Leslie Charteris

For weeks the Saint had been hunting two men across Europe...and one of them at least he had sworn to kill. Face-to-face with his quarry in London, Simon Templar takes his own side in a nightmare game of international conspiracy, rescues a beautiful pawn, checkmates a fiendish plot...and saves his king.

The Saint is on holiday in Austria and promising to behave himself, but when he sees a man being attacked by thugs, he feels obliged to intervene. The stranger seems remarkably ungrateful, and soon it's clear why, for he is a thief with a prize that men will kill for. Soon the Saint is in a race against time, the police, and his old enemy Prince Rudolf to keep hold of the loot.

When the Saint goes fishing, he catches an unusual specimen in the shape of a young lady claiming to be Adolf Hitler's daughter. And when the Ungodly also arrive on the scene, it seems clear the fish will just have to wait....

"Debonair thief-turned-detective Simon Templar circles the globe to solve cases with charm and cunning in a series of fast-paced RKO films (1939-41) full of clever banter and cleverer twists based on stories by best-selling author Leslie Charteris"--Container.

"When Secret Agent X-9 premiered in January 1934, King Features could proudly boast that its new adventure strip was written by the world's most famous mystery writer - Dashiell Hammett, the man who virtually invented the hard-boiled detective in such novels as The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and Red Harvest. The artist chosen was less well-known - at this point, Alex Raymond was merely an uncredited assistant on Tim Tyler's Luck and the humor strip...