Rifles, The Facts And The Fiction

From John Buchan’s adventure novels to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, rifles have given British literature some of its most memorable passages

- Peter Revington

One warm afternoon in July 1920, a slight, dapper gentleman walked down St James carrying a rifle. He had just taken delivery of a new, .240 Apex boltaction rifle from a well-known London gunsmith. The city heat was oppressive and, with an hour or so before his train, he decided to call into The Athenaeum for refreshment before the return journey to Oxfordshire. There, in the relative cool of the West Library, he paused to consider the coming season’s stalking and the pleasure that would come from his new gun.

The man in question was John Buchan, politician, author and keen proponent of fieldsports, and the .240 Apex was a new cartridge, propelling a 6.2mm (.240in) bullet at around 2900fps. It had been developed in the early 1920s, primarily for deer stalking. Although the belted, rimless cartridge was produced for bolt-action rifles, a rimmed cartridge was also created for double rifles. As a cartridge, it was probably ahead of its time and in performance not dissimilar to the .243 Winchester that is so popular today. The rifle was to become Buchan’s favourite – he must have used it extensively, for while he was Governor-General of Canada in 1936, he lent it to his son, Johnnie, for a trip to Saskatchewan – although it is not known what became of it after his death in 1940. It certainly featured in one of his best-known novels. Buchan stalked regularly in the west of Scotland after World War I and often accepted invitations to stalk with others. He drew on his own experiences in his writing, and his accounts of both fishing and stalking in John Macnab and The Three Hostages remain as gripping today as they ever were.

REAL-LIFE DRAMA