John Buchan's name will forever be associated with the classic thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps but he originally regarded himself as a short story writer and a 1912 profile in The Bookman described him as 'probably the best modern exponent of the short story'. His first published work, written while he was a student, were stories which appeared in magazines as varied as Blackwood's and The Yellow Book and three of his first eight books were short story collections. The Complete Short Stories, of which this is the first of three volumes, brings together for the first time all of his short stories in chronological order of publication. Andrew Lownie includes in this volume the stories which appeared in Scholar Gipsies and Grey Weather as well as stories never before published between hard covers. These include an important addition to the canon: A Captain of Salvation, a powerful tale of a man who restores his self-respect working for the Salvation Army in the East End of London until one day he is tempted back to a life of sin. The stories in this collection were written and published while Buchan was a student of Glasgow and Oxford Universities but most of them feature the farmers and shepherds of the Scottish Borders. They provide a highly revealing glimpse of John Buchan the man and comprise a fascinating complement to his novels.'Fans - and they are still numbered in tens of thousands - forget or do not even know that he had been a sort of infant prodigy. At ...