Castle Gay

Today marks the beginning of my third annual John Buchan June. I started this blog series two years ago in an effort to reclaim my birth month from other themed celebrations and turn it in a more fun, wholesome, and adventurous direction. As it happens, the Buchan novel we’re starting this year’s festivities with fits that description perfectly—the second Dickson McCunn tale, Castle Gay.

Buchan introduced Dickson McCunn, a retired Glasgow grocer with a businesslike mind and a romantic heart, in 1922’s Huntingtower. Castle Gay picks up six years after his retirement and first adventure as he hosts two of the Gorbals Die-Hards, the young scouts from a Glasgow slum who had assisted him in routing Bolshevik agents and saving a Russian princess. Now grown, Jaikie Galt is a Cambridge rugby star and Dougal Crombie a reporter for one of the largest newspaper chains in Britain. McCunn, who had taken the boys in after the events Huntingtower, is justifiably proud of them, and sees them off on a walking tour of Scotland ahead of Jaikie’s return to Cambridge.

But this being a John Buchan novel, not long after setting out Jaikie and Dougal fall headlong into a plot that slowly grows more complex and dangerous the more they discover about it. First, they happen upon Dougal’s wealthy employer, Thomas Carlyle Craw, under apparent house arrest deep in the countryside. It turns out that local students have kidnapped Craw as a prank, mistaking him for an older student running for rector of their university, and the befuddled landlady is holding him there. Dougal and Jaikie offer to contact Craw’s staff and the outraged Craw sends a letter with them announcing his predicament.

When they arrive at Craw’s vacation home, Castle Gay, they discover the gates locked and barricaded and reporters from rival newspaper chains skulking the grounds. With the help of a spirited local girl named Alison Westwater they enter the castle and learn that not only are reporters snooping the countryside trying to find out why Craw is missing, but an envoy of agents from the eastern European republic of Evallonia are in the neighborhood, hoping to meet him. Craw, in the high-minded editorials he dashes off from the seclusion of his homes around the country, has taken a hard pro-monarchy stance on this distant country’s politics in the hopes of preventing its takeover by Bolshevik-aligned radicals.

At first Jaikie, Douglas, Alison, and Craw’s staff assume that the visiting Evallonians are republicans hoping to kidnap or otherwise harm Craw for his influential opinions. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the group represents the monarchist faction, and that the heir to the Evallonian throne himself may be among them.

But the republicans are not out of the picture and, as Jaikie shuffles Craw through the countryside and Dougal works to prepare the way for his boss’s return following his strange absence, they learn that this faction is also present in the area, that they’re watching the land around Castle Gay closely, and that their intentions are much more sinister than those of their monarchist rivals.

And so Jaikie and Dougal find themselves saving a newspaper magnate from one kidnapping plot and trying to foil another, meanwhile guarding Craw’s reputation as well as his life by dodging rival reporters from London and Bolshevik spies from eastern Europe, facilitating a nighttime escape by sea, and even managing a costume ball in which real European royalty appear in disguise, all leading to a dramatic final confrontation in the stately library of Castle Gay. Along the way, Dougal comes into his own as a reporter, Craw reconnects with the real world, and Jaikie falls in love.

Castle Gay is not as good as Huntingtower, which benefited from a simpler plot with the lovable Dickson McCunn at its heart, but it is greatly enjoyable. No less a reader than Evelyn Waugh praised its masterful handling of tones that should clash—the thrilling, the romantic, the comic. Buchan has a lot of fun at Craw’s expense, with Jaikie dragging the put-upon media mogul through the rain and mud and cold of the Scottish countryside. And while fun and often funny, Buchan also gives Craw a clear character arc. This fussy, picky, detached newspaperman, who lives in carefully controlled comfort, has his expensive suit ruined and his impractical shoes destroyed on what to Jaikie is an unremarkable walk through the hills, but once he has gotten past his outrage and his discomfort he discovers real physical courage and, Buchan suggests, rescues his soul.

Buchan also plays with irony and mistaken identity, not only in Craw’s initial kidnapping, in which he is merely the victim of a student gag, but later, when one of the reporters finally gets into Castle Gay and has a surprising interview with the reclusive Craw—not knowing that it is actually Dickson McCunn. When the interview is published in a rival paper, Craw is furious at the very McCunn-like opinions ascribed to himself, but can’t disavow them.

All of which is humorous, but it also hints at Buchan’s genuine concern with the influence of the news media. Buchan wrote Castle Gay while recovering from an illness in 1929 and published it in 1930, a time when central and eastern Europe were still in a tumult as a result of the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles. Opinions on foreign politics were hotly debated in the Anglophone world, which was often a point of resentment in the countries in question. The influential Craw, stumping for monarchy in a republic presumably carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (the Evallonians’ names are all scrupulously polyglot, making Evallonia impossible to pin down as a stand-in for any specific country), attracts the wrong kind of attention from both parties in Evallonian politics, both of whom wish to manipulate British media coverage to their advantage. The fact that the coverage is exposed as often wrong, as when McCunn’s opinions are breathlessly reported as Craw’s to a stunned readership—and a stunned Craw—is not only funny but subtly shows how dangerous this influence can be. As biographer Ursula Buchan points out, Buchan “perfectly understood the concept of ‘fake news.’”

But while this is an interesting and, Lord knows, still-relevant theme, the joy of Castle Gay is in the complicated maneuverings; the slapstick discomfiture of Thomas Carlyle Craw; the shy love of Jaikie for Alison, one of the most attractive of Buchan’s female characters, rivalling John Macnab’s Janet Raden; and the stir of chivalrous romance in the end as Dickson McCunn, brought into the plot by Jaikie and Dougal, gets to participate in an adventure like something out of a book again—the thing he’s always desired.

Castle Gay may not be my favorite of Buchan’s adventures, but it has many touches of his best fiction and is an enjoyable romp through the Scottish hills. Not a bad way to begin John Buchan June.