Enter 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 Patricia Charteris Higgins

  Preface originally published 1963, Enter the Saint (Pan Books Paperback) Leslie Charteris

  Introduction originally published 1939, The First Saint Omnibus (Doubleday Crime Club)

  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: 9781477842614

  ISBN-10: 1477842616

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To P. M. Haydon,

  Because he liked The Saint

  —London, July 1930

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD

  PREFACE

  THE MAN WHO WAS CLEVER

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  THE POLICEMAN WITH WINGS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE LAWLESS LADY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  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

  My father was just twenty-two years old when he wrote the stories in this book. It was the seventh book he’d had published, the first having been let loose on an unsuspecting public prior to his twentieth birthday. The natural expectation when hearing of such prolific output from an author at this tender age is work of lesser quality. However, during this period, and indeed throughout the 1930s, when he wrote twenty books, he was at his best. The Saint and Leslie Charteris were focused and funny. They evolved and delivered a unique form of action, adventure, and wit in a style that readers had never seen before.

  He had always wanted to be a writer, right from his early years in Singapore, when The Straits Times published one of this nine-year-old budding author’s poems. After leaving school he moved to Paris, ostensibly to study art, but in fact most of his time was spent polishing his writing skills. This period was largely unproductive, and starvation became a real threat. His parents brought him home to London and sent him to Cambridge to study law. He gave this up after one short year when a publisher promised to publish a book he’d written earlier on a trip back to Singapore to see his father.

  He wrote for many reasons; it was a way to work when and where he wanted, and to achieve his desired lifestyle. The logical place to pursue his goals seemed to be the United States. So in 1939 he bundled up me, his seven-year-old daughter, and sailed for America on the Empress of Britain. After settling in a small Hollywood apartment, he went to work with a passion. I vividly recall him pounding away at his typewriter in his unique two-fingered style, chuckling to himself over his last turn of a phrase or play on words. In between periods of frenzied typing, he would get up, light a cigarette, perhaps sip a martini and pace around in total concentration. Interruptions were forbidden. Despite his protestations later in life, it was clear he achieved a great deal of satisfaction from his writing.

  Certainly millions of fans have enjoyed his work since it was first published. At last count sales have exceeded forty million, with his work appearing in dozens of languages. Besides his books there have been three TV series, fifteen films, ten radio series, and a comic strip syndicated in newspapers around the world for over a decade. My father was an astute businessman, so I’m sure having his work reprinted in the twenty-first century would appeal to his fiduciary interests.

  He wrote the Saint’s adventures resolute in the belief that, as he said, “There is a solid place for the rambunctious adventurer I dreamed up in my youth. A man who really believed in old-fashioned romantic ideals and was prepared to lay everything on the line to bring them to life.”

  I’m honored that he named me Patricia after the heroine in many of the Saint’s adventures. That people are still enjoying and being entertained by his work would have made him immensely proud, as are his beloved wife, Audrey, and myself.

  Incidentally, Father, when you dedicated a later book to “Patricia, hoping she would meet a Saint some day,” your prophecy came true. My Saint and I will celebrate our sixtieth anniversary next year.

  —Patricia Charteris Higgins

  PREFACE

  When a character has had as long a run as the Saint, the author must eventually be overtaken by problems which he never foresaw when he began his creation. For the world moves on, not even steadily, but with what often seems to be an inexorable acceleration, and the writer himself grows older, and wiser, and a better master of his craft. As with all again, the changes are gradual, almost imperceptible from year to year, until one day it becomes possible to see this whole accumulation in one startling glance, as by placing a man of fifty beside a photograph of him taken thirty years before.

  This book, which contains the first novele
ttes I ever wrote about the Saint, was first published in 1930, at which time about one-third of the potential readers of this edition were not even born. And only those in the oldest bracket will have personal memories of the era in which the stories were laid.

  In those days I had no idea that the first Saint book would be followed by at least thirty-five others, and I might well have been appalled by the prospect if it had occurred to me, as I would have been seriously contemplating a vision of myself as a grandfather. And I would certainly have been somewhat indignant at the suggestion that this book was not nearly the best thing of its kind ever written, let alone that I would ever wish that it might survive only in mellowing reminiscence like an old silent movie.

  But all these things have happened, and here we are with something which is rapidly becoming a period piece, if it isn’t one already, yet which the publishers insist on keeping alive over my own protests, because, they say, too many people who have become Saint addicts recently would complain if they were arbitrarily cut off from tracing his career backwards to the earliest records of it.

  My first thought in this situation was to revise these older stories, polishing the crudities of style which I am now conscious of, toning down the uncouth juvenilities which now embarrass me, changing outdated topical allusions, modernizing the mechanics of the action to conform with the time-tables and technologies of today. But after some reflection and experiment I realized that that was no solution.

  The polishing and toning down I might do—but was it worth devoting to it the time and effort which could be better employed in writing something entirely new? The dated topicalities could be replaced by new and current allusions—but how long would it be before those were no less dated? And basically, can a story honestly constructed within the framework of the conditions and attitudes and limitations of a bygone generation be displaced into another age without creating a new complex of unrealities and inconsistencies? And where would this modernizing ever end, once it was started? Wouldn’t it have to be done over again every five or ten years? And would the Sherlock Holmes stories be as durable if they had been translated from the idiom of hansom cab to taxis to helicopters to a jet-powered anti-gravity belt?

  Regretfully, I have decided that if the Saint Saga must remain permanently in print in its entirety, then it can only do so in its original form. That I can only ask readers to keep in mind the dates to which the first stories belong, and that I must hope they can adjust themselves not only to slightly archaic means of locomotion and telecommunication but also to the fact all of the exuberances and philosophies expressed are not necessarily the same as those which I, or Simon Templar, would defend today.

