He said, almost awkwardly for him, “I just wanted to be in at the death.”
“You were,” Simon assured him, somewhat unnecessarily.
“Are there any more of ’em?”
“Quite a lot—I hope. But not around here. And we don’t have to bother about them. Just turn that stuff on the desk over to the FBI. The rest will be their routine.”
“I’d sure like to know what happened to you.”
The Saint told him.
Kinglake scratched his head.
“I’ve seen plenty in my time, believe it or not,” he said. “But you’ve topped all of it.” He ended with an admission. “I’ll have to think of a new story now, though; because I messed up the one you gave me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the Saint. “Whatever you said, you can tell ’em you only said it for a stall, because you couldn’t give out what you really knew. The true story is your story now. Only leaving me out. There’s plenty of evidence on that desk. Go on and grab yourself some glory.”
“But these are the three guys you named in The Times-Tribune.”
“So what? So I happened to know too much, and I was too smart for anybody’s good. You knew just as much if not more, but you were playing a cagey game. You say that by shooting my mouth off like that I told Maris and Co. that they were hot, and nearly ruined all your well-laid plans. That’s why you were so hopping mad about me. In fact, you had to perform superhuman feats to salvage the situation after I balled it up. Say anything you like. I won’t contradict you. It suits me better that way. And there’s nobody else left who can call you a liar.”
The Lieutenant’s steely eyes flickered over the room. The truth of that last theorem was rather gruesomely irrefutable.
Then his glance went to Olga Ivanovitch.
She stood very quietly beside the Saint, her pale face composed and expressionless, her green eyes passing unemotionally over the raw stains and ungainly attitudes of violent death. You could tell nothing about what she thought or expected, if she expected anything. She waited, in an incurious calm that suddenly struck Simon as almost regal; she hadn’t asked anything or said anything.
“What about her?” Kinglake asked.
Simon’s pockets had been emptied completely. He bent over one of the bodies and relieved it of a packet of cigarettes that it wouldn’t be needing any more.
“I’m afraid I was holding out on you about her,” he answered deliberately. “She’s one of our people. Why the hell do you think she was tied up in the cellar with me? But I couldn’t tell you before.”
He was so easy and matter-of-fact with it that the Lieutenant only tried to look unstartled.
“But what story am I supposed to give out?”
“Like me—the less you say about her the better,” Simon told him. “She was just one of the hostesses at the Blue Goose, and Maris was making use of her through his role of bartender. He set her up in this house, so he had a key. But she wasn’t here tonight. When the set-up began to look too sticky, she scrammed. You don’t think she’s worth fussing about.”
Simon hadn’t looked at the girl until then. He did now.
“By the way,” he said casually, “you’d better get a move on with this scramming act. Kinglake is going to have to call Headquarters in a few minutes. You can scram in my car—it won’t take me more than ten minutes to check out of the Alamo House. Go and put some things in a bag.”
“Yes,” she said impassively and obediently, and went out of the room.
Simon smoked his inherited cigarette with unalloyed enjoyment.
Kinglake gathered the papers on the desk together and frowned over them wisely.
The Saint made another search of the unlamented ungodly, and found his own automatic in Weinbach’s pocket. He nested it affectionately back in his clip holster.
The Lieutenant gazed yearningly at the telephone, tightened a Spartan stopper on a re-awakening ebullience of questions, and got out another of his miasmic cigars.
Olga Ivanovitch came in again.
She had changed into a simple grey suit with plain white trimmings. Her honey-coloured hair was all in place again, and her face was cool and freshly sweetened. She looked younger than Simon had ever remembered her. She carried a pair of suitcases. Kinglake really looked at her.
Simon hitched himself off the corner of the desk where he had perched.
“Well,” he said, “let’s be on our way.”
He shook hands with Kinglake for the last time, and picked up Olga’s bags and went out with her. They went down the crushed coral walk through a rambling profusion of poinsettias and bougainvillea that were only dark clusters under the moon. The Gulf waters rolled against the beach beyond the seawall with a hushed friendly roar, Simon Templar thought about Jean Lafitte again, and decided that in the line of piracy he could still look the old boy in the eye on his home ground.
They left the gate, and the girl’s step faltered beside him. He slowed with her, turning, and she stopped and faced him.
“Spassibo,” she said, with an odd husky break in her voice. “Thank you, thank you, tovarich…I don’t think it’s any use, but thank you.”
“What do you mean, you don’t think it’s any use?”
Light seeping from a window of the house behind them like a timid thief in a dim-out touched her pale halo of hair and glistened on her wide steady eyes.
“Where can I go now?”
The Saint laughed.
“My God, you Russians! Look, darling. You played along with Maris for quite a while. Several of the ungodly must know it. But they’ll never know that Maris ever changed his mind about you. They’ll only know that you got out of Galveston one jump ahead of the barrage. So you’re all set to move in again somewhere else. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Well, I wasn’t kidding either. That’s what you’re going to do. Only next time you’ll do it legitimately—for the FBI or something like that. I’m taking you to Washington with me so you can meet a guy named Hamilton. I have to see him anyway…Besides,” he added constructively, “it’s a dull trip, and we might make fun on the way.”
PUBLICATION HISTORY
This book was first published in March 1944 by Doubleday, with a British edition following over a year later in July 1945.
As Leslie mentions in his introduction, “The Sizzling Saboteur” was in fact based upon a true story that he eventually wrote under the title of “The Human Torch,” which was published in 1945 in The Saint’s Choice of True Crime. But the Saint’s version of the story was serialised in Flynn’s Detective Fiction under the title of “The Saint in Trouble” and ran from November 1943 to January 1944.
