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The Last Hero
£6.40
A little wear but a nice copy. Minor imperfections to lovely jacket
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| Publisher | Hodder and Stoughton, Reprint edition (1 Jan. 1937) |
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by Dr. Gerard Charmley
‘The Last Hero’, also known as ‘The Saint Closes the Case’, is one of the best Saint novels ever written, and arguably the greatest adventure story written in the inter-war years. The second full-length novel featuring Simon Templar, alias the Saint, this epic adventure sees the Saint, his girlfriend Patricia Holm, and his associates, Roger Conway and Norman Kent, seeking to preserve the peace of Europe. Professor Vargan has created a diabolical super-weapon which will give to any country possessing it overwhelming strength. The wicked Professor Rayt Marius and his sinister organisation seek to obtain the weapon, in order to upset the balance of power. Is it simply so that Marius can make more money out of arms trading, or does a foreign despot stand behind the mystery millionaire? Templar and his allies must do battle with Marius, Chief Inspector Teal, and the military forces of two Governments, as they seek to suppress the secret of Vargan’s weapon and keep the peace of the world. In the end, all the battlefields of the looming future war come together in a cottage in Maidenhead.
In ‘The Last Hero’, first published in 1930, Leslie Charteris approaches literary greatness. While the inter-war adventure genre has been frequently criticised for national chauvinism (Dornford Yates please step forward), Simon Templar, one of the most anarchic and appealing of the heroes created during this period, emerges here as an internationalist, the League of Nations Disarmament Committee personified, as he seeks to destroy a super-weapon of almost Satanic aspect. Templar here could almost be the patron Saint of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, fighting both the British Government, the evil minions of Rayt Marius and the unidentified nation of Crown Prince Rudolf. The Saint fights powers and Principalities to an extent not seen in his later adventures. The British emerge as misguided, only saved by the determination of a few honest men, portrayed as criminals when fate has cast them for the role of saviours.
An unusually deep and challenging novel, ‘The Last Hero’ mixes adventure fiction and pacifism; the need for ordinary people to stand up against evil, wherever it is found, and the nature of love and sacrifice. Although the story is concluded in ‘Knight Templar’, this novel may be read without reference to its sequel, as a fascinating meditation on war and peace, its great message being ‘Nothing is won without sacrifice’.
by Tim Stockil
I remember enjoying The Saint when I was young so I thought it would be fun to re-read one of them. How wrong I was. The style is incredibly dated and the plotting defies belief. One minute the Saint is shot through the shoulder and the next he is heaving wardrobes around. As if! Much more fun to re-read the Modesty Blaise novels – they may be fantastical too, but at least they are well-written.
by L D
Good condition, good read.
by Paul Magnussen
For my money, this is the best of all the Saint books. On one level merely a good thriller, on another level it’s a very serious book indeed, because it deals with the horrors of war and what it’s worth sacrificing to avoid them; and its great merit is that it makes its points without ever becoming preachy or leaden.
Kingsley Amis, in his insightful and entertaining opus
The James Bond Dossier
, expends considerable space on considering what goes into the making of a good villain. Charteris’s best villains are easily the equal of Fleming’s, and “The Last Hero” has two them!
One may safely invent a sinister arms merchant from any country (although Rayt Marius is much more sinister than most). To present a sinister head of state, however, presents a problem: obviously one can’t use a real head of state, for reasons of both plausibility and libel. There are two traditional solutions, both moderately unsatisfactory: to invent a fictional country, which will irritate any reader with the basics of geography; or to be mysterious about which state it actually is. Charteris here opts for the second alternative, and great villain though Marius undoubtedly is, for me Crown Prince Rudolf of ———- is the best in the whole Saint Saga.
(It is of course logically pointless to try and work out what the country really is, but it’s quite fun trying anyway, as Charteris obviously realises as he plants clues in various places. It’s somewhere around the Balkans. The Saint doesn’t yet speak the language, which therefore can’t be French, German or Spanish. The Prince is Marius’s own prince, and Marius was once a guttersnipe in the slums of Prague; on the other hand, we later learn that the Prince’s appendix is in Budapest. The most telling clue [not divulged ’til
Getaway
] is that the Prince’s family owned the Montenegrin crown jewels. [King Nikola of Montenegro might in fact be the prototype of Rudolf’s father, were not the time-frame all wrong. This is cool juggling. How many readers are familiar enough with Montenegrin history to know that he didn’t in fact have son called Rudolf?] )
Professor K.B. Vargan has invented a weapon called the Electron Cloud, able to incinerate large numbers of people in minimum time. The British Government wants it, and so does Prince Rudolf, who has military ambitions. The story revolves around the efforts of the Saint and his friends to keep the weapon from ever being used at all, for the sake of the men and boys “who’d just be herded into it like dumb cattle to the slaughter, drunk with a miserable and futile heroism, to struggle blindly through a few days of squalid agony and die in the dirt”.
The familiar friends — Orace, Pat, Roger, Norman — are all here. Charteris was later dismissive of his early work, as older authors often are. But whatever its deficiencies, this book and its sequel
Knight Templar
have a drive and fire, and an idealism (eccentric though it be), that lifts them above the mundane.
Variously published as “The Last Hero” (the original title), “The Saint Closes the Case” and “The Saint and the Last Hero”. (The last shows how much awareness the publisher concerned has of his material: the Saint — so labelled by Vargan — IS the last hero!)
P.S. For a list of all Charteris’s Saint books (in two sections, because of length limitations) see my Listmanias.