Enriched edition. An English countryside mystery-thriller featuring The Saint on holiday in Baycombe, unmasking a notorious criminal and hunting hidden treasure.By Leslie Charteris
Meet the Tiger (1928) inaugurates Simon Templar, the Saint, a debonair adventurer poised between detective, swashbuckler, and cheerful outlaw. In a seaside town, Templar hunts the elusive Tiger behind coastal smuggling, trading quips and feints beside Patricia Holm, his spirited ally. Charteris fuses harum-scarum chases, masquerade, and romantic banter with a jaunty, intrusive narrator who winks at the reader. The book sits at the spry edge of the interwar thriller, refreshing Buchan and Sapper with a more ironic, morally elastic hero. Leslie Charteris (1907-1993), born in Singapore to a Chinese father and English mother and educated in England, left university to write. In the opportunistic print culture of the late 1920s, he modeled a cosmopolitan gentleman-rogue who spurned the tidy puzzles of the Golden Age for kinetic adventure. Drawing on A. J. Raffles and the Scarlet Pimpernel while tweaking officialdom, Charteris distilled youthful bravura and outsider cosmopolitanism into Templar's insouciant voice - later powering magazines, films, radio, and television. Readers of classic thrillers and lively crime fiction will relish this inaugural Saint adventure - for its breezy nerve, flirtatious wit, and inventive set pieces - and for the glimpse it offers of a franchise finding its stride.
Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
