2.0 out of 5 stars
Saint Saga #25, July 15, 2007
This 1945 opus finds the Saint battling black-marketeers and Nazi saboteurs.
The catastrophic slide in quality that started with
The Saint Goes West continues. In dismal contrast to early classics like
The Last Hero, "The Saint On Guard" is both preachy and leaden; the plots of the two stories here are formulaic and drearily predictable; and the villains are straight from Central Casting. The old friends are all absent; but this may be a good thing, considering the procrustean torturing of Iron John Fernack (from
The Saint in New York) into the pathetic Teal-substitute of "The Black Market". And whoever invented Olga Ivanovitch the Beautiful Russian Spy clearly had a much shakier grasp of Russian than Charteris had of French, German and Spanish.
A very few passages show the old Charteris touch, in particular the near-breaches of the Fourth Wall that started right at the beginning with
Meet the Tiger. For instance Simon, explaining the iridium black market to Fernack, remarks:
"You make us remind me of the opening characters in a bad play, carefully telling each other what it's all about so that the audience can get the idea too."
But by and large, for hard-core Saint aficionados only.
P.S. For a list of -- and discussion of -- all Charteris's Saint books, see my So You'd Like To... Guide.
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