The Runagates Club


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:
According to Buchan's preface, the book's title is taken from Psalm 68: "He letteth the runagates continue in scarceness", a reference to the "execrable" quality of the club's food and wine.

Critical reception

The stories are "pleasingly diverse in subject, incident and treatment" according to a contemporary reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement.
Discussing The Runagates Club, Brian Stableford praised "The Green Wildebeest" as "a well-executed story". Stableford also 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."
Andrew Lownie, in John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier notes that this work, Buchan's only collection of post First World War short stories, is unique in including all of his major characters. He holds 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".