Featuring the Saint

by Leslie Charteris

Paper Book, 1931

Status

Available

Call number

Fic Mystery Charteris

Publication

London : Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1931.

Description

These three stories find the Saint flushing out swindlers in inimitable style. In The Logical Adventure Templar is on the tail of a famous aviator who has a sideline in drug smuggling and human trafficking. In The Wonderful War the Saint travels to the Central American republic of Pasala to avenge the murder of an oil inspector, which involves instigating revolution. Finally, in The Man Who Could Not Die, the Saint encounters adrenaline junkie Miles Hallin. Hallin claims to be able to cheat death but when one of Templar's friends is killed, the Saint decides to put that to the test.

User reviews

LibraryThing member jjmcgaffey

Pretty standard Saint stories. As far as I can recall, I've never read any of these before - it's hard to tell, since Charteris made a habit of putting various stories together in assorted combinations to make books. But I don't remember these. The Logical Adventure is mostly Simon showing off -

deducing this, that, and the other, and telling people to do random things which all dovetail perfectly to support his schemes. Save the girl, kill the villains, and escape any retribution - even though he's standing with Teal as one man dies. The only thing I can't figure out is the plane - did he damage it, or bribe the pilot, or was he just unreasonably lucky? A Wonderful War - the setting is quite annoying, a purely stereotyped tiny South American country jammed full of corruption. Simon gets huge heaping gobs of good luck to support his trickery, and his opponents get the equivalent loads of bad luck leaving them vulnerable to the same. Even when the Saint thoroughly screws up, _luckily_ it all solves itself in his favor almost as soon as he figures out his error. This one isn't even much fun to read. The third story is The Man Who Couldn't Die; it's better than the other two, though it still spends rather too much time dwelling on Simon's special perceptions. Still, he does figure out what's up when no one else has a clue there's something fishy (though it seems kind of obvious to me). Some nice cliffhangery moments near the end, and a happy ending (for certain values of happy - it is a Saint story, so the ungodly are properly smitten (smited?)). For the sake of the last story, I guess it's worth keeping. The first two I'll try to avoid rereading.

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