Huntingtower

Dickson McCunn is fifty-five, prosperous, and at last his own man. He has sold his Glasgow provision business, and this spring he means to do the thing he has dreamed of behind the counter all his careful life: take to the open road and find an adventure. He finds far more than he bargained for. Drawn by a woman’s voice singing in a strange tongue, McCunn and a young poet he meets on the way stumble on the secret of Huntingtower, a shuttered house on a lonely sea-loch — where a Russian princess is held prisoner, with a fortune in jewels and a ring of Bolshevik agents closing in.

Against the conspiracy McCunn can call on no army and no police he dares trust — only his own untested nerve, a hot-headed companion, the loyalty of the country folk, and the Gorbals Die-Hards: a half-dozen ragged, ferociously capable boys from the Glasgow slums, camping nearby on a holiday bought with their own pennies, who throw themselves into the rescue and very nearly win it single-handed. Part thriller, part fairy tale, and part broad Scots comedy, the story carries a respectable grocer into a danger he is laughably unfit for — and discovers that he is equal to it.

Huntingtower shows the warmer, funnier side of the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. In Dickson McCunn, the everyman hero who finds romance in middle age, and in the unforgettable Die-Hards, Buchan created some of his best-loved characters and the first of three novels about them. Steeped in the moors and sea-lochs of southwest Scotland and rich with Lowland Scots speech, it is a tale about courage waiting in unlikely people, and about the refusal to let life narrow into mere comfort.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s place in Buchan’s work, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.