And then a new sound broke into the room—faint and distant at first, swelling gradually until it seemed to pierce the eardrums like a rusty needle. The Saint stiffened up and stood still. And he heard it again—the mournful rising and falling wail of a police siren. It shrilled into his brain eerily, mounting up to its climax like the shriek of a lost soul, moaning round the room at its height like the scream of a tormented ghost. It was so clear that it might have been actually under his feet.
Simon sprang to the window and flung it up. Down in the street below he saw two squad cars pulling in to the kerb, spilling their loads of uniformed men. Among them, under a street lamp, he could recognise the officer whom he had misdirected on the road. The pursuit squadron had come home.
The Saint turned and faced the room. In his heart he had expected no less. He was quite calm.
“Will you hold the fort again, Monty?” he said.
He ran quickly down the stairs and the corridor leading to the vestibule. As he came out of the corridor he saw the officer mounting the steps. For an instant they stared at each other across the doorway.
Then Simon slammed the great doors in the officer’s face, and dropped the bar across them.
He heard a muffled shout from outside, and then the thumping of fists and gun-butts on the massive woodwork, but he was dashing into the nearest room with a window on the street. He looked out and saw a third squad car driving up; then a bullet slapped through the glass beside him and combed his hair with flying splinters. He ducked, and grappled with the heavy steel shuttering that was rolled away on one side of the window. He unfolded it and slammed it into place, and went to the next window. A hail of shots wiped the glass out of existence as he reached it, but the next volley spattered against the plates of armour steel. He had been right about that police station—it was built like a fortress. Simon sprinted from room to room like a demon, barricading one window after another until the whole of the ground floor on the street side was as solid as the walls in which the windows were set.
Then he went through to the back of the building. A section of armed men detached from the main body nearly forestalled him there: there was a back door opening on to a small square courtyard, and one of them had his foot over the threshold when the Saint came to it. Simon swerved round the levelled Luger: the shot singed his arm before he thrust the man backwards and banged the door after him.
The other windows at the back were barred, and Simon could tell at a glance that the bars would withstand any assault for at least half an hour. A face loomed up in one of the windows while the Saint was making his reconnaissance, and he was barely in time to throw himself to the floor before the man’s automatic was spitting lead at him like a machine-gun.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Simon lay flat on his belly and watched the bullets stringing a ruled line of pockmarks along the plaster of the wall over his head. He crawled out on his stomach and went upstairs again, and when he reached the police chief’s office he had a Luger automatic rifle under each arm.
He pushed one of them into Patricia’s hands.
“Over the landing, and take any of the rooms opposite. Some of ’em are trying to break in at the back. Keep ’em away from the door. Don’t hit anyone if you can help it—and don’t get hit yourself!”
He flung himself across to the window which he had opened before. Some of the policemen were keeping back the crowd of civilians who had materialised from nowhere; others were standing in groups watching the police station, and the Saint’s appearance was the signal for a scattered fusillade. Another man was running across the street with an axe.
Bullets chipped the window frame and scraped showers of plaster from the ceiling as the Saint took aim. He dropped the man with the axe with a flesh wound in the fleshy part of his leg; another man picked up the axe and rushed for the main doors. Simon spread a curtain of clattering steel along the cobbles in front of the man’s feet and checked the rush. It was certain suicide to take a step farther into that rain of spattering death. The officer shouted a command, and the man ran back with the Saint slamming bullets round his feet.
The police retired behind the shelter of their cars, and paused. Simon saw the peak of the officer’s cap rise up, and sent it flying with a well-aimed shot. The man sank down again, and Simon proceeded methodically to plug the tyres of the police cars. A couple of volunteers were carrying the wounded man away, and the Saint let them get on with it.
A lull descended on the street side of the battle, and through it Simon heard Patricia’s rifle across the landing spitting its syncopated stutter of defiance. He waited, ramming a fresh feeder of ammunition into the clips.
Then another order rang out, and the police leapt up as one man in a second and better organised attack.
One squad charged for the door, headed by the man with the axe. The others covered their advance with a storm of fire that went whistling round the Saint’s head like a cloud of angry hornets. Simon made his Luger belch lead till the barrel scalded his hands. It was a miracle that he was not hit himself, while he sprayed shots along the armour of the police cars and sent volleys of ricochets whining away off the cobblestones. One shot clipped his ear and drew blood. He shook his head and crowded a new box of cartridges on to the Luger’s hungry breech.
Suddenly he found Monty Hayward beside him, automatic raised, taking aim. The Saint caught his wrist and dragged him away.
