After some thirty years or so, it was marvellous to
reacquaint myself with the Saint, Patricia Holm, Hoppy Uniatz, Peter Quentin,
Orace and Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. While I enjoyed Charteris’s later and
shorter moral tales, I much prefer the older stories. Printed in 1937, this was
the 17th book in the series and has a surprisingly grim edge to it
that is lacking in the modern versions translated to TV.
The three novellas are told in Charteris’s inimitable
omniscient narrator’s voice, often with his tongue in his cheek. He had a
highly amusing turn of phrase: ‘They studied him with the detached curiosity of
surgeons inspecting a new kind of tumour revealed by an operation.’
Charteris was also a keen observer and used language to good
effect and because of this he’s a pleasure to read. Take, for example, a
paragraph from Chapter 8: ‘The boisterous human fellowship of the Broken Sword
was swallowed up in an abyss as he closed the door of the public bar behind
him. As if he had been suddenly transported a thousand miles instead of merely
over the breadth of a threshold, he passed into a different world as he faced
the quiet road outside – a world where strange and horrible things happened
such as the men he had left behind him to their beer would never believe, a
world where a man’s life hung on the flicker of an eyelid and the splitting of
a second, and where there was adventure of a keen corrosive kind such as the
simple heroes of mythology had never lived to see. The Saint’s eyes swept left
and right before he stepped out of the shadow of the porch, but he saw nothing
instantly threatening…’ Great stuff!
See also my blogs November 2013 blogs:
and
The entire canon (bar the first book) have been republished;
please refer to this website for more details...
***
Spanish
Eye (Crooked Cat Publishing)
From Amazon.com here
From Amazon.co.uk here
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