LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Brighter Buccaneer. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1933. First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1933. Reprinted many times, often [warning] with some stories not included.

    Leslie Charteris’s long-lived and internationally popular character, the Saint, has appeared in two widely different sorts of tales. In the novels, he is the piratical adventurer and self-appointed executioner, usually involved in melodramatic thrillers with lots of action and political intrigue. The Saint short stories, however, tend to be more jocular and subdued, and often have elements of genuine detection.

    Charteris has made one particular sort of short story his specialty — the “sting” story, in which Simon Templar outcons the con men. In doing so, he makes good the losses of the previously fleeced-in line with his reputation as “the Robin Hood of Modern Crime” — and pockets a nice profit for himself in the bargain.

    Several of the stories in this collection are classics in this genre. In “The Brain Workers,” for instance, Templar adopts his favorite disguise as twittish Sebastian Tombs to outwit one Julian Lamantia, dealer in phony oil stock; in the final story, “The Unusual Ending,” Lamantia comes in for another dose of the same (this time he’s running a Ponzi scheme). “The Unblemished Bootlegger,” a tale of poetic retribution, is noteworthy in that it marks the debut of Peter Quentin, who became one of the Saint’s regular accomplices in later stories.

    “The Appalling Politician” provides a break from the con games. It is a detective story, in which the Saint’s long-suffering adversary, Chief Inspector Claude Eustace Teal, calls on Templar to help out with a stolen-treaty problem. In this one, as he often does, Charteris makes use of his fictional alter ego to get off a few witty blasts at pompous British politicians.

    The best of all the stories is “The Green Goods Man,” in which Templar neatly turns the tables on a counterfeit-money scam artist. It has two truly memorable scenes and a slick double-twist ending.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.