Alias the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  THE ADVENTURES OF THE SAINT

  Enter the Saint (1930), The Saint Closes the Case (1930), The Avenging Saint (1930), Featuring the Saint (1931), Alias the Saint (1931), The Saint Meets His Match (1931), The Saint Versus Scotland Yard (1932), The Saint’s Getaway (1932), The Saint and Mr Teal (1933), The Brighter Buccaneer (1933), The Saint in London (1934), The Saint Intervenes (1934), The Saint Goes On (1934), The Saint in New York (1935), Saint Overboard (1936), The Saint in Action (1937), The Saint Bids Diamonds (1937), The Saint Plays with Fire (1938), Follow the Saint (1938), The Happy Highwayman (1939), The Saint in Miami (1940), The Saint Goes West (1942), The Saint Steps In (1943), The Saint on Guard (1944), The Saint Sees It Through (1946), Call for the Saint (1948), Saint Errant (1948), The Saint in Europe (1953), The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955), The Saint Around the World (1956), Thanks to the Saint (1957), Señor Saint (1958), Saint to the Rescue (1959), Trust the Saint (1962), The Saint in the Sun (1963), Vendetta for the Saint (1964), The Saint on TV (1968), The Saint Returns (1968), The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968), The Saint Abroad (1969), The Saint in Pursuit (1970), The Saint and the People Importers (1971), Catch the Saint (1975), The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976), Send for the Saint (1977), The Saint in Trouble (1978), The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978), Count On the Saint (1980), Salvage for the Saint (1983)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 Interfund (London) Ltd.

  Foreword © 2014 William Simon

  Preface © 1964 Leslie Charteris

  Introduction © 1945 Leslie Charteris

  Publication History and Author Biography © 2014 Ian Dickerson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477842652

  ISBN-10: 1477842659

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Douglas Madeley

  In memory of the Great Open Spaces…not forgetting the Pont Genois

  —Corsica, June 1930

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE

  THE STORY OF A DEAD MAN

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  THE IMPOSSIBLE CRIME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE NATIONAL DEBT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

  THE SAINT CLUB

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  “We will go out and find more and more adventures. We will swagger and swash-buckle and laugh at the half-hearted. We will boast and sing and throw our weight about. We will put the paltry little things to derision, and dare to be angry about the things that are truly evil. And we shall refuse to grow old.

  We shall learn that romance lies not in the things we do, but in the way we do them.…We shall speak with fire in our eyes and in our voices; and which of us will care whether we are discussing the destiny of nations or the destination of the Ashes? For we shall know that nothing else counts beside the vision.”

  —Leslie Charteris, from The Saint Versus Scotland Yard(1932)

  Time was, you could tell the Hero just by looking at him.

  He was nice looking, perfectly dressed, and goodness glowed from within like a bright white light. You knew that, within the space of fifty minutes (one episode, less commercials), the Hero would a) save the world or at least the small part of it he was standing in; b) get The Girl (yes, there was always a Girl, and in a time when calling her The Girl would not get you demonized, lynched, or worse); c) catch the Bad Guy and turn him over to the proper authorities, or dispense his own brand of justice; and d) do it all over again the very next week.

  We had police officers and private eyes, we had reporters and jazz musicians, we had doctors and secret agents, we even had the Hero of Heroes, Superman…who, disguised as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fought a never-ending battle for…well, you know the rest.

  Through it all, one hero in particular stood head and shoulders above them all, was the standard to aspire to, the perfect representation of the Man to Grow Up to Be, at least in my childish opinion:

  The Saint.

  To a seven-year-old boy in Chicago, the Saint was a wonder. Tall, broad shouldered, ridiculously handsome, impeccably mannered, debonair in the classical definition of the word, but boy could he deal with Bad Guys. Exotic locations (so the reality was Elstree Studios back lot, back then who knew?), glamorous women, dastardly villains, cool cars, and always, without exception, on top of any situation he ran into. Justice was served, mystery solved, Bad Guys nailed, all with a healthy dose of wit, style, and charm. Mysteriously wealthy enough to do as he pleased, anywhere he went an adventure was waiting for him, and he went a lot of places where adventures were waiting.

  (Two questions linger: Why was he almost always introduced as “the ‘infamous’ Simon Templar”? He was the Good Guy, why would he be “infamous”? Also, many times when he landed in a foreign city, the police were there waiting to tell him zey vere vatching heem closssely…but he hadn’t done anything yet, just walked off a plane; consider the fun his attorneys could have with that bit of business.…)

  Before I was born, my mother was a high-school English teacher and school librarian. A love for reading and for books was instilled at a very early age and, thanks to her patience, I could read at about a fifteen-year-old level when I myself was nine, back when such things were measured in that manner.

