Authentic, rebellious, and a true clubland hero – it’s time to stop underrating John Buchan

“He was the best writer of the three, the best story-teller and the best craftsman. But, for me, he is the easiest of the three to forget.”

That was the judgement with which Richard Usborne began his essay on John Buchan in his book Clubland Heroes, the other two authors featured being Dornford Yates and Sapper. This verdict was based on what he perceived as the Achilles’ heel of Buchan’s writing: “His plots were exciting, but his people dull, heroes and villains”.

That seems a little harsh. Richard Hannay, who made his debut in The Thirty-Nine Steps, impressed himself on the mind and memory of everyone who read the books in which he featured. Granted, there were no Tolstoyan passages of introspection, but Hannay was more than an identikit action man; his personality is conveyed throughout the novels by a kind of osmosis and he lives vividly enough.

Sir Edward Leithen, another Buchan hero, is more deserving of Usborne’s reproach. Yet it can be argued that Leithen, whose life most closely paralleled that of the author (he ended his career as Attorney General) is the more effective for his lack of colour. He is a vehicle for narrative. Buchan was extremely sophisticated in his use of authorial devices and the invention of Leithen is one such contrivance. Usborne conceded: “But as a Buchan character par excellence he is really the most interesting of the lot. And the nicest.”

Usborne seems, in the tradition of a Buchan character bored by inaction, to have been feeling a trifle liverish when he dealt with Buchan’s creations: “I wish I could like Sandy Arbuthnot”. Millions of schoolboys did. In any case, likeability can hardly be expected to be the defining characteristic of a man of whom “there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak of him round their fires” and who has spent much of his life playing the Great Game, defending Britain’s empire from the covetous clutches of Johnny Foreigner. As for Archie Roylance, even Usborne liked him.

There cannot be much more to be discovered about John Buchan since he has been well served by biographers, beginning with Janet Adam Smith, via Andrew Lownie’s The Presbyterian Cavalier, to the recent Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps by Ursula Buchan, the writer’s granddaughter.

A review of the last-named book speculated that “Somewhere in the cultural compost heap that nourishes the conservative imagination in this country, among the Robertson’s jam jars and Mac cartoons and decaying prints of Zulu, his huge body of work might still be releasing nutrients”. That suggests class warriors are not well-placed to write objective reviews.

More bizarrely, the same writer opined, referring to Clubland Heroes: “Usborne’s droll catalogue of his subjects’ reactionary excesses helped writers like Dornford Yates and the repellent ‘Sapper’ along the way to oblivion. Buchan continued to be read, but his reputation was battered”.

On the contrary, as was observed in an earlier piece here, Usborne’s book rekindled interest in all three writers. Usborne may have felt cool regarding Sandy Arbuthnot, but his good-natured analysis hardly “battered” Buchan’s reputation. “Progressive” writers invariably underestimate the intelligence of readers of non-progressive fiction.

The great canard in connection with Buchan is the charge of anti-Semitism, now a very tattered and discredited libel indeed. The much-quoted passage from the beginning of The Thirty-Nine Steps is Scudder’s claim that “the Jew” is behind the conspiracy he fears; yet in the same breath he admits “for three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms”. Richard Hannay, in any case, is sceptical of Scudder’s paranoia and the Jews turn out to be irrelevant to the conspiracy. If Buchan was anti-Semitic, he was the only recorded anti-Semitic Zionist in history, for he championed that cause, so that the Nazis noted his “Pro-Jewish activity”.

Buchan was the son of a Free Church of Scotland Minister, was educated successively at Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow, then Glasgow University (his first published writing was in Glasgow University Magazine), and, after winning a variety of prizes, left the university without graduating – not as a drop-out but to take up a scholarship he had won to Brasenose College, Oxford.

Thereafter his careers were multifarious: colonial administrator, propagandist, lawyer, novelist, parliamentarian, historian, church elder and country squire.

To his chagrin, at the start of the Great War he was declared unfit for active service, though he found his way to the front as a correspondent. During the opening days of the war, while bedridden, he wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps in five weeks – an achievement that changed his life. He became, like countless other Scots, seamlessly assimilated into the British establishment as he rose in rank and responsibilities – during the Great War he was briefly Director of Intelligence – dying in office as Governor General of Canada.

Buchan wrote more than a hundred books, of which only nineteen were in the category he called his “shockers”, his adventure stories, but it is for these he is remembered. In the venturesome world of Britain’s empire, Buchan’s tales were less far-fetched than they might seem now. Even his heroes were anchored in reality: Richard Hannay was partly based on Field Marshal Lord Ironside, while Buchan acknowledged that Aubrey Herbert, who had twice rejected offers of the throne of Albania and was father-in-law of another novelist, Evelyn Waugh, was the model for Sandy Arbuthnot.

It is sometimes argued that the cinema popularised Buchan’s writing, through the film version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Buchan rather absurdly claimed was better than the novel. In reality, the film did more for the career of Alfred Hitchcock than for John Buchan. All cinema versions have continued to be travesties, with directors making the mistake, inseparable from their profession, of imagining they can improve upon a classic.

One of the most interesting of Buchan’s “shockers” is Huntingtower, in which the hero is not a soldier/laird/spy but a retired Glasgow grocer, Dickson McCunn, in his fifties. Although Sir Archie Roylance is awarded a walk-on part and the damsel in distress is a Russian princess, this novel is set firmly among the middle and lower classes.

It is the Gorbals Diehards, a troop of ragged boy scouts whom McCunn is helping to better themselves and rise above their origins in the Glasgow slums, who steal the show. They are realistically and unsentimentally portrayed, Buchan drawing on scenes observed in his early life.

The kitchen of the cottage belonging to Phemie Morran in a village in Carrick, rather than the gun room of a country house, is where much of the action is plotted; the Scottish rural background could hardly be more earthy. Yet it is all delineated with great authenticity.

Inevitably, in modern times the author – like all chroniclers of clubland heroes – has been denounced as “snobbish”. That is nonsense. Buchan largely populated his fiction with characters from clubland because that was the circle in which he moved for most of his life and also, conveniently, the forum in which power play was formulated.

Even then, in John Macnab, a transgressive spirit drives three gentlemen to turn poachers in order to humble an unpopular nouveau riche property owner. Like the first Marquis of Montrose, whose biography he wrote, John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir was a Presbyterian Cavalier. That Presbyterian heritage imbued him with a certain rebellious social spirit, of which John Macnab is a humorous and entertaining distillation.

It is more than a century since The Thirty-Nine Steps arrived on the bookstalls; it is still in print and selling today. Any author who remains popular for over a hundred years can fairly claim to have been a success. That novel, Buchan’s most popular, was written in five weeks. There is a challenge to inventive minds enduring the enforced idleness of lockdown today. It is time we had a new clubland hero.