Customer Reviews

The Best of the Saint, Vol. 2

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As is usually the case with "Best of" compilations, this two-volume anthology should more properly be called "A Representative Selection of"; although I'm glad to see that none of the inferior wartime Saint stories is included, and that this set does also at least contain genuine Charteris stories, and not the later pot-boilers written by ghost-writers under Charteris's name.

It's always seemed to me that if you like the Saint stories enough to read more than a couple of them, it's worth starting at the beginning and reading them in the right order (as described in my So You'd Like To... Guide). Otherwise, you miss so much: to take just one example, the references in "The Sporting Chance" to Norman Kent (hero -- although not the eponym -- of The Last Hero) will be meaningless to you.

However, if anthologies such as this are more to your taste, then I would say that the stories in Vol. 1 (which are earlier) are generally better than those in Vol. 2 (with the notable exception of "The Golden Journey" in the latter).

Here's what you get in Vol. 2:

The entirety of #29 The Saint in Europe (1954)
• The Covetous Headsman
• The Angel's Eye
• The Rhine Maiden
• The Golden Journey
• The Loaded Tourist
• The Spanish Cow
• The Latin Touch
The entirety of #31 The Saint Around the World (1957)
• The Patient Playboy
• The Talented Husband
• The Reluctant Nudist
• The Lovelorn Sheik
• The Pluperfect Lady
• The Sporting Chance
From #36 The Saint in the Sun (1964)
• The Better Mousetrap
• The Prodigal Miser
• The Hopeless Heiress

Nice to see Hodder finally acknowledging (in the flyleaf blurb) that Meet the Tiger was the first Saint novel, after years of pretending that Enter the Saint was. However, it's only true in the loosest sense that Charteris "continued to write about the Saint up until 1983": all the books after The Saint in the Sun (1964) were the said ghost-written pot-boilers.