“You stay out of it!” he snarled. “I didn’t take all this trouble just for you to get a bullet through your head, and I didn’t clear you of one set of charges so that you could be pinched for shooting policemen.”
Monty Hayward looked him in the eyes.
“That be damned for a yarn—”
“And you be damned for a fool. Your job is to look after Rudolf. What’re you doing about him?”
“I knocked him out and left him,” said Monty calmly.
The Saint looked round. He saw the prince lolling back in his chair with his face turned vacuously to the ceiling—and also he saw that the cabinet door was wide open, and the police chief and his inspector were standing in the room.
“What do you mean—you cleared me?” said Monty Hayward.
Simon turned him round by the shoulders.
“Rudolf’s confession was heard. I arranged it like that—that’s why I made him answer me, and got rather theatrical in the process. But it worked. You’re clear, Monty—and if you do anything silly now those same men will be witnesses against you.”
Monty looked at the white-haired police chief, and then back to the Saint. His mouth set in a stubborn line.
“I told you I’d see it through with you,” he said.
He flung off the Saint’s hand and went back to the window. Then he felt the Saint’s gun in his back.
“I mean it, Monty. If you don’t stay out I’ll plug you. Or else I’ll lay you out like you laid out Rudolf. Don’t be a fool!” They eyed each other steadily, while the guns outside thundered and chattered erratically. The regular thudding of the axe at the front doors resonated up through the building. And the Saint’s face softened. “Monty, it’s been swell having you. But you’ve done your share. Leave this to me.”
He swung back to the window with his rifle coming up to his shoulder. Again the hysterical rattle of the Luger battered through the room, like a sheet of tin jabbed against a fast-moving fly-wheel. Simon poured the bullets round the knot of men clustered in the doorway, kicking up little spurts of dust and powdered stone from the cobbles. The fury of his fire drove them back for a moment; then a shot from the barrage that rained through the window struck the side of his gun, numbing his hands and hurling him backwards with the impact. When he tried to bring a fresh cartridge into the chamber he found that the action had jammed.
He threw the useless weapon across the room and dashed through the door. Out on the landing the sounds of thudding and smashing timber were louder, and he knew that the minutes of the front door’s resistance were numbered. He took n
o notice. In a moment he was back, hauling a Nordenfeld machine-gun behind him.
“They shall have everything but the kitchen sink,” he said, and Monty saw that he was smiling.
Monty stood and watched him drag the heavy gun to the window and set it up so that it pointed down at the nearest squad car. A full belt of cartridges was clamped through the slots, and the Saint jerked at the cocking lever to make sure of its smooth running. He fanned a burst along the street, and then he straightened up.
“It’s been a great day, Monty,” he said.
He glanced round the room.
Prince Rudolf was rousing again, staring as if hypnotised at the police chief and the inspector who were gazing down at him. The meaning of their presence was writing itself over his brain in letters of fire. Then he turned his head and saw the Saint.
He struggled to his feet. One of the things that Simon would always remember was the Crown Prince’s last charming smile, and the gesture of those eloquent hands.
“After all, my dear young friend,” said the prince gently, “you have not disappointed me.”
The Saint looked at him without answering.
Then he turned to the desk and picked up a flat ebony ruler. He went with it to the machine-gun and rammed it through the firing handles, locking down the trigger button, and the Nordenfeld started a continuous crackling as the breech sucked in the long belt of ammunition.
Simon left it and faced Monty again.
“Good luck, old lad,” he said.
The Saint’s hand was out, and the blue eyes smiled. Monty Hayward found himself without words, though there were questions still teeming in his mind. But he took the Saint’s hand in a firm grip.
He felt a last strong touch on his shoulder, and the Saint laughed. And then Simon Templar was gone.
Monty Hayward heard him across the landing, calling to Patricia. The firing from the other room ceased. Their footsteps went down the stairs.
Monty stood where he was. He wondered whether those two splendid outlaws were choosing to go out as they had lived, in a blaze of their own glory and the stabbing flames of guns, making one last desperate bid for freedom. And he didn’t know. His brain had gone hazy. He saw the Crown Prince fingering a button on his coat, saw the prince’s hand go to his mouth, but still he didn’t move—not even when Nina Walden cried out, and the prince sat down quietly like a tired man…The door below was breaking in. He could hear every blow pounding through the heart of the seasoned oak, and the hoarse voices of the men working. There was less firing outside, but the Nordenfeld with the jammed trigger still played the crackling message of the man who had gone.
A long time afterwards—it might have been centuries, or it might have been a few seconds—Monty Hayward went to the window and stood beside the gun, looking out.
