NORMAN Douglas (1868-1952) set his first novel, South Wind (1917), in the sun-drenched island of Capri, which he calls Nepenthe, intending that it should describe a set of circumstances which would make the murder of a bishop excusable. Douglas was born in Austria, grew up speaking German and rejected both the Calvinist ethos of his Aberdeenshire family background and the north European oppressiveness of his childhood, settling in the south of Italy and indulging himself apparently guiltlessly in the company of adolescent boys, paganism and sunshine. Equally outré is John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), a committed anarchist who wrote novels and poetry in German, including a novel of homosexual sub-culture in Berlin, The Hustler (1926), and the poem Morgen (Morning) which was set by the great composer Richard Strauss and became one of his most widely known and best-loved orchestral songs.

A contemporary international traveller of a very different stripe, Violet Jacob (1863-1946) was long resident in India and journeyed elsewhere, painting, writing diaries and novels as well as poems in rich vernacular Scots. She was born into the Kennedy-Erskine family, near Montrose at the ancestral home, the House of Dun. She married the soldier Arthur Jacob in 1894, travelled with him and his regiment to India and Egypt, then lived in England. Her mother was Welsh and her first novel was set in the Welsh borders, The Sheepstealers (1902). The Interloper (1904) was set in Scotland, many characters speaking Scots, and she wrote other books for children and popular romance fiction, but her finest novel is Flemington (1911), a spy story set in Jacobite times, an exploration of divided loyalties (Balnillo House in the novel is modelled on the House of Dun). Themes of mistaken or disguised identity had been prominent in The Interloper, but here they are put to intensely dramatic effect, linking with Scott’s Waverley and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Landscape as metaphoric expression of unreliable co-ordinate points, human motivation as mysterious and flawed, loyalty and hope as compromised, tragically broken by circumstance and the politics of the time, are all clearly focused themes in the novel. There are good short stories in Tales of My Own Country (1922) and of her poems, Tam i’ the Kirk and The Wild Geese have a piercing vernacular pathos and poignant authority. The latter, performed by Jim Reid or Jean Redpath, is heartbreaking and strong. (You can find it online.)

There’s an immediate, factual tangibility and mysteriousness about her poems that draw upon ballad tradition but craftily leave questions unanswered. In The Jaud, the life of a respectable woman may seem unfulfilled compared to that of someone less “virtuous” or morally strict, but the question is: Whose experience is more valuable? A child whose father has drowned at sea has a ghostly premonition on his way to the shore to meet him, when another question arises: What has really happened? Jacob has the great virtue of leaving ego, philosophy and politics out of her poems: there are spare, lean strokes, sharp, suggestive lines, packed with implication and understatement. Her only son was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and her husband died in 1937. She returned to her native Angus, where she lived till 1946. Her diaries, novels, paintings and stories are varied, curious, and have an international provenance, but haunting, longing, loyalty and home are keynotes in her later work. They are contemporary with the Kailyard writers. While Douglas Brown and MacDougall Hay responded violently to the couthy sentimentalism of the worst of them, as we saw last week, Jacob maintained an independently minded subtlety and emotionally poised style. In her writing, tragedy is understated but no less powerful for that.

A different kind of writer altogether was John Buchan (1875-1940), whose novels vividly describe Scottish landscapes and characters. Prester John (1910) begins with a boy on the shore at evening, witnessing the amazing dance of the tall black man John Laputa around a blazing bonfire. This prefigures a fascination with the power of his nemesis that develops when they meet again in South Africa. John has become the charismatic leader of a black African rebellion to overthrow white imperialism, while the boy has become an adult who will have numerous adventures and hair-breadth escapes before the rebellion is defeated and the noble savage meets his end. Structurally, the novel is a revision of Scott’s Waverley, with the main character seduced and enthralled by the villain – except that in Scott’s novel loyalties are culturally entwined and progress is diminishment. For Buchan, imperial authority is paternal, good and strong. Racism and the sexuality of power relations are flagrantly evident but Buchan’s prose is so clear, the narrative so fast and well-balanced, that the tension between the “virtues” of Empire and the justified energy of self-determination rising against it is vibrant throughout.

Buchan is a terrific storyteller. It’s only by reading against the grain of his prose that his allegiances can be questioned. The tension in his writing derives from the way his literary skill is applied to the edge of the historical moment in which he was living. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (first published in Edinburgh in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899) and the stories of RB Cunninghame Graham also come out of this moment. Buchan exploits the context for adventure, while Conrad and Cunninghame Graham expose its deepest horrors for literary and moral judgement, but they all come out of the same late 19th, early 20th-century, transitional world.

BORN in Perth, Buchan grew up partly in the Borders, took his first degree at Glasgow then went to Oxford. His love of Scotland was compromised – or complemented – by his commitment to Anglocentric political authority. In his worldview, England afforded civilised security, Scotland meant wildness and adventure. He loved the Scots language, poetry, and the fiction of Scott and Stevenson, but his career was firmly embedded in the British establishment, and he became Baron Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada, where he died. The pathos of his position is partly what engendered his fine last novel, Sick Heart River (1941) in which the main character, Sir Edward Leithen, sacrifices himself in Canada to save a tribe of indigenous people from extinction. The descriptions of the Canadian wilderness, the moral dedication of Leithen and the principle that the native people have a right not to be treated as mere subjects by a distant imperialist authority are all strongly depicted. It’s as if in the relation between indigenous people and the authority of imperial power there is an unspoken allegory of the relation of all native peoples, including those of Scotland, to Westminster.

