LESLIE CHARTERIS' THE SAINT AND THE HAPSBURG NECKLACE

The Saint reincarnated, or reconstituted, once again in add-a-cliche prose--this episode taking place in Vienna in 1938 when a seductive woman, Frankie, asks him to salvage some crown jewels from her family castle in Hungary, now in Gestapo hands. Along with her cousin Leopold and the more dubious Max Annellatt who runs interference-assistance--although it's Frankie and the Saint who figure in the dungeon to safe repository retrieval. ""Habits of over a thousand years die hard""--so does a certain kind of readership, all according to what goes on in their upper storey.