  About a year or so after discovering the television series, my mother introduced my younger brother and myself to the wonders of the library. Books. Lots of books. Lots and lots of books. It was like handing a child who loved to read the keys to the golden gates of Oz.

  At that point in time, I was obsessed with Houdini and magic and read everything I could get my hands on. Mom drove us back and forth a lot to the library, but as a former school librarian herself, she didn’t mind at all. One time I went to the checkout desk with my books, and made a comment about The Saint being on tomorrow night and I couldn’t wait.

  The librarian peered at me over her glasses,
glanced at my mother, and said, “There are books, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied. We were in a library; of course there were books. We were raised to be polite, so I said nothing about stating the obvious to this woman who was so old she obviously was a little off. (In retrospect, she was probably forty-ish; no real excuse, but that is OLD to a nine-year-old. She had to be at least as old as my mother, for heaven’s sake!)

  “You misunderstand,” she said with the patience of a woman who dedicated her life to indulging children. “There are books about that show you were talking about. The Saint.”

  There were what????

  She looked at my mother, who smiled, shrugged, and nodded simultaneously in that way mothers do. The librarian came from behind the desk, took my hand, and led me into the fiction area. It took her a moment or two, then she pointed, “Right here, young man.”

  I looked to where she was pointing.

  An entire shelf. Book after book after book, all by a fellow named Leslie Charteris. I reached out and picked one at random, flipping through the pages.

  The name “Simon Templar” leapt out at me.

  Score!

  She walked me back to the checkout desk, and I added the book (as I remember, it was Alias the Saint), and home we went. Just to show how instant my obsession became, it ended up being one of those flashlight-under-the-covers nights to finish reading it. The next day, with no shame at all, I asked if we could go back to the library. With that special wisdom mothers possess, mom said no, not until I’d read everything else I’d brought home.

  Okay, fair enough. I blitzed through the rest of the books, suddenly finding Houdini and his escapades to be second fiddle, and Saturday morning off we went again. I came home with five books, the maximum allowed per person at one time.

  Guess what they all were?

  It went like that over the entire summer. I never learned the librarian’s name, she was “The Library Lady,” but she handed a child the keys to the kingdom with a random comment and a moment’s kindness.

  Jump forward a few months, and my father was transferred to Nevada. We lived in a nice neighborhood with a huge mall within walking distance. One afternoon, sent for a half-gallon of milk, for the first time I noticed the spinner racks of paperback books in the grocery store. Idly spinning them around, a title jumped out and caught my eye: The Saint to the Rescue.

  Hey, I knew those books! Immediately, I grabbed the milk I’d been sent to bring back, paid for it, ran the eight or so blocks home, raided my bank, ran back to the store, and bought it.

  That was the start of a collecting obsession that didn’t end until 1997, when I finally found a copy of The Saint in Pursuit for a reasonable price. And that completed the entire series.

  The original stories were different from the Saint I knew. I was stunned to learn the first novel was published in 1928. The Saint of the novels and short stories was more of a vigilante, and sometimes a brutal one. He had no qualms about offering a permanent solution to a particular villain, something that shocked me the first time I read it. He had a gang, initially, a core group of like-minded individuals; Monty Hayward, Peter Quentin, the tragic hero Norman Kent. Not to mention Patricia Holm, the perfect girlfriend. Simon could gallivant around the world, dally with other ladies (the name “Avalon Dexter” has always stuck with me), but he always came back to Patricia. All through junior high, high school, and the first years of college, I almost always had a Charteris book in a notebook pocket.

  Thanks to bookstores over the years, the entire series sits in a special bookcase. Thanks to a friend in a writers group who was downsizing her home, the Fiction Publishing set sits on top of that bookcase. The “September Seven” published to coincide with Return of the Saint are there, too. And now, thanks to the advent of DVDs, the vagaries and whims of syndication programmers no longer hold sway. Someone who knows me better than I know myself made the comment that she can always tell when I am dealing with an ugly professional matter: The Saint runs on the home theatre almost 24/7.

  I carefully considered the comment, marveled at the intuition, respected the intellect, then arched my left eyebrow in the best Saintly tradition, and suavely replied, “So?”

  I grew up believing this: the Good Guy triumphed, no matter the odds. Victims were always rescued, maybe at the very last moment, but they were alive and saved. If your cause was Just, and you were Right, you’d win. Bad Guys always lost.

  (insert pause…imagine shrug…picture sheepish look) I was a kid…what did I know? Heroes should be above the crowd; polished but not effete, superior but not snide, capable but not arrogant, strong but not uncaring.

