An fifty-year-old mild-mannered gardener becomes a lovable legend in his town for his talent to romantically please every woman that fancies him.

In Zola's Paris, an ingenue arrives at a tony bordello: she's Nana, guileless, but quickly learning to use her erotic innocence to get what she wants. She's an actress for a soft-core filmmaker and soon is the most popular courtesan in Paris, parlaying this into a house, bought for her by a wealthy banker. She tosses him and takes up with her neighbor, a count of impeccable rectitude, and with the count's impressionable son. The count is soon fetching sticks like a dog and mortgaging his lands to satisfy her whims.

A troubled rock star descends into madness in the midst of his physical and social isolation from everyone.

Des, an enthusiastic incompetent, always promises rather more that he can deliver.

The core of the plot is the romantic triangle formed by the protagonist, a conscripted soldier named Private Brigg, a worldly professional soldier named Sergeant Driscoll, and Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of the Regimental Sergeant Major. The location is a British army base in Singapore during the Malayan Emergency.

Little boy Henry Clayton Jr. survives a plane crash in the untamed Amazon jungle. However, he's discovered by a tribe of vicious savages who plan on sacrificing him. Meanwhile, Henry's father ventures into the jungle to find the missing lad before it's too late.

Morgan, an aggressive and self-admitted dreamer, a fantasist who uses his flights of fancy as refuge from external reality, where his unconventional behavior lands him in a divorce from his wife, Leonie, trouble with the police and, ultimately, incarceration in a lunatic asylum.

Simon Templar is The Saint, a handsome, sophisticated, debonair, modern-day Robin Hood who recovers ill-gotten wealth and redistributes it to those in need.