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ella101's review
1.0
The cover was so cool but I couldn’t really keep focussed with this book and didn’t really take anything in, I didn’t read the last two chapters as I felt inclined to stop and read something more interesting
blueyorkie's review against another edition
5.0
Even today, The Saint almost always remembered by the television series played by Roger Moore.
Many of us remember black and white television, but also an evening well spent. The Saint was synonymous with a good history, charm and beautiful women nearby, and that white Volvo "coupé".
Leslie Charteris left us with perfect stories and crimes.
Many of us remember black and white television, but also an evening well spent. The Saint was synonymous with a good history, charm and beautiful women nearby, and that white Volvo "coupé".
Leslie Charteris left us with perfect stories and crimes.
imakandiway's review against another edition
3.0
O facto de ser composto por um conjunto de contos fá-lo uma leitura fácil, embora, se calhar, não o melhor cenário para sermos apresentados a Simon Templar, o Santo, um dos maiores "con artists" da ficção.
smcleish's review
3.0
Originally published on my blog here in April 2000.
The Brighter Buccaneer is a collection of fifteen typical Saint short stories. These tales concentrate on Simon Templar as an avenger of those taken in by conmen, with a couple of other subjects for variety. All are entertaining, but some show signs of haste in their construction. (This is hardly surprising, considering the vast amount of material written by Charteris in the early thirties.) Most of the short stories about the Saint are trifles compared to the longer works, begin written mainly to fill up space in The Saint magazine. Still, these are very successful within their limited aims.
The Brighter Buccaneer is a collection of fifteen typical Saint short stories. These tales concentrate on Simon Templar as an avenger of those taken in by conmen, with a couple of other subjects for variety. All are entertaining, but some show signs of haste in their construction. (This is hardly surprising, considering the vast amount of material written by Charteris in the early thirties.) Most of the short stories about the Saint are trifles compared to the longer works, begin written mainly to fill up space in The Saint magazine. Still, these are very successful within their limited aims.
tony's review
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.
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