"The Saint on guard" by Leslie Charteris

I used to love the Saint. Simon Templar, the scourge of the underworld, who takes the law into his own hands to punish the ungodly, is the world's most debonair hero/ villain. He easily out-Bonds James Bond. His style and ready wit have enabled him to tweak the tails of law enforcement officers throughout the world, despite leaving a trail of dead baddies.

I thought I'd read the entire corpus when I was a kid but here were two stories I had missed. They show the Saint operating in the USA during the war, working on behalf of the good guys to track down spies and saboteurs. One of the unusual aspects of Saint stories is that they are almost always of novella length so that you get two or three adventures in a book.

This is Simon Templar at his exquisite best. Great fun; not very heavy.

January 2015; 253 pages