“This will be hard for you to digest, Saville,” he said, “but since anything you paid me would probably be money that you ought to be giving back to Rowena, my conscience would bother me, even if she has got plenty to spare. On the other hand, I’d like to get her out of your clutches without any messy headlines. So I’ll give you a break. If you back me up tomorrow evening when I suggest that she ought to see another doctor—whom I’ll suggest—and if you can think up a good excuse to resign voluntarily as her guardian and trustee, I won’t have to play this tape to her.”
Wakerose compressed his lips and stared grimly about the room. With his hands locked tensely behind his back, he paced across it to the open window and stood looking out into the night. The hunch of his shoulders gave the impression that if it had been on a higher floor he might have thrown himself out.
After a full minute, he turned.
“I shall think about it,” he said, and walked towards the door.
“Think very hard,” said the Saint. “Because I’m not quite sure that it mightn’t be better for Rowena to know the whole horrible truth about you and your slimy scheme. And whatever brilliant inspirations you have about how to double-cross me and retrieve the situation, I’ll always have this little recording.”
Wakerose sneered silently at him, and went out without another word.
He came back soon after three o’clock in the morning, through the open window, and crossed in slow-motion tiptoe to the bed where the covers humped over a peacefully insensible occupant. There was enough starlight to define clearly the dark head-shape buried in the pillow but half uncovered by the sheet, and he swung mightily at it with the heavy candlestick which he carried in one gloved hand…
The massive base bit solidly and accurately into its target, but with no solid crunch of bone, only a soggy resistance—which was natural, since the “head” consisted of a crumpled towel balled up inside a dark pullover and artistically moulded and arranged to give the right appearance. At the same time, a blinding luminance dispelled the treacherous dimness for a fraction of a second before the Saint switched on a less painfully dazzling light.
He stood in the bathroom doorway, holding a Polaroid camera with flash attachment in one hand.
“I was beginning to be afraid you were never coming, Saville,” he murmured genially. “But I kept telling myself that you were clever enough to realize that you ought to get rid of me and my tape record, no matter what, if you ever wanted to sleep well again. Or I hoped you would, because a picture like this would clinch any ambiguities in the sound track, which you might have been just slippery enough to think you could explain away.”
Wakerose stood frozen in a kind of catalepsy, while Simon deftly changed the bulb in his flash and snapped one more after-the-crime souvenir, admittedly not an action shot, but just for luck.
“Of course, this washes out the previous deal,” he said. “I don’t want to spoil Rowena’s day tomorrow, so I’m not going to play the tape to her till we come home. By that time I hope your air-conditioned juggernaut will have been repaired so that you can have taken off, leaving behind a signed confession which I think I can persuade her not to use as long as your accounts are in order and you never bother her again. Otherwise, chum, you may find yourself trying to sell Gourmet some novel articles on prison cuisine.”
“Yes,” said Rowena Flane. “Yes, now I understand—everything except why you’ve done so much and wouldn’t take anything when you could have.”
“Because,” Simon said, “one day I’ll get so much more out of it when I see you as slim and lovely as you should be, and I can think that I made it happen.”
“Like in a fairy tale. So the prince kissed the toad, and broke the spell, and it turned into a beautiful princess. Oh, it’s hard to believe it’s coming true.” But she was sad. “Only by then you won’t be threatening to marry me anymore.”
“Why don’t we wait a couple of years,” said the Saint, gently, “and see whether you’re still single too?”
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The stories in this book first appeared in The Saint Detective Magazine (and The Saint Mystery Magazine, as it would later be rechristened) prior to book publication in November 1963 (if you were in America) or 25 May 1964 (if you were in Great Britain).
This book is notable for it being the last one that was written by Leslie Charteris alone; by the early 1960s he was keen to retire yet, prompted largely by the success of the first TV series, he was keen to see the literary Saint kept alive, so after the publication of this book he started collaborating with other writers.
Of the stories in this volume three were adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore; “The Russian Prisoner” first aired on Friday, 14 October 1966 whilst “The Better Mousetrap,” which included a marvellous performance from comedian Ronnie Barker as a bumbling police detective, popped up a few weeks later on Friday, 25 November 1966. “The Fast Women” which starred Kate O’Mara as one of the eponymous ladies, aired Friday, 13 January 1967.
Uniquely for a Saint book, only one foreign language translation has ever appeared: a French edition entitled Le Saint au soleil, which was published in 1966.
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 took 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.
Nineteen thirty-six found him in Tenerife, researching anothe
r Saint adventure alongside translating the biography of Juan Belmonte, a well-known Spanish matador. Estranged for several months, Leslie and Pauline divorced in 1937. The following year, Leslie married an American, Barbara Meyer, who’d accompanied him to Tenerife. In early 1938, Charteris and his new bride set off in a trailer of his own design and spent eighteen months travelling round America and Canada.
The Saint in New York had reminded Hollywood of Charteris’s talents, and film rights to the novel were sold prior to publication in 1935. Although the proposed 1935 film production was rejected by the Hays Office for its violent content, RKO’s eventual 1938 production persuaded Charteris to try his luck once more in Hollywood.
New opportunities had opened up, and throughout the 1940s the Saint appeared not only in books and movies but in a newspaper strip, a comic-book series, and on radio.
Anyone wishing to adapt the character in any medium found a stern taskmaster in Charteris. He was never completely satisfied, nor was he shy of showing his displeasure. He did, however, ensure that copyright in any Saint adventure belonged to him, even if scripted by another writer—a contractual obligation that he was to insist on throughout his career.
Charteris was soon spread thin, overseeing movies, comics, newspapers, and radio versions of his creation, and this, along with his self-proclaimed laziness, meant that Saint books were becoming fewer and further between. However, he still enjoyed his creation: in 1941 he indulged himself in a spot of fun by playing the Saint—complete with monocle and moustache—in a photo story in Life magazine.
In July 1944, he started collaborating under a pseudonym on Sherlock Holmes radio scripts, subsequently writing more adventures for Holmes than Conan Doyle. Not all his ventures were successful—a screenplay he was hired to write for Deanna Durbin, “Lady on a Train,” took him a year and ultimately bore little resemblance to the finished film. In the mid-1940s, Charteris successfully sued RKO Pictures for unfair competition after they launched a new series of films starring George Sanders as a debonair crime fighter known as the Falcon. But he kept faith with his original character, and the Saint novels continued to adapt to the times. The transatlantic Saint evolved into something of a private operator, working for the mysterious Hamilton and becoming, not unlike his creator, a world traveller, finding that adventure would seek him out.
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 21