Buchan was the author of many novels of lasting value, not only entertaining “shockers” as he dismissively called them, of which The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is the best-known after various film and theatrical versions. This contains the most lovingly depicted images of Scotland when Richard Hannay is on the run in the Borders. In literary terms, it has the most fascinating final confrontation. The villains are exposed by the hero only when he recognises them through their disguises – disguises which are not supplied by make-up or false moustaches, but by essential ways of presenting themselves in behaviour, body-language, mannerisms and attitudes. In other words, Buchan recognised the significance of visual appearance as politically persuasive propaganda well before the rise of mass media. Buchan’s writing in this part of the book is intensely well-judged and adroit, and untranslatable to screen media. No film version has ever tried to present the book’s actual climax.

Mr Standfast (1919) includes colourful and politically-determined descriptions of Glasgow and the (allegedly) Irish- and Communist-controlled political revolutionaries of Red Clydeside, with a portrait of a character who seems to be modelled on John Maclean, the revolutionary appointed by Lenin as the Communist Soviet government’s Glasgow consul. Huntingtower (1920) gives us a group of Glasgow boys from the slums, the Gorbals Die-Hards, taken into the Scottish Highlands by the benevolent retired grocer Dickson MacCunn, where they become embroiled in anti-Tsarist Bolshevik plots. Buchan’s imperialist ideal is clear enough but the representation of slum-children in this sympathetic context suggests his benevolent, paternal attitude to improvement for the working-class, and if that seems horribly patrician, we should remember that the fictionalising of the characters gives them a life beyond the limitations of their author’s intentions. Wee Jakey, for example, beyond sentimentalism, is a master of his own self-determination who might come to scare any aristocrat when he grows up. Imagine what the Gorbals Die-Hards could have done if John Maclean had been leading them instead of Dickson MacCunn.

Witch Wood (1927) is a historical novel in the line of Scott and Stevenson, in which the central character is torn by religious doubt and ambiguous social allegiances: politics and sexuality are drawn into the mix. And A Prince of the Captivity (1933) is an important anti-Nazi novel, possibly the first popular novel to affirm Jewish integrity in the face of rising Fascism. Its date, like that of the other novels, suggests the proximity of Buchan’s writing to the major political events of his time. Its closest companion in fiction is Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Anna Buchan (1877-1948), John’s sister, published many novels under the name O Douglas, the best of which is perhaps The Setons (1917). Her fiction is in the same sphere of close observation of domestic life as that of the Findlater sisters Mary (1865-1963) and Jane (1866-1946), who wrote individually and in collaboration, notably in their novel-of-manners Crossriggs (1908). While never profoundly exploring social and sexual potency, as Susan Ferrier, Catherine Carswell, Nan Shepherd, Willa Muir, Janice Galloway or AL Kennedy have done, their novels open up domestic Scottish life in more unsettling, comic and ironic ways than their male contemporaries of the Kailyard school, Crockett and Maclaren, and deserve more extensive revaluation.

At least four other novelists of the period are worth revisiting. George Blake (1893-1961), born in Greenock and wounded at Gallipoli in World War I, became a journalist on the Glasgow Evening News when Neil Munro was editor, and a familiar figure in the literary world of the 1920s and 1930s. His literary reputation rests on a series of novels depicting industrial Glasgow and the development of shipbuilding on the river Clyde, such as The Shipbuilders (1935) and the “Garvel” series (set in Greenock), including The Westering Sun and The Constant Star (both 1946). Blake was also a fierce critic of the Kailyard novelists, partly because his fiction embodied a social realism from which the Kailyarders insulated themselves. His work is close to that of Dot Allen (1892-1964), in her classic of the Depression, Hunger March (1934), and points forward to that of Edward Gaitens, William McIlvanney and James Kelman.

BY contrast, although James Barke (1905-58) did write of industrial Glasgow in Major Operation (1936), his most lasting book is The Land of the Leal (1939), a Tolstoyan vision of the lives of farmers’ workers in the south-west of Scotland, in the Rhinns of Galloway. His most popular books are a series of novels on the life of Robert Burns, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (1946), The Song in the Greenthorn Tree (1947), The Wonder of All the Gay World (1949), The Crest of the Broken Wave (1953), The Well of the Silent Harp (1954) and the posthumously published sequel, Bonnie Jean (1959). The writing is lucid and the narrative fast in all these novels, in the style of Russian socialist realism.

AJ Cronin (1896-1981), on the other hand, apparently died a millionaire, a tax exile in Switzerland, the richest writer Scotland produced till JK Rowling. A writer of international popularity, his fame rests on the invention of Dr Finlay, whose stories were adapted for television (1962-71 and 1993-96), variations on the Kailyard ethos of small-town domestic dilemmas. His most commercially successful novel was The Citadel (1937), an exposé of the British medical world which, it’s been suggested, prompted the foundation of the National Health Service. His most notorious work was his first novel, Hatter’s Castle (1931), about a monstrous patriarch, a kind of anti-Kailyard novel akin to The House with the Green Shutters or Gillespie. Cronin’s commercial skill, therefore, rested on a keen sense of topicality and a determined exploitation of both Kailyard and anti-Kailyard positions.

Many of the writers we’ve looked at over these recent essays explode the conventional idea that the era of the Kailyard was typified by mere sentimentalism, but Cronin’s success is also a warning. Commercial exploitation of human feeling was inevitable in the world these writers inhabited, and has become even more ingrained in modern culture since then. But not all writers were enthralled by commercial success. Some set their sights on more important things.