Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Read online

  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 Martin Gately

  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: 9781477842942

  ISBN-10: 1477842942

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Audrey, for ten wonderful years

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE HELPFUL PIRATE

  THE BIGGER GAME

  THE CLEANER CURE

  THE INTEMPERATE REFORMER

  PREFACE

  Simon Templar watched…

  THE UNCURED HAM

  THE CONVENIENT MONSTER

  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

  Why, hello. You know, the moment you came in here I thought you were going to start reading this book. Saint fans have a certain look about them that it is almost impossible to conceal or mistake. It is the look someone has when they are searching for adventure. The sort of adventure which, although perhaps set in yesteryear, is still recognizably that of our world rather than one filled with, say, dinosaurs or dragons. There are times when one wants a proper Sunday Roast and nothing else, however fancy, will do—and you are holding the literary equivalent.

  It’s not easy to kick through that version of the “fourth wall” that exists between writer and reader. It’s difficult to generate the necessary eye contact via the printed word. Harder still when I realize that what I write here is delaying you in reading some of the greatest Saint stories ever penned. Listen. I’m talking to you. This is important. I want to tell you about the time when I forgot to trust the Saint and why I won’t ever allow it to happen again. It was June of 1999 and I’d not long since returned to London after a holiday in the United States. Yes, I’d had a couple of pints with my work colleagues in the Yorkshire Grey pub on the corner of Theobalds Road and Grays Inn and I was now heading home. I started to cross the road just as the lights were changing and broke into a run about halfway across the far lane. At that precise moment it felt rather like someone must’ve very accurately thrown a cricket ball at my leg. I sensed the impact about midway down my calf. I even looked back in the gutter to see if I could see the ball. A ball? On a busy London street? There was no ball, cricket or otherwise, to be seen. Could it have been a hubcap somehow torn loose from a car wheel—because now the sensation of impact had been replaced by a slicing feeling, as if a hunting knife were cutting all the way through my leg. It hurt so much and was so inexplicable that the only thing left to do was laugh out loud. At this point I became a stranger to normal rational and coherent thought. Except I knew I just wanted to be home.

  Unfortunately, my leg no longer worked. It was rather like I’d been somehow instantaneously issued with an artificial leg. Now I knew how my childhood Action Men must’ve felt when the elastic bands inside them perished. My friends scant yards away in the Yorkshire Grey might as well have been on the moon. I wouldn’t have tried to re-cross the road even if I had thought of it—which I didn’t. My normal thought processes had been replaced with a sort of tunnel vision survival instinct. I was injured in a hostile environment and I had to make it out of there. I proceeded as best I could in the direction of Chancery Lane tube station like a refugee from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. Somehow, I made it onto a train and propped myself up in the corner by the door. Then my vision started to go. I was looking at the world through a layer of Golden Syrup. I convinced myself not to pass out, concerned that I might be mistaken for drunk. Ultimately, I arrived home, unlocked the door, and collapsed gently onto the hall tiles at the end of my endurance. I put off a trip to hospital until the following day, where I was diagnosed with a snapped calf muscle (by this time I could barely stand). Now, I made plenty of mistakes that night. You can have fun imagining how you would’ve coped better and differently later. The crucial thing is this: in the whole of the ten-week bed rest/convalescent period I never once thought to read a Saint book. Not even when a buxom trauma clinic nurse wedged my foot into her cleavage, leaned forward, and bent it back to its normal position so that she could encase it in plaster. You would have thought that should have guaranteed some sort of epiphany, but no. And I really should have called on the Saint to divert me, especially when he had always been part of my life, let alone my reading list. One of my earliest memories is of starting to peel the red Saint sticker off the bonnet of my Corgi model Volvo P1800 and then thinking the better of it and leaving the sticker in place—I showed no such mercy to the figures in my Chitty Chitty Bang Bang model. They were soon decapitated. Poor old Caractacus Potts. Of course, my introduction to the Saint was via the ITC TV show starring Roger Moore. The appearance of the Saint in each first scene accompanied by the manifestation of his halo held me in an almost hypnotic thrall. If entire episodes had been comprised of variations on that first scene I’d have been perfectly happy. The Saint, like Ellery Queen, is a character comfortable with breaking the “fourth wall” (that same partition I was trying to kick down earlier) and frequently did so in those introductory sequences. Being directly addressed by a character in narrative possibly has a powerful effect on impressionable minds—on me, at least, the effect was that I regarded the episodes as more th
an just stories. The TV set had become a window through which I was simply observing events in Simon Templar’s life.

