A review by tony
The Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris
4.0
A collection of fifteen shorts, all previously published in a long-vanished British Sunday newspaper, and all very much along the same lines as each other: a thoroughly nasty piece of work (alternating between low-class and high-class criminals) comes to Templar's attention, and he comes up with a clever way to impose his own brand of Saint-ly poetic justice on them (leaving himself significantly better off in the process, natch).
There's just enough variation on the theme to not get too repetitive, and for every eye-rolling piece of wildly overblown prose that doesn't quite work (“The feat of muscular prestidigitation was performed so swiftly and slickly that she took a second or two to absorb the fact that it had indubitably eventuated and travelled on into the past tense”) there's another that does (“Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr Lamantia’s emotions at great length, but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it.”)
These are generally more light-hearted than I remember some of the longer-form stories and books being, but they'd make a good introduction to the oeuvre for a newcomer.
There's just enough variation on the theme to not get too repetitive, and for every eye-rolling piece of wildly overblown prose that doesn't quite work (“The feat of muscular prestidigitation was performed so swiftly and slickly that she took a second or two to absorb the fact that it had indubitably eventuated and travelled on into the past tense”) there's another that does (“Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr Lamantia’s emotions at great length, but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it.”)
These are generally more light-hearted than I remember some of the longer-form stories and books being, but they'd make a good introduction to the oeuvre for a newcomer.