Customer Reviews

Trust The Saint

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Consists of "The Helpful Pirate", "The Bigger Game", "The Cleaner Cure", "The Intemperate Reformer", "The Uncured Ham", and "The Convenient Monster."

Who's tougher - a big-game hunter or a retired matador? (Who better than the Saint to decide the issue?) How could a man die from cleaning a stain off his necktie? The answers to these and other questions are provided, as well as a meeting between Simon Templar and the Loch Ness Monster...

This collection, from 1962, finds the Saint variously in Hamburg, London, Paris, Hurley (England), Stockholm and Loch Ness.

The outer stories are rather formulaic and not very interesting, despite some entertaining trivia about the Monster in the last. But the two inner stories are minor gems.

In Paris, Simon attempts to help a frail chambermaid who, at her wits' end, has appealed to him for help against a particularly foul blackmailer. But the apparently easy task is unexpectedly complicated by Inspector Archimède Quercy of the Police Judiciare, whom we last met in The Saint in Europe.

And, very unusually in a story of this late vintage, in "The Intemperate Reformer" we have the return of two old friends: Sam Outrell, Simon's janitor when he lived at Cornwall House before WWII; and Monty Hayward, his reluctant but stalwart fellow-outlaw through Getaway, likewise over 20 years before.

Both of these stories compare with Charteris at his best, in the pre-War days. Whether they're worth the price of the book will of course depend on your budget.

P.S. For a list of -- and discussion of -- all Charteris's Saint books, see my So You'd Like To... Guide.