All of his stories demonstrate a confidence in technique and are distinctive in style. In his introduction to
Modern Short Stories (1926), which he edited, he recognized that a short story was not simply a short novel, that there was a difference of quality as well as of length:
It must deal with a single episode, the motif must be narrowed so as to admit of a sharp definition, the impression upon the reader should be not of a piece of life portrayed in all its catholicity and variousness, but of life seen in a dramatic moment. Its parallel in poetry is lyrical concentration as contrasted with epic expansion.
David Daniell has defined the categories appropriate to the Buchan touch: the locus amoenus story (about a special and powerful place); the wise, classical scholar story; the "flight North" story; the Scottish moorland romance; and the experience of the power of the irrational. More than half of Buchan's short fiction originally appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, but it also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Living Age, The Yellow Book, and the Glasgow University Magazine. Some were written especially for collections, and a few have never been collected.
In four of his collections of short stories--Sir Walter Raleigh (1911), The Path of the King (1921), The Gap in the Curtain (1932), and The Long Traverse (1941)--Buchan used a framing device to link the stories into a cohesive narrative so that they resemble novels.
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