Enter The Saint

A shopping trip to Porvoo today yielded a couple of unexpected presents in the form of two old Saint books from a junk shop. I have been trying to find some for the last year, but they are not available anywhere that I know of in Finland – not even in the fantastic secondhand Englsh bookshop in the cente of Helsinki.

The books are Enter The Saint and The Avenging Saint (formerly known as Knight Templar). Both are very old paperbacks. The first is an American edition from 1945, a genuine Pocket Book, which is interestingly shorter than a standard paperback. The other is a 1948 Pan Books edition, with a wonderful cover.

I have read very little Leslie Charteris since I was about twelve years old, and bought a few reduced Saint books as some of my first ‘adult’ novels. The only one I have been able to find was in a Mammoth collection, The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels, and it was good enough to make me want to see what some more was like.

Now I will.