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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saint Saga #03,
By
This review is from: The Saint: The Last Hero (Paperback)
For my money, this is the best of all the Saint books. On one level merely a good thriller, on another level it's a very serious book indeed, because it deals with the horrors of war and what it's worth sacrificing to avoid them; and its great merit is that it makes its points without ever become preachy or leaden.Kingsley Amis, in his insightful and entertaining opus The James Bond Dossier, expends considerable space on considering what goes into the making of a good villain. Charteris's best villains are easily the equal of Fleming's, and "The Last Hero" has two them! One may safely invent a sinister arms merchant from any country (although Rayt Marius is much more sinister than most). To present a sinister head of state, however, presents a problem: obviously one can't use a real head of state, for reasons of both plausibility and libel. There are two traditional solutions, both moderately unsatisfactory: to invent a fictional country, which will irritate any reader with the basics of geography; or to be mysterious about which state it actually is. Charteris here opts for the second alternative, and great villain though Marius undoubtedly is, for me Crown Prince Rudolf of ----- is the best in the whole Saint Saga. (It is of course logically pointless to try and work out what the country really is, but it's quite fun trying anyway, as Charteris obviously realises as he plants clues in various places. It's somewhere in the Balkans. The Saint doesn't yet speak the language, which therefore can't be French, German or Spanish. The Prince is Marius's own prince, and Marius was once a guttersnipe in the slums of Prague; on the other hand, we later learn that the Prince's appendix is in Budapest. The most telling clue [not divulged 'til Getaway] is that the Prince's family owned the Montenegrin crown jewels. [King Nikola of Montenegro might in fact be the prototype of Rudolf's father, were not the time-frame all wrong. This is cool juggling. How many readers are familiar enough with Montenegrin history to know that he didn't in fact have son called Rudolf?] ) Professor K.B. Vargan has invented a weapon called the Electron Cloud, able to incinerate large numbers of people in minimum time. The British Government wants it, and so does Prince Rudolf, who has military ambitions. The story revolves around the efforts of the Saint and his friends to keep the weapon from ever being used at all, for the sake of the men and boys "who'd just be herded into it like dumb cattle to the slaughter, drunk with a miserable and futile heroism, to struggle blindly through a few days of squalid agony and die in the dirt". The familiar friends - Orace, Pat, Roger, Norman - are all here. Charteris was later dismissive of his early work, as older authors often are. But whatever its deficiencies, this book and its sequel Knight Templar have a drive and fire, and an idealism (eccentric though it be), that lifts them above the mundane. 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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