Meet the Tiger (Edition2024)

I first met ‘The Saint’ when I was 12. I read ‘Knight Templar’ followed by its immediate predecessor ‘The Last Hero’ when i discovered a cache of ‘Saint’ books belonging to my parents in a cupboard.I then made it my mission to collect and read as many as possible.Since ‘Meet The Tiger’ was not published by Hodder and Stoughton, and had slipped into obscurity-a fact not lamented by Charteris, as he himself acknowledged it was not written to the same standards he presented in his later works-this story has escaped me until I discovered this transcription last month.Poorly formatted for 3/4 of the story and published in a plain jacket, it is (as is another Charteris novel, ‘Daredevil’) an intriguing insight into the development of the characters who became popular with ‘Enter the Saint’: ‘Orace and Patricia Holm, as well as ‘Anna’ and ‘Belle’.‘Daredevil’ would supply those other two main supporting characters DCI C.E. Teal and Simon Templar’s ‘Hirondel’ car.Like many ‘origin’ stories (although The Saint has been adventuring for a good 8 years when the events of ‘Meet The Tiger’ occur), it is incomplete and a little rough around the edges, and shows Charteris still learning his craft, but a cracking read all the same.Both Charteris and The Saint would mature and evolve, going on to both lead illustrious and exciting careers.

I was looking forward to reading this book. I have all the Leslie Charteris Saint books at home, and I just needed this one to complete the set.Unfortunately, to misquote the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch with Andre Preview - the words were all there, but necessarily in the right order."The Page layout and typography were appalling and the grammatical layout exhiliratingly awful requiring an awful amount of hard work to decipher the text. I would be a good test for MI6 applicants.Sentences were jumbled together, there was no paragraph settings. Chapters and Headings and text were all on the same line. Sometimes there were single word lines of text.Eventually, having worked through two thirds of the book the final third finally began to make sense as there were complete paragraphs, although the page layouts were still butchered to some extent but it at least became readable.I have been reading Saint books since I was aged eleven when I was living in Aden in 1960 - No radio, no television, just books in the evening to read. The first was The Saint Bids Diamonds - and I have been looking for a copy of this book for many years. The story is slightly disappointing - some of the ideas crop up again in Saint Overboard published in the late 1930's, however although Leslie Charteris disowned the book, the story is not that bad and if a little hackneyed, well, it was the first Saint novel and no matter how bad, it was infinitely better than any Agathe Christie cliched country house set of murders.If you can a better copy of the book please read it. It is not a great book, but it is worth the effort.

"Meet The Tiger" (later retitled "The Saint meets the Tiger") published in 1928, was Leslie Charteris's first book in the Saint Saga (even though Hodder & Stoughton later pretended that Enter the Saint was, presumably because they weren't the publishers of the former).It's a useful (though not infallible) rule of thumb that if a book doesn't hook you by the end of the first page, it's not going to. Here are the first two paragraphs of "Meet the Tiger":'Baycombe is a village on the North of Devon coast that is so isolated from civilisation that even at the height of the summer holiday season it is neglected by the rush of lean and plump, tall and short, papas, mammas, and infants. Consequently, there was some sort of excuse for a man who had taken up his dwelling there falling into the monotony of regular habits — even for a man who had only lived there for three days — even (let the worst be known) for a man so unconventional as Simon Templar.It was not so very long after Simon Templar had settled down in Baycombe that the peacefully sedate village became most unsettled, and things began to happen there that shocked and flabbergasted its peacefully sedate inhabitants, as will be related; but at first Simon Templar found Baycombe as dull as it had been for the last six hundred years.'Not the greatest opening Leslie Charteris ever wrote — he was to become pretty skillful later — but quite respectable for a young man of 21 in only his third book. The character so introduced, of course, was to become the longest-running fictional hero of the 20th century.Even at this early stage, the Saint (plausibly from his initials — but you knew that) is a more well-developed, more travelled and certainly more eccentric character than his near-contemporary, Bulldog Drummond. There are few of the wilder parts of the world which he has not visited, and few of those in which he has not had adventures. He has won a gold rush in South Africa, and lost his holding in a poker game twenty-four hours later. He has run guns into China, whisky into the United States and perfume into England. He deserted after a year in the Spanish Foreign Legion (Drummond would have been horrified at the idea of joining, let alone deserting).Likewise Patricia Holm, the Saint's companion in so many later adventures, is a much more interesting heroine than boring little Phyllis Drummond, who exists only to be kidnapped and rescued — someone whom the swine have got, or might get, and nothing more.The elements of the plot are pretty much the standard stuff of the day: a debonair hero for the reader to identify with; a million dollars in gold stolen from a Chicago bank by a mysterious mastermind known as The Tiger; a gang of ruthless criminals; and of course a damsel in distress. What separates this from the majority of such efforts is the way Charteris plays with these elements — tongue clearly in cheek, in places — and weaves a story that carries you along from first to last. Some of the characters (Algy, for instance, or Aunt Agatha) are so skillfully drawn that you feel you'd recognise them if they walked into your local pub.Other characters that recur later include Simon's faithful manservant Orace, and — briefly, in Knight Templar — Detective Inspector Carn.From what I can make out, "Meet The Tiger" is very difficult to get hold of; but if you want to read the Saint books it's worth making the effort. They're definitely best if read in the right order.P.S. For a list of all Charteris's Saint books (in two sections, because of length limitations) see my Listmanias.

A terrific introduction to the Saint and Patricia Holm. Typical action and wonderful plotting, this yarn is full of the bravado, banter, and brevity that makes all of the Saint novels such a joy to read.