  So, when I finally step out of your way and let you loose on these marvellous tales, do keep in mind that while “nothing ordinary happens to the Saint,” these extraordinary narratives are firmly rooted in our real world. If you only know the Saint from TV then the topless mud-wrestling and live sex shows of “The Helpful Pirate” may come as something of a surprise. The story may even seem daring for its time (just a couple of years after the Lady Chatterley trial). The con trick perpetrated in this story may strike you as unlikely, but it is modest in its scope and execution when compared to one that I’m aware of from my personal experience as a former junior functionary of the Serious Fraud Office. In the real world, two German con men rented former bank office premises in a West Country resort and purported to be a branch of a fictional German bank—they even had a working bureau de change in the lobby. They then took “advance fees” of many tens of thousands of pounds to process applications for loans—loans that would, of course, never materialize. The unfortunate victims were simply given worthless “banking instruments”—albeit with face values of millions—that had been cobbled together and laminated in the upstairs office. Mr Charteris could undoubtedly have spun these events into a superb yarn—might I suggest that “The Counterfeit Bank” would be a suitably Saintly title?

  The understandably grumpy rhino from “The Bigger Game” reminds me of a rhino I once saw in a safari park. The tractor vehicle which I at first thought just happened to be cutting the grass in front of the rhino wasn’t fitted with a grass cutter at all but rather with a concrete weight. Its purpose: to interpose itself between the tourists in their cars and the rhino if it decided to charge. The rather callow youth in the cab of the tractor had on his face a strange mixture of boredom and concentration. Our lives were in his hands…I hope he was being motivated and rewarded by more than just the minimum wage.

  The “joker in the pack” in this collection of tales is “The Intemperate Reformer.” A wonderfully comedic collision of the Saint’s world with the schemes of a very minor league bad guy who would not be out of place in a P. G. Wodehouse story. Nevertheless, I ached for his comeuppance and for civilization to be rid of the appalling soft drink that he was peddling. This story nicely evokes the bygone era of the British licensing laws, the purpose of which always seemed to be to deny you of an alcoholic beverage just when you most seemed to need or deserve one. Normally after 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday, if I recall correctly. It could be very frustrating.

  Now, I don’t plan to tell you all about the stories in this book in the same way that I don’t intend to break into your home and open all your Christmas presents. It just wouldn’t be right. But I’ll tell you that the final story in this volume is the one that means the most to me—it is “The Convenient Monster.” I went looking for the Loch Ness Monster when I was eleven years old. It’s tough to crack the mystery of Loch Ness while under close parental supervision, but I did my best. I met monster hunter Frank Searle, but then who didn’t? He was one of those monster hunters who were really just there to talk to the coaches full of tourists. His contributions to cryptozoology were photographing vaguely monster-shaped logs and producing dubious superimposed images of brontosaurus-like creatures swimming (yeah, right) in the loch. His was the ignominy of being included in a chapter entitled “The Fakers” in Nicholas Witchell’s book The Loch Ness Story. Nevertheless, his tourist-friendly vigil was the highly accessible real-world counterpart of Eleanor Bastion’s stakeout for the creature. By the way, I do feel a bit sorry for the dog in this story. I know I shouldn’t spoil the plot, but it does call to mind the dog that gets eaten by the shark in Jaws. I wonder if I was the only person in the cinema who spotted the familiar Volvo P1800 in the Amity Island car park and secretly hoped that Simon Templar would turn up and save the day. Back on topic, Mr Charteris also neatly reminds us that this is not the first time the Loch Ness Monster has met a Saint.

  It’s time for the big reveal. You’re almost ready to start reading the stories that I’ve teased you with some of the details of—drinking from the fountainhead yourself instead of having the stories pre-processed by the budget and sensibilities of the 1960s TV show of The Saint. But first you need to know this: sometimes history repeats itself and sometimes it doesn’t. When my Dad was sixteen he made a split-second decision at work to roll a heavy steel casting out of the way of a reversing truck rather than shout a warning to the driver. The casting spun around—like a coin, he says—and as it fell it gouged great clumps of flesh out of either side of his leg. He was laid up for ten weeks recovering and made it his business to read every Saint book then available. I congratulate him on his taste and good sense. He raised his son to be a Saint fan and any failings in that regard are mine, not his. I won’t let him down again. But neither you nor I have to wait for a nasty leg injury. Get all the Saint books. Read them. If you want to be entertained, always, always trust the Saint.

