What to read after “Enter the Saint” by Leslie Charteris: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
A. J. Raffles is a celebrated cricketer welcomed into London's best clubs, and by night a daring burglar. His friend Bunny Manders, drawn into the schemes, narrates a series of elegant robberies that mix careful planning with narrow escapes. Raffles steals from the wealthy, keeps his manners, and treats each job as a sport, while the pair dodge the growing danger of being caught.
Arsène Lupin robs the rich with flawless manners and a wink, slipping past locked doors and out of police traps alike. A master of disguise who lives both as an elegant gentleman and as France's most wanted burglar, he steals jewels, paintings and secrets, and often turns his schemes against people who deserve it. The stories follow his ingenious thefts and the detectives who try to catch him.
In a city of canals and thieves, Locke Lamora leads a small band of con artists who rob the nobility. A hidden power turns the tables, and the crew find themselves caught in a scheme far larger than any of their own.
Nathaniel is a young apprentice magician who summons the djinni Bartimaeus to steal a powerful amulet from a politician. The djinni is clever, sarcastic and far from willing, and the theft sets off a fight that neither of them expected to survive.
Eli Monpress is a wizard and a thief who would rather have a larger bounty than a heavier purse. To raise it he kidnaps a king, which brings the Spirit Court's envoy Miranda Lyonette after him. Eli's easy charm hides a plan that puts more than his own bounty at stake.
Slippery Jim diGriz is the galaxy's smoothest con man and thief, a well-mannered crook who talks his way through bank vaults and police cordons. Caught at last, he is offered a choice: work for the secret service he spent years outwitting, or face prison. His first assignment sends him after another criminal just as clever as himself, across worlds and space stations where every plan needs a quick rethink.
Bernie Rhodenbarr is a polite, skilled burglar who never hurts anyone and only steals from people who can afford it. Hired to steal a small blue box from a Manhattan apartment, he is still there when the police arrive and a dead body is found in the bedroom. To clear his name he has to work out how the murder was done.
In 1855 a polished thief plans to steal a shipment of gold being carried by train from London toward the Crimea. He gathers a crew, copies the four keys to the safes and studies the timetable, while a police informant threatens to expose the scheme.
Bernie Rhodenbarr, a bookstore owner who supports himself by burglary, is interrupted while robbing a Manhattan apartment and hides in a closet. When he emerges, the tenant is dead and his loot is gone. To clear himself and get the money back, he starts hunting the killer across the city.
Robin Hood takes to Sherwood Forest as an outlaw after a clash with the law, and gathers a band of loyal companions around him. They rob the rich and the corrupt, help the poor, and match wits with the Sheriff of Nottingham. The tales follow their feasts, disguises, archery contests and fights against unjust rulers.
Gen has been locked in the king's prison of Sounis for boasting that he can steal anything. Freed by the king's magus, he is dragged along on a hunt for an ancient artifact that could settle the fate of three nations, and he schemes, complains and remembers more than he admits.
Moist von Lipwig is a con man offered a choice: be hanged, or revive Ankh-Morpork's ruined post office. With the city's mail piled up undelivered in the crumbling post office and a rival message company sabotaging him, he sets out to make the letters move and stay ahead of his own past.
In the city of Vienne, the aristocrat Nicholas Valiarde plays the careless nobleman while secretly running a network of thieves. He is funding a long revenge against the man who ruined his family through a series of elegant heists. Then eerie deaths and a forbidden necromantic power interrupt his carefully built scheme, and Nicholas has to decide how far his deception and his private code will carry him.
Two orphaned brothers run away to Venice and fall in with a gang of street children led by the mysterious Thief Lord, who claims to be a master burglar. The children live in an abandoned cinema, stealing what they need and looking out for one another, until a strange commission and a magical carousel pull them into a bigger adventure than they expected.
James Bond is sent to a French casino to bankrupt Le Chiffre, a Soviet-backed paymaster, at the baccarat table. When the operation ends in torture and violence, he is sent away to recover with a woman he begins to trust, unaware that the game is not over.
A British weather station on an Arctic ice floe sends a distress call after a fire. A US nuclear submarine is sent to rescue the survivors, but the narrator, a doctor with unclear orders, finds that the station was also a listening post and that someone aboard is lying.
When Sophy Stanton-Lacy comes to stay with her cousins in London, she finds the household tangled in debts, broken engagements and bad tempers. Cheerful and managing, she sets out to arrange everyone's happiness, clashing with her proud cousin Charles along the way.
Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town and charms its officials and landowners. He has come to buy serfs who have died but are still listed on the tax rolls, and his odd scheme draws him into the vanity and corruption of the society around him.
Jennifer Sylvester is tired of being Green Valley's Banana Cake Queen and of obeying her parents. Desperate for a way out, she tries to outmaneuver Cletus Winston, the town's scheming fixer, and draws him into her plan. Their deal slowly turns into something neither of them expected.
Katarina Bishop has left her family's life of theft for a boarding school, but her father is accused of stealing five paintings from a dangerous collector. To save him, Kat assembles a crew of young thieves and plans a museum heist against a two-week deadline, with Interpol and a mobster close behind.
Fat Charlie Nancy learns that the father he barely knew was the spider god Anansi, and that he has a brother he never met. Spider is charming, magical and trouble, and he turns Charlie's careful life upside down while Charlie tries to bury a past that will not stay buried.
Stan Carlisle works the carnival, watching the geek at the bottom of the show and vowing never to fall that low. Clever and ambitious, he moves from a mind-reading act to spiritualist con, fleecing the rich, until his own past catches up with him.
A quiet Catholic priest with a mild manner and an eye for human nature solves impossible crimes that baffle the police. Across twelve stories he uncovers murderers, thieves and impostors, often relying on ordinary details that everyone else has overlooked.
Five killers board the same bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka, each with a different mission and a different plan. A suitcase of ransom money ties their missions together, and the confined carriages turn every polite encounter into a threat.
Start with “The Amateur Cracksman”, “Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief”, “The Lies of Locke Lamora”: they are the closest to “Enter the Saint” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Enter the Saint” these are Gentleman Thief, Trickster, Morally Grey Character), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The Lies of Locke Lamora”, “The Amulet of Samarkand”, “The Spirit Thief”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
