1930 thriller. The Saint and Pat Holm stumble across a weapon so
terrible it cannot be allowed to exist, even in the hands of the
British government. Vt The Saint Closes the Case.
This is a novel of parts, and I suspect that some of that is
because it began as two separate short stories: The Creeping Death
makes up its beginning and end, while Sudden Death was inserted and
modified to be the central section. If things seem to be floundering
for a while, that's probably why.
The moment-to-moment thud and blunder is excellent, with the sort of
attention to small tactical details which makes me realise how much
this kind of thing has been an influence on my role-playing style: it
matters which way the car skidded and crashed, and therefore whether
the man with the gun can get out quickly or has to fight his way free,
because everyone here is a competent professional and of such small
advantages are victories made. The interludes of philosophising are
less convincing; all right, perhaps this weapon is the one so
horrible that it makes fighting in a war no fun even for heroic chaps
and so cannot be allowed to exist, but I cannot help but feel that the
heroic chaps of the Great War would have said the same thing about
poison gas and aeroplanes, the heroic chaps of the American Civil War
the same thing about the Gatling gun, and so on back to a caveman
arguing that a pointy rock was cheating. (Of course, we have the
lone inventor, perhaps less of a cliché then than now, so if he can be
suppressed the thing will never be discovered by anyone else. Contrast
the very extensive correspondence among real scientists in the 1930s
as they realised that yes, the energy contained in radioactive
materials could indeed be let out suddenly, and it was only a question
of how.)
At the same time, there is a distressing lack of basic tradecraft.
When you are leaving one person with a gun alone to guard three
enemies for several hours in the dead of night, you don't leave the
enemies untied! You may need to speak the number you want to the
telephone operator, but that just means you don't make a phone call
where the bad guys can hear you, which you shouldn't be doing anyway.
On the one hand, if these mistakes weren't being made, then small
victories would quickly cascade into bigger ones and the book would be
over too soon and without last-moment tension; on the other, the
mistakes make the good guys look frustratingly stupid. Combine that
with very extensive foreshadowing that one of the Saint's men is going
to die – no spoiler, it's right there in the introduction – and at
times the narrative seems distinctly heavy-handed.
And of course while Patricia Holm is here and still shows reasonable
pluck, she's not really an active participant in events the way she
was in Meet the Tiger. Of course it's a truism of this kind of
fiction that Girls don't get to play, and if it weren't for the fact
that in that first book Charteris had shown that he could do better
one wouldn't even be surprised; but it's still a disappointment.
Still, there's a spirit here which manages to shine through the cliché
and occasional turgidity. When Charteris remembers that he's writing
to entertain, he can entertain superbly.
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