The Runagates Club is a 1928 collection of short stories by the Scottish author John Buchan. The collection consists of twelve tales presented as reminiscences of members of The Runagates Club, a London dining society. Several of the stories are recounted by recurrent characters in Buchan’s fiction, including Richard Hannay, Sandy Arbuthnot, John Palliser-Yeates, Charles Lamancha, and Edward Leithen.
Contents
The stories are entitled:
The Green Wildebeest: Sir Richard Hannay’s Story
The Frying Pan and the Fire: The Duke of Burminster’s Story
1. The Frying-Pan
2. The Fire
Dr Lartius: Mr Palliser-Yeates’s Story
The Wind in the Portico: Mr Henry Nightingale's Story
’Divus’ Johnston: Lord Lamancha's Story
The Loathly Opposite: Major Oliver Pugh's Story
Sing a Song of Sixpence: Sir Edward Leithen's Story
Ship to Tarshish: Mr Ralph Collatt's Story
Skule Skerry: Mr Anthony Hurrell's Story
'Tendebant Manus': Sir Arthur Warcliffe's Story
The Last Crusade: Mr Francis Martendale's Story
Fullcircle: Mr Martin Peckwether's Story
Title
The book's title alludes to the "execrable" quality of the Runagates Club's food and wine. According to Buchan's preface, it derives from Psalm 68: "He letteth the runagates continue in scarceness."
Critical reception
The stories are "pleasingly diverse in subject, incident and treatment" according to a contemporary reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement.[2]
Brian Stableford praised "The Green Wildebeest" as "a well-executed story", and described "Skule Skerry", "Tendebant Manus", and "Fullcircle" as "tales of subtle hauntings, told with a delicacy with Buchan rarely bothered to bring to his hurriedly-penned novels."[3]
Andrew Lownie, in John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (2013) noted that this work, Buchan's only collection of post First World War short stories, is unique in including all of his major characters. He held the stories to be beautifully self-contained, and to demonstrate "the usual Buchan themes of an unwitting amateur drawn into adventure and the fragile division between civilisation and chaos".[2]
^ abLownie, Andrew (2013). John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier. Thistle Publishing. pp. 201–202. ISBN978-1-909609-99-0.
^Stableford, Brian, "Buchan, John, (1st Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield)", in David Pringle, St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers (London: St. James Press, 1998), pp. 104 ISBN978-1-55862-206-7
