Huntingtower (novel)

Huntingtower is a novel written by John Buchan in 1922. The first of his three Dickson McCunn books, it is set near Carrick in south-west Scotland around 1920. The hero is a 55-year-old grocer Dickson McCunn, who has sold his business and taken early retirement. As soon as he ventures out to explore the world, he is swept out of his bourgeois rut into bizarre and outlandish adventures, and forced to become a reluctant hero.

The leading characters are:

Dickson McCunn: an affluent retired grocer, whose unostentatious and dour but stubborn and determined nature makes him a surprising hero. Dickson McCunn is formidable and dangerous partly because he seems unremarkable and ordinary, and friends and enemies alike are taken by surprise when he acts boldly.

John Heritage: an unsuccessful poet and ex-soldier. McCunn's first impressions of Heritage in the Black Bull Inn at Kirkmichael are poor; Heritage is opinionated on poetry, sourly cynical and openly patronising. But later, Heritage proves to be courageous, even foolhardy, romantic in his views towards Saskia, whom he loves from afar, and despite his war experiences he still has enthusiasms and a belief in right and wrong. It is his memory of meeting Saskia in Rome during the World War which prompts him to break into Huntingtower when he has discovered that she is there and is in danger.

Dougal, leader or "chief" of The Gorbals Diehards, a small group of six boys from the slums of Glasgow who have organised themselves into an adhoc scout troop and are camping in the vicinity of Huntingtower. They are the first accidental discoverers of things amiss at Huntingtower and act as a vital scouting force providing intelligence to the adult players.

Wee Jaikie, the most junior member of the Diehards, who is held in respect by his older friends because he is implacable in a fist fight and has the ominous characteristic that when other boys weep it is a signal that they have lost the will to fight, but when Jaikie weeps, it means that he has only just begun to fight. Jaikie acts as a messenger between the Diehards and their adult allies, especially McCunn and Phemie Morran, in whose house they are lodging.

Mrs Morran, the lady who gives McCunn and Heritage rooms in her house after they are turned away from the Inn by a man who turns out to be a member of the conspiracy, put in charge of the village inn to keep out potentially interfering people such as Heritage and McCunn. Mrs Morran proves to be a shrewd advisor, and articulates the novel's core philosophy of allegiance and loyalty. In her young days she was a maidservant at Huntingtower and it offends her deeply that bad people have put the house to evil uses.

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