being held at gunpoint by Marius and the prince, Kent reveals that he killed the scientist, but not before being given the man's final notes on the electroncloud. In exchange for Marius and the Prince allowing the Saint and his friends Patricia and Roger Conway to go free, Kent agrees to hand over the documents. After Templar and his group (save Kent) depart, Kent reveals that he has played a trick on Marius and had secretly passed the notes off to Simon before his departure. As the book ends, Marius shoots Norman Kent dead as he stands in front of a window to stop Marius shooting through it. The Last Hero was published 15 years before the advent of nuclear weapons, and nine years before the outbreak of the Second World War, yet contains statements that could be seen as predicting these two milestones. Perhaps coincidentally, the name Albert Einstein is mentioned in passing. The electroncloud device is only shown in action once and, while the inventor of the device is killed, and Marius states to Templar that the machine Templar and Holm witnessed in action was destroyed by his men, it is never revealed what, if anything, Templar did with the scientist's notes. It is noteworthy that "The Last Hero" was published on the same year as Olaf Stapledon's vast science fiction opus Last and First Man - an otherwise utterly different kind of book, yet Stapledon also included the plot element of a scientist inventing a terrible weapon of mass destruction, which must be suppressed, even at the cost of its inventor's life. The Last Hero was the first of a trilogy of novels. The events of this novel (in particular the fate of Norman Kent) led to an immediate sequel, Knight Templar (a.k.a. The Avenging Saint), which was published later in 1930 and which takes place three months after the conclusion of Last Hero. In 1932, after an interval of a number of unrelated novellas and a full-length novel, the trilogy concluded with Getaway. After this book, the character of Holm fades somewhat into the background for a time, although she would return to the forefront in the novella collection The Holy Terror. The tone of the book is far more romantic and tragic than the average Simon Templar books. In most books of the series, the reader can know in advance that no matter what terrible