  They should be special. No, make that Special.

  The Saint is comfort food for the brain. A return to simpler times, easier times, when black was black and white was white, and one had not yet learned the infinite shades of grey there are in the adult world.

  Simon Templar—the Saint—saw me through my childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and now sometimes in middle age. Of all the books bought and discarded over too many years to admit now, the Saint Collection was, and continues to be, carefully preserved. Moved across the country three times, moved another three times in the same city, there sits a bookcase filled with my childhood hero. In my own fiction, I actually found the perfect moment in a short story to use the phrase “…as the actress said to the Bishop,” and it fit perfectly. It was my personal acknowledgement to both a writer and his character that still have an influence to this day.

  I recently received an email from a reader about Sometimes, There Really Are Monsters Under the Bed. He pointed out that one of the lead characters at the climax is described as being surrounded by a “halo” of light and, in his opinion, the resolution was “very well done and along the lines of how Leslie Charteris’s The Saint—Simon Templar—might have handled the situation.”

  To say my Writerly Ego blew all out of proportion for a few minutes would be an understatement, to put it mildly.

  I am genuinely excited to see the Saint back in print. It’s been too long, old friend.

  Here’s a glass of Peter Dawson raised to bopping the Ungodly on the beezer, and hoping The Halo continues to shine for years to come, along with the sincere wish new generations find you as exciting and wonderful and entertaining as a certain nine-year-old did in mid-1960s Chicago.

  Thank you, Mr Charteris. You always promised us to “Watch for the Sign of The Saint.…He Will Be Back!”

  Now, he is.

  —William Simon

  PREFACE

  Bibliographiles, who study the small print on the backs of title pages, will already have observed that this book was first published in 1931, which is a longish time ago by ordinary standards. It is, in fact, one of the very earliest Saint books, and the first story in it was actually published serially even before any of the stories in the first collection of novelettes, Enter the Saint.

  At that time I had no idea that I would still be writing Saint stories more than 30 years later, or that an entire new generation would be growing up to discover them, who would then be working backwards through the list to trace all his adventures to the beginning. Even if I had, I suppose there is nothing I could have done about it: I wrote them as well as I could at the time, and publishers found them acceptable, and they seemed to please enough readers to pay their way. And I wrote them for the years in which they were written, without any thought of posterity, and certainly without even imagining that anyone would read them so many decades later.

  And now that the same publishers insist on bringing out yet another edition, I feel bound to explain again to any recent recruits to the Saint’s following, who might jump straight from the very latest Saint book to this one, that they must inevitably find great contrasts not only between the styles of writing but also between the characterizations of the Saint himself. For just as I have myself been going through the process of growing up which only ends at the end of a man’s life, I cou
ld not have written about a man who went through so many adventures without ever changing or developing at all.

  But that is a labor which could be endless, as my slothful instinct finally realized in the nick of time, and ultimately pointless anyhow, if my Immortal Works outlives me by a few centuries, as I expect them to.

  Therefore let this book go out as another period piece in the making. I only ask readers not to be beguiled by any accidental modernities into forgetting how venerable the stories actually are, and how embryonic was the technology of the world in which they were laid.

  And also, if you would be critically tolerant, how young was the author, and how correspondingly youthful was his hero.

  —Leslie Charteris

  THE STORY OF A DEAD MAN

  INTRODUCTION

  Knowing how easily I could get tiresome if I went on repeating (as many of you have heard me do before) that most of my notoriously outlandish plots are based on recorded fact, it should be a refreshing change for all of us at this point to introduce a story in which the situation is reversed, and the history of crime later adapted itself to fit a plot which I provided for it.

  This is one of the earliest stories of the Saint; and now that you have spent your quarter and been stuck with it I will frankly admit that it is not the best. However, it is not the worst either; and it will always be interesting to me for the light that it throws on an old proverb that “History repeats itself.” Because my own theory is that History, being an entirely involuntary concatenation of events, is by definition incapable of deliberately doing anything. My own more careful generalization would be that history is full of people who have tried to repeat the performances of their predecessors, usually with no greater success.

  For instance. This story centers, in part, around the desire of a certain man to become officially dead and yet at the same time to remain alive; and the way in which he proposed to achieve this convenient miracle is carefully revealed. He failed. But nevertheless, not long after this story was published, another gentleman attempted to perform the same feat by an identical method. His attempt to repeat History was fully reported by the newspapers of the time. I am obliged to mention this in case any other enterprising individuals should remain at large who still think he had the makings of a good idea. They hanged him.