What Might Have Been:
The Story of a Social War

by Ernest Bramah

This new edition of Ernest Bramah’s speculative fantasy What Might Have Been (1907) was reviewed enthusiastically in the Times Literary Supplement: ‘abounds in humour and wit ... Bramah’s condemnation of the power of the press to corrupt and mislead is as pertinent today as it was in 1907’.

This satirical novel of Conservative resistance to Labour rule is better known in its abridged form as The Secret of the League (1909). It mixes social realism with office espionage, and accurately predicted the invention of the fax machine and the ascendancy of Labour politics. What Might Have Been is a political thriller, with a nail-biting Buchanesque car chase, a sea battle that C S Forester could have written, and dramatic rescue missions on the wing.

Now, for the first time since 1907, What Might Have Been is available at its original length, with 7000 words restored to recreate this lost landmark in British speculative fiction. Ernest Bramah’s other literary works include the Kai Lung short stories of fantasy chinoiserie, and the Max Carrados tales of a blind Edwardian detective.

Handheld Classic 1

£13 paperback, ISBN 978-1-9998280-0-4

The Runagates Club

by John Buchan

The Runagates Club (1928) was John Buchan’s last collection of short stories, a classic of British interwar short fiction. These twelve stories were written from 1913 to 1927, when he was at the peak of his powers, and Buchan designed The Runagates Club as a showcase to bring together the best of his magazine fiction.

Buchan’s most popular character Richard Hannay battles an ancient curse in South Africa in ‘The Green Wildebeest’. Edward Leithen tags along in an assassins’ war in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. The Runagates Club features First World War spy and code-cracking thrillers ‘The Loathly Opposite’ and ‘Dr Lartius’; tales of supernatural possession in deepest Wales, comfortable Oxfordshire and the House of Commons, in ‘The Wind in the Portico’, Fullcircle’ and ‘”Tendebant Manus”’; and stories of survival in the far North and in Depression-era Canada with ‘Skule Skerry’ and ‘Ship to Tarshish’. There is farce too, in ‘The Frying-Pan and the Fire’ and ‘”Divus” Johnston’, and the riotous journalistic romp of ‘The Last Crusade’ is the last word on fake news, for all eras.

Handheld Classic 2

£11 paperback, ISBN 978-1-9998280-1-1

Footnotes

1 Page numbers refer to the first printed edition.

2 ‘In conversation with Val Warner and Michael Schmidt in 1975’ (1981), in With the Hunted: Selected Writings, (ed.) Peter Tolhurst (Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2012), 399–406, 402–3.

3 Steinman, Michael (ed.) The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938–1978 (New York: Counterpoint 2004), 216.

4 Plock, Vike Martina, ‘A note on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “The Kingdom of Elfin“ (1927)’, Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2015), 6–8.

5 Warner’s letter to William Maxwell, in Steinman 2004, 215.

6 Page numbers refer to the first printed edition.

7 Sutherland, Helen, ‘From Elphame to otherwhere: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin,’ Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2005): 21–32, 26.