Leslie Charteris: Thanks to the Saint (1958)

Edition: Coronet, 1961
Review number: 928

In this late fifties collection of six stories, Simon Templar returns to the America that has really been his home for the preceding twenty years. It is not one of the more interesting collections, though it does have an unusually high proportion of tales where the Saint is investigating a murder. The reluctance with which he does this is something of a running joke throughout the entire series of stories, objecting on the grounds that he is an action hero rather than Sherlock Holmes, but he does usually take on the role reasonably competently. (The motive for doing so is normally that the police automatically assume that he is responsible for any crime committed while he is in the neighbourhood, so he is working to clear his name. In these stories, this isn't the case, for some reason, but the reluctance is still there.)