Much like The Saint Steps In, sales for this volume were not great, and it was only the advent of The Saint on TV in the 1960s that would generate numerous editions. Foreign translations include the French (Le Saint contre le marché noir) in 1946 and the Swedish (Helgonet en garde) also that year. The Dutch opted for De zwarte markt in 1949, whilst the Polish had to wait until 1991 to read Święty na straży.
Both the stories in this book were adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore; “The Sizzling Saboteur” was retitled “The Fellow Traveller” and was first broadcast on Thursday 19 September 1963 as part of the first season, whilst “The Black Market” was retitled “The Rough Diamonds” and broadcast on 21 November 1963.
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.
He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.
He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.
When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3
X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.
These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4
Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?
“I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5
However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6
The paper launched in early 1929, and Leslie’s first work, “The Story of a Dead Man,” featuring Jimmy Traill, appeared in issue 4 (published on 2 March 1929). That was followed just over a month later with “The Secret of Beacon Inn,” starring Rameses “Pip” Smith. At the same time, Leslie finished writing another non-Saint novel, Daredevil, which would be published in late 1929. Storm Arden was the hero; more notably, the book saw the first introduction of a Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Claud Eustace Teal.
The Saint returned in the thirteenth issue of The Thriller. The byline proclaimed that the tale was “A Thrilling Complete Story of the Underworld”; the title was “The Five Kings,” and it actually featured Four Kings and a Joker. Simon Templar, of course, was the Joker.
Charteris spent the rest of 1929 telling the adventures of the Five Kings in five subsequent The Thriller stories. “It was very hard work, for the pay was lousy, but Monty Haydon was a brilliant and stimulating editor, full of ideas. While he didn’t actually help shape the Saint as a character, he did suggest story lines. He would take me out to lunch and say, ‘What are you going to write about next?’ I’d often say I was damned if I knew. And Monty would say, ‘Well, I was reading something the other day…’ He had a fund of ideas and we would talk them over, and then I would go away and write a story. He was a great creative editor.”7
Charteris would have one more attempt at writing about a hero other than Simon Templar, in three novelettes published in The Thriller in early 1930, but he swiftly returned to the Saint. This was partly due to his self-confessed laziness—he wanted to write more stories for The Thriller and other magazines, and creating a new hero for every story was hard work—but mainly due to feedback from Monty Haydon. It seemed people wanted to read more adventures of the Saint…
Charteris would contribute over forty stories to The Thriller throughout the 1930s. Shortly after their debut, he persuaded publisher Hodder & Stoughton that if he collected some of these stories and rewrote them a little, they could publish them as a Saint book. Enter the Saint was first published in August 1930, and the reaction was good enough for the publishers to bring out another collection. And another…
Of the twenty Saint books published in the 1930s, almost all have their origins in those magazine stories.
Why was the Saint so popular throughout the decade? Aside from the charm and ability of Charteris’s storytelling, the stories, particularly those published in the first half of the ’30s, are full of energy and joie de vivre. With economic depression rampant throughout the period, the public at large seemed to want some escapism.
And Simon Templar’s appeal was wide-ranging: he wasn’t an upper-class hero like so many of the period. With no obvious background and no attachment to the Old School Tie, no friends in high places who could provide a get-out-of-jail-free card, the Saint was uniquely classless. Not unlike his creator.
Throughout Leslie’s formative years, his heritage had been an issue. In his early days in Singapore, during his time at school, at Cambridge University or even just in everyday life, he couldn’t avoid the fact that for many people his mixed parentage was a problem. He would later tell a story of how he was chased up the road by a stick-waving typical English gent who to
ok offence to his daughter being escorted around town by a foreigner.
Like the Saint, he was an outsider. And although he had spent a significant portion of his formative years in England, he couldn’t settle.
As a young boy he had read of an America “peopled largely by Indians, and characters in fringed buckskin jackets who fought nobly against them. I spent a great deal of time day-dreaming about a visit to this prodigious and exciting country.”8
It was time to realise this wish. Charteris and his first wife, Pauline, whom he’d met in London when they were both teenagers and married in 1931, set sail for the States in late 1932; the Saint had already made his debut in America courtesy of the publisher Doubleday. Charteris and his wife found a New York still experiencing the tail end of Prohibition, and times were tough at first. Despite sales to The American Magazine and others, it wasn’t until a chance meeting with writer turned Hollywood executive Bartlett McCormack in their favourite speakeasy that Charteris’s career stepped up a gear.
Soon Charteris was in Hollywood, working on what would become the 1933 movie Midnight Club. However, Hollywood’s treatment of writers wasn’t to Charteris’s taste, and he began to yearn for home. Within a few months, he returned to the UK and began writing more Saint stories for Monty Haydon and Bill McElroy.
He also rewrote a story he’d sketched out whilst in the States, a version of which had been published in The American Magazine in September 1934. This new novel, The Saint in New York, published in 1935, was a significant advance for the Saint and Leslie Charteris. Gone were the high jinks and the badinage. The youthful exuberance evident in the Saint’s early adventures had evolved into something a little darker, a little more hard-boiled. It was the next stage in development for the author and his creation, and readers loved it. It became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
Having spent his formative years in places as far apart as Singapore and England, with substantial travel in between, it should be no surprise that Leslie had a serious case of wanderlust. With a bestseller under his belt, he now had the means to see more of the world.
The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 24