He saw the front doors give way, and the grey-uniformed men pouring in. He heard their boots clattering up the stairs, heard them pounding on the door of the room where he was, shouting for it to be opened. A bullet crashed through the panels and flattened itself on the wall a yard to his left. Still he did not move. The Saint had locked the door as he went out, and taken the key. The police chief bawled something to that effect, and a dozen shoulders tore the door from its hinges. Policemen filled the room.
Monty knew that the gun at his side gave a last expiring cough and went silent; that the room was a babel of voices; that Nina Walden was standing beside him and looking out also; that men were shaking him, barking their questions in his ear. He knew all those things, but they were only vague impressions in the haze of his memories.
What he saw, and saw clearly, was a figure in field-grey that came out of the main doors with the limp form of a fair-haired girl slung over his shoulder. Monty saw the crowd surge round them, heard the uniformed man’s curt explanation murmured from lip to lip through the crowd, and made out the word “verwundet” in it. He saw a passage open up through the mob, and the girl carried through on the shoulder of the grey uniform to the Crown Prince’s Rolls. He saw the yellow car begin to move slowly through the milling crowd, gaining speed as it won through the densest part, with the grey uniform at the wheel and the girl beside him in the front seat. And he saw, he would have sworn he saw, that as the yellow car reached the open street and whirled away into the night, the driver raised one hand in gay debonair wave—even before another man appeared on the station steps with a shout of revelation that was taken up in the furious rumbling of a thousand throats.
Still Monty Hayward stood there, not hearing the impatient voices round him, not answering them—a free man, living again the unforgettable hours of his adventure and seeing all his life ahead. So he would go back to his life. And the Saint would go on. For it was thus that their paths led them. There would be a chase, but the police cars had already been disabled. There would be cordons, but the Saint would slip through them. There would be armed men at every frontier, but those two would still get away. He knew they would get away.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
As with so many early Saint stories, this novel started life in The Thriller magazine; the first episode was “The Property of the Deceased,” which appeared in issue No. 157 on 6 February 1932, with the latter half appearing on 18 June 1932, under the title “Two Men From Munich.” By then both the Saint and Leslie Charteris were getting into their stride and little rewriting was needed to turn two substantial stories into one full-length novel.
Getaway made its British publishing debut in September 1932. When the Doubleday Crime Club published an American edition in February 1933, they christened it Getaway: The New Saint Mystery, but it was Charteris himself, in his guise as a publisher, who oversaw the retitling of the book to The Saint’s Getaway when Bond-Charteris published a paperback on 5 April 1945.
By February 1942 Hodder & Stoughton was on its seventeenth printing of the hardback, suggesting that this was one of the bestselling Saint titles. Indeed the book has been consistently published, and for a few years in the early 1960s, when the Saint books made their first appearance in paperback, Pan Books was publishing a fresh edition annually in a determined effort to keep up with demand.
Charteris dedicated the book to author P.G. Wodehouse. The two never met, but when Doubleday published Wanted for Murder, a collection of Featuring the Saint and Alias the Saint, in November 1931, Wodehouse was approached to provide a sales blurb. The resulting quote, “We have all been devouring the Simon Templar stories, and like each one better than the last. I hope you are going to do dozens more—they are simply corking,” was used extensively as you might imagine, for at the time Wodehouse was one of the bestselling authors in the world. Charteris was genuinely touched that such an author would take the time to do this, hence this book’s dedication.
When it came to The Saint’s Getaway around the world, the first translation was in Germany, where it was titled Die Jagd nach der Kassette and appeared in 1934. Sharing the desire of many English-language publishers, German publishers retitled German translations to include the word Saint (or “Heilige”) in the title. Consequently, the book was retitled Der Heilige kommt davon for a 1962 reprinting.
A Portuguese translation, O Santo e os diamantes roubados, appeared in the 1930s, as did a Spanish version (La evasión in November 1936) and a French edition (Le Saint et l’archiduc in 1939).
The Norwegians went with Helgenen må gå i dekning in 1964, but their near neighbours, the Swedes, beat them to it with a translation entitled Helgonet och Hans Höghet in 1940. More recent translations include the Dutch (De Saint En De blauwe diamant in 1955) and the Greeks (ΚΙ O AΓIOΣ ΦOBEPA ΘEΛEI in 1975).
An audio version was published in 1991 by Books on Tape, with David Case doing the reading.
The book was adapted for the 1941 film The Saint’s Vacation, which starred Hugh Sinclair as Simon Templar. The film made a couple of significant changes: as a sign of the times, Prince Rudolf was now working for Nazi Germany, and Patricia Holm is completely absent from the adv
enture.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”
—Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview
Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.
He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.
“I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1
One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.
When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.
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