Love Quote by Leslie Charteris

Romance, here, isn’t candlelight or courtship; it’s a refusal to live on autopilot. Leslie Charteris frames his subject as someone who treats “an exciting situation” not as a script to be executed but as a resource to be mined. The key dig is “mechanical movements”: a swipe at the stiff, dutiful masculinity of pulp adventure, where the hero hits his marks like a wind-up toy. Charteris wants the opposite. His man is “vitally and positively” present, almost aggressively so, as if joy requires muscle.

The sentence is built to contrast performance with appetite. “Believes in romance” reads like a moral claim, but it’s really a sensory one: romance is a technology of attention, a choice to interpret danger and pleasure as meaningful rather than merely efficient. That’s why the verbs matter. “Squeezing” is tactile, slightly greedy, and unembarrassed. It gives delight a physicality that sidesteps genteel notions of restraint. This is hedonism dressed up as integrity.

Contextually, Charteris is writing from a 20th-century popular-fiction world where escapism is both commodity and coping mechanism. The subtext is a defense of escapist intensity against the modern suspicion that thrills are shallow. He’s arguing that style of living can be a form of sincerity: if the world is chaotic, the most honest response might be to extract “the last drop” anyway. It’s not naïveté; it’s an ethics of fully inhabited fantasy, a portrait of the hero as someone who doesn’t just survive the plot but insists on enjoying it.