Product Description

'Simon had about him that indefinable atmosphere of romance and adventurousness which is given to some favoured men in every age, and it attracted adventure as inevitably as a magnet attracts iron filings' Leslie Charteris

Exciting, debonair and ever so slightly disreputable, the Saint is ready to mete out justice in a way that only he can. These adventures take him all over the world, where, with that ever present twinkle in his eye, he flushes out swindlers, murderers and jewel thieves. He helps to solve an unusual murder in Paris, confounds a cunning crook in Bermuda and in Rome he is grabbed by the long arm of the Mafia at their peril!

Sir Roger Moore, star of the Sixties TV series, introduces this collection of post-war stories, which include The Patient Playboy and The Sporting Chance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #224186 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

About the Author
Leslie Charteris was born in Singapore and moved to England in 1919. He left Cambridge University early when his first novel was accepted for publication. He wrote novels about the Saint throughout his life becoming, alongside Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, one of the 20th century's most prolific and popular authors.

Customer Reviews

35-year pot-pourri
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 Listmania list). 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 Nº 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 Nº 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 Nº 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.

Best of The Saint
Good collection of the works of Charteris featuring The Saint.

Many of the early 60s TV shows featuring Roger Moore are lifted almost straight from these pages. Simon Templar, the black heart, never loses his appeal.