THE FANTASTIC SAINT

Six yarns starring Simon Templar, crime fiction's Raffles-with-James-Bond, each containing an element of the fantastic, and more or less chronologically arranged (1932-62). The two oldest tales are the weakest: the Saint cons a con-man who builds autogyros; the Saint thwarts the ambitions of a man who's discovered how to transmute metals into gold. And the most recent is a so-so who-might-do-it involving the Loch Ness monster. But in between are three juicier offerings: a mad scientist breeds giant intelligent ants to supplant the human race; a business tycoon uses voodoo to make zombies of his factory workers; and, in a sardonic, genuinely atmospheric yarn, the Saint gets tangled up with a bunch of B-movie characters who insist that they're figments of someone else's imagination. A barrel-scraping idea for an anthology (Charteris points out as much in his afterword), with the contents just about strong enough to carry it off.