The Dancing Floor is the sixth book in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month 2019. You can find out more about the project and the books I read in 2018 here, and view my reading list for 2019 here.
What follows is a (spoiler-free) introduction to The Dancing Floor. It is also an excuse to show off my paperback copy of the book published by Hodder in 1961 with its cover that, to my mind, more resembles a poster for a B-movie than a John Buchan novel! I will be publishing my review of the book later in the month.
The Dancing Floor was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in July 1926. In the United States it appeared first in serial form, under the title ‘The Goddess from the Shades’, in Street & Smith’s Popular Magazine between May and June 1926. It was published in novel form in the US by Houghton Mifflin on 24th September 1926.
John Buchan first explored the idea for the novel in a supernatural short story called ‘Basilissa’ published in Blackwood’s Magazine in April 1914 and included in the US (but not the UK) edition of the short story collection, The Watcher by the Threshold. As Ursula Buchan explains in her recent biography of her grandfather, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, the story was inspired by a cruise John Buchan and his wife, Susan, made in the company of friend Gerard Craig Sellar in 1910. ‘They […] sailed down the coast of Euboea to Athens, passing the Petali islands on the way, where they were intrigued by a shuttered and impenetrable house, standing back from the shore in a walled garden.’ Ten years later Buchan expanded his short story to novel length, adding the character Sir Edward Leithen who had first appeared in The Power-House.
Like his other adventure stories (or as Buchan termed them, his ‘shockers’) The Dancing Floor enjoyed considerable commercial success. Janet Adam Smith reports that in the UK it sold 31,000 copies in its first year after publication making it his best performing book after The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. It had first year sales in the US of 10,000 copies. Combined sales by 1960 for the Hodder & Stoughton edition and later Nelson edition were 122,000 copies.
Sources:
Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])
Kenneth Hillier and Michael Ross, The First Editions of John Buchan: A Collector’s Illustrated Biography (Avonworld, 2008)
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