, later to appear in The Island of Sheep—to observe birds despite the objections of locals, among whom the island has a bad name and a reputation for the supernatural. There he has a terrifying encounter with something he later believes he can explain, though the reader may be left doubting his comforting, too-neat rationalization.

The uncanny of a different kind occurs in “Tenebant Manus,” another story rooted in the First World War, in which the unremarkable brother of an officer killed on the Western Front takes up his mantle for a brief, bright, forceful career in politics.

A final humorous story, “The Last Crusade,” is a satire of fake news avant la lettre. When a bored journalist working the South African frontier drops in on an elderly minister’s sermon, in which the minister inveighs against the Bolsheviks for threatening to execute an Orthodox patriarch, he files an amused, scoffing column which is stripped of context, exaggerated, and presented as news—as is the public response. Every news cycle makes the story bigger and wilder and less connected to the real world. By the end, the media is announcing the launch of an amateur invasion of Russia by a fictitious army of American Fundamentalists motivated by the words of the minister, who is now dead. The whole incident, according to the narrator, veteran journalist Francis Martendale, ended with fortunate real-world results, but that was no thanks to the news media.

The last story, “Fullcircle,” concerns Sir Edward Leithen but is told by historian Martin Peckwether, and begins with a time the two were tramping across the countryside and encountered an impeccably progressive, high-minded young couple in an old estate. Catching back up with them two years later reveals the power of the land to transform people.

These twelve stories originated as magazine pieces, mostly published in the mid- and late-1920s, and the frame structure of The Runagates Club was Buchan’s inspired excuse to collect and unite them. Quite apart from the fun of imagining Buchan’s regulars hanging out and chatting over a good meal together, one of the joys of this collection is the imaginative variety of the stories. Buchan was at the height of his powers as an author of fiction in the 1920s, writing novels like Huntingtower, Midwinter, The Dancing Floor, and my two favorites, John Macnab and Witch Wood, in the years leading up to this book. With horror, humor, satire, suspense, straightforward human drama—and with many stories mixing two or three of these—The Runagates Club shows off Buchan’s range to great effect.

Throughout the stories, Buchan revisits many themes and subjects familiar from his novels. The foolish things of the world confounding the wise, a biblical truth invoked explicitly at the end of “The Last Crusade,” comes through in several stories of reversal and unlooked-for grace. The virtues of integrity, physical courage, and duty, old-fashioned and neglected even then, feature in many of the stories and most prominently in “Ship to Tarshish,” in which a moral weakling, cossetted by an undemanding life of privilege, must choose hardship not only to do right by others but to be able to live with himself.

The First World War also looms large. The clubland characters narrating these stories made up the officer class of the British Army and suffered disproportionate losses in terrible combat. Buchan himself lost his best friend and brother and knew many others who never lived to see 1918. The weight of that loss comes through in stories like “The Loathly Opposite” and especially “Tendebant Manus,” but it’s there even in lighter wartime tales like “Dr Lartius.”

Buchan even seems to have a little fun with himself. I’ve noted before his reputation for wild coincidences playing a part in his fiction, a tendency noted in his own lifetime. The humorous stories in The Runagates Club like “‘Divus’ Johnston” embrace this to the point of comedy and “The Frying Pan and the Fire” is built entirely out of a cascading series of coincidences and bad luck, like the steady escalation of a Marx Brothers sketch.

But the most powerful recurring theme throughout, one revisited over and over again in Buchan’s novels, is the fragility of civilization, which Buchan justifiably saw as a thin, translucent veneer laid over bottomless barbarism. Sometimes this takes on a this-worldly political aspect, as in Leithen’s assistance of Ramon Pelem against leftist revolutionaries who, we learn in the painful coda of the story, eventually do take Pelem down.

More often, in at least three stories, civilization lulls modern man into hubris, a complacent confidence in his all-encompassing materialistic worldview that leads him to trifle with forces older and more powerful than he can reckon with. Thus the fate of Hannay’s assistant in “The Green Wildebeest” and the ornithologist in “Skule Skerry,” in which the scientific arrogantly ignore local custom and tradition and suffer for it. But this theme comes through most chillingly in the case of the amateur neopagan in “The Wind in the Portico,” who seeks an encounter with something he has romantic notions of but does not and cannot understand. His fate, quite pointedly, is the fate of mortals who trespass against the gods in Greek myth. Ancient paganism was not a hobby.

Buchan’s good solid prose and skills with structure, pacing, and description strengthen all of the stories in The Runagates Club, but these last three, with their gothic atmosphere, vividly imagined landscapes—the remote hills of South Africa, a ramshackle English country house converted into a temple, a misty uninhabited island in the North Atlantic—as well as their thematic depth, were my favorites. With such a variety to choose from, I imagine any reader could pick up the book and come away with an entirely different set of favorites. I hope some of y’all will. If you do, I’d love to hear which you liked best.

John Buchan June is off to a great start with these stories. I look forward to writing about the first full-length novel of the month, and the first full-length novel of Buchan’s career, next time.