  —Martin Gately

  THE HELPFUL PIRATE

  There were a few people—a very few—within his tight circle of friends and almost astronomical orbit of acquaintances, for whom the Saint would do practically anything. Including even things which under any other auspices would have excited him to violent and voluble revolt.

  One addiction that he especially despised was the fad for antiques. He could admire and love an old house for its own sake, but he was incapable of understanding anyone who would build a house today in good or bad imitation of the architecture of a bygone age. He could respect the furnishings of a genuine old house when they were its natural contemporaries, without necessarily wanting to live with them himself, but he could only wax sarcastic about dislocated decorators, professional or amateur, who put period furniture in a steel-and-glass skyscraper apartment:

  “If the Georgians had been convinced that it wasn’t smart to build anything but fake Elizabethan, there wouldn’t have been any Georgian architecture for other monkeys to imitate. If Louis Seize had refused to park his ischial tuberosities on anything but an Henri Quatre chair, there wouldn’t be any Louis Seize furniture for the fake factories to make copies of. In fact, if everyone had spent his time gazing adoringly backwards, we’d still be sleeping on stone cots in nice cozy caves. I was born in the twentieth century, and I don’t see anything wrong with living with its better experiments.”

  He might have added that although he had been called the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, he had not found it necessary to leap around in thigh boots and ear-rings, with a cutlass between his teeth, but he still had some quite unpredictable modesties.

  The bitterest focus of his prejudice, however, centered on the proliferation of the smaller shops that deal in the smaller items, the merchants of bric-a-brac rather than furniture, and their patrons.

  “There’s one on every other street in Europe, down to the smallest village,” he had said. “If the non-edible contents of every trash can and junk pile for the last five centuries had been hidden away by gnomes, I doubt if the hoard would be enough to stock them all. There must be secret production lines that would make Detroit look like a medieval handicraft studio, running day and night to pour out enough antiques to meet the demand. And everywhere you can get to by jet plane or jalopy there’s some beady-eyed tourist sniffing for a treasure that all his predecessors have overlooked. He wouldn’t know a genuine William and Mary silver sugar-bowl from an early Woolworth, but so long as he’s told it’s more than two hundred years old he wants it. And if he’s a she, which most of them are, she doesn’t even want it for a sugar-bowl. She can see just how it could be re-modeled into the most darling lamp. And when she finds the most darling old lamp, she knows just how it could be eviscerated to make the cutest sugar-bowl. If Aladdin had run into one of them, the Arabian Nights would have been full of screaming genies.”

  Yet there he was, Simon Templar, in exactly that type of shop on t
he oddly-named ABC-Strasse in Hamburg, Germany, saying to the proprietor, “I was looking for some of those old Rhine wine glasses, the kind that spread out from under the bowl to the base, so that they stand on a sort of inverted ice-cream cone instead of a stem.” He drew the shape in the air with both hands.

  “Ah, yes, I know what you mean. They are called Römer glasses.”

  “Do you have any?”

  “I am sorry, not at the moment. The old ones are quite rare.”

  “So I’ve heard. But I’m not worried about the price. Someone I want to do a special favour for is crazy about them, but he’s only got two or three. I’d like to be able to give him a set. And the rarer and more valuable they are, the more he’ll be impressed.”

  While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue. It was not merely the over-all excellence of his tailoring and accessories, for they were too superlative to be ostentatious. It was perhaps primarily an air, an attitude, the easy assurance of a man who has had the best for so long that he no longer demands it: he simply expects it.

  The dealer was a broad-beamed portly burgher whose name, according to the legend on the shop window, was Johann Uhrmeister. He had receding sandy-gray hair and pale blue eyes which appraised the Saint as expertly as they would have rated any marketable relic.

  “I should be glad to look around for you, sir. If you will leave your name—”

  “Templar,” Simon told him truthfully.