By David Dickinson
In the final chapter of Castle Gay, John Buchan's second adventure with Glasgow grocer Dixon McCunn and the Gorbals Diehards, the author says his goodbyes. The villains, men with villainous names and at least one beard, Mastrovin, Dedekind, Rosenbaum, Calaman and Ricci are dispatched to their Ruritanian homeland in Evallonia.
The finest farewell is reserved for Buchan's favourite diehard, once known as Wee Jaikie, now John Galt of St Mark's College Cambridge and rugby wing three quarter for Scotland. "Years later, when the two monosyllables of his name were famous in other circles than those of Rugby football, he was to remember that evening as a crisis in his life."
Jaikie had fallen in love.
Unfortunately, Buchan never wrote a story where Jaikie's future fame was revealed. Perhaps, like another Buchan hero, Sir Edward Leithen, he would have been a lawyer who finds himself in uncharted and irregular waters. None of Buchan's heroes, as far as I can see, have enjoyed the afterlife given to so many other fictional heroes.
There was Jean Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea, that chronicle of the earlier life of the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. There was George Macdonald Fraser whose Flashman, pirated from Tom Brown's Schooldays, had many adventures in late Victorian England and met Queen Victoria, Mr Gladstone and Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes himself, of course, like Jane Austen's heroines, has had over 30 books published about him that were not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Thanks to the laws of copyright, fictional characters can be brought back to life by anybody once the term of copyright has expired. Recent years have seen two triumphant examples of the literary Lazarus. Anthony Horowitz has given us the masterly House of Silk with its pitch perfect reproduction of the Conan Doyle style and a plot that the master would have been proud of. PD James has written Death comes to Pemberley where Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are visited by murder at their great house in Derbyshire.
On the fringes of this literary landscape I have dabbled with short stories about Mycroft Holmes. Richard Foreman has brought Raffles back to life in the Albany. Speculation about the future life of literary figures is a fascinating game. Did the hobbits live peacefully after they've returned to the Shire? Did George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw live happily ever after or were their temperaments incompatible? My favourite, impossible for decades because of copyright, would be Smiley's War. We know that between 1939 and 1943 he was working undercover in Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, but that is all. Why was he withdrawn to London by his superiors and never allowed back to Germany? And, of course, if there is a Smiley's War, there must be its counterpart from the other side of the Iron Curtain, Karla's Peace. What did the Circus do with the master spy when they brought him back to Britain? Was he locked away in some Sussex village with that other defector Oleg Gordievsky to keep him company and play chess on wet winter afternoons?
David Dickinson is author of the Mycroft Holmes and Murder at the Diogenes Club