  This does not mean that we have renounced our zest for adventure. It only means that our taste may have become more subtle as our panoramas became larger. It is thrilling enough for a boy to skirmish with imaginary savages in a stalk through the woods. Later he will discover much quieter and deadlier monsters, while at the same time he is reaching towards the stars.

  —Leslie Charteris (1963)

  THE MAN WHO WAS CLEVER

  INTRODUCTION

  This was the first Saint story I ever wrote at this length—the first of many, as the present volume shows. In those days we called them “novelettes” and blushed faintly when we said it. Recently I have gathered from some reading of book reviews that an attempt is being made by a few publishers and authors more highbrow than myself to popularize this length as “a new literary form.” Only now they call them “novellas,” and instead of the blush there are traces of a lofty preening. Which just goes to prove something or other; I forget exactly what.

  Whether you call it a novelette or a novella or a piece of cheese, I don’t think I shall ever lose my affection for it as a literary form. The short story is inevitably an artistic anecdote. The “full-length novel,” on the other hand, must always be open to suspicion of having been artificially inflated in order to bring it up to a purely conventional size. But the novelette leaves room for all the meaty development that could be asked for, while at the same time calling for a fairly ruthless conciseness. It is a nice length to read, since it can be consumed completely, at one sitting, in any idle hour, such as while lying in bed before going to sleep, or while waiting for the wife to put on her hat. It is a particularly nice length to write, since it can be finished before the author gets tired of it.

  This story, like the two following it, has no particularly brilliant originality of plot, and there are perceptible crudities in the telling. However, I have left it in its original form, except for revising a few minor allusions which dated it too unmistakably. It belongs to a period when the Saint was younger, more boisterous, and less subtle than he has since become.

  1

  “Snake” Ganning was neither a great criminal nor a pleasant character, but he is interesting because he was the first victim of the organization led by the man known as the Saint, which was destined in the course of a few months to spread terror through the underworld of London—that ruthless association of reckless young men, brilliantly led, who worked on the side of the Law and who were yet outside the Law. There was to come a time when the mere mention of the Saint was sufficient to fill the most unimaginative malefactor with uneasy fears, when a man returning home late one night to find the sign of the Saint—a childish sketch of a little man with straight-hue body and limbs, and an absurd halo over his round blank head—chalked upon his door, would be sent instinctively spinning round with his back to the nearest wall and his hand flying to his hip-pocket, and an icy tingle of dread prickling up his spine; but at the date of the Ganning episode the Saint had only just commenced operations, and his name had not yet come to be surrounded with the aura of almost supernatural infallibility which it was to earn for itself later.

  Mr Ganning was a tall, incredibly thin man, with sallow features and black hair that was invariably oiled and brushed to a shiny sleekness. His head was small and round, and he carried it thrust forward to the full stretch of his long neck. Taking into the combination of physical characteristics the sinuous carriage of his body, the glittering beadiness of his expressionless black eyes, and the silent litheness with which he moved, it was easy to appreciate the aptness of his nickname. He was the leader of a particularly tough racecourse gang generally known as “The Snake’s Boys,” which subsisted in unmerited luxury on the proceeds of blackmailing bookmakers under threat of doing them grievous bodily harm; there were also a number of other unsavoury things about him which may be revealed in due course.

  The actual motive for the interference of the Saint in the affairs of the Snake and his Boys was their treatment of Tommy Mitre on the occasion of his first venture into Turf finance. Tommy had always wanted to be a jockey, for horses were in his blood, but quite early in his apprenticeship he had been thrown and injured so severely that he had never been able to ride again, and he had had to content himself with the humble position of stable boy in a big training establishment. Then an uncle of Tommy’s, who had been a publican, died, leaving his nephew the tremendous fortune of two hundred pounds, and Tommy decided to try his luck in the Silver Ring. He took out a licence, had a board painted (“Tommy Mitre—The Old Firm—Established 1822”) and enlisted a clerk. One day he went down to Brighton with this paraphernalia and the remains of his two hundred pounds, and it was not long before the Snake’s Boys spotted the stranger and made the usual demands. Tommy refused to pay. He ought to have known better, for the methods of the Snake had never been a secret in racing circles, but Tommy was like that—stubborn. He told the Snake exactly where he could go, and as a result Tommy Mitre was soundly beaten up by the Snake’s Boys when he was leaving the course, and his capital and his day’s profits were taken. And it so happened that Simon Templar had elected to enjoy a day’s racing at Brighton and had observed the beating-up from a distance.

  Snake Ganning and a select committee of the Boys spent the evening in Brighton celebrating, and left for
London by a late train. So also did Simon Templar.

  Thus it came to pass that the said Simon Templar wandered up the platform a couple of minutes before the train left, espied the Snake and three of the Boys comfortably ensconced in a First-class carriage, and promptly joined them.

  The Saint, it should be understood, was a vision that gave plenty of excuse for the glances of pleased anticipation which were exchanged by the Snake and his favourite Boys as soon as they had summed him up. In what he called his “Fighting kit”—which consisted of disreputable grey flannel bags and a tweed shooting-jacket of almost legendary age—the Saint had the unique gift of appearing so immaculate that the least absent-minded commissionaire might have been pardoned for mistaking him for a millionaire duke. It may be imagined what a radiant spectacle he was in what he called his “Gentleman disguise.”

  His grey flannel suit fitted him with a staggering perfection, the whiteness of his shirt was dazzling, his tie shamed the rainbow. His soft felt hat appeared to be having its first outing since it left Bond Street. His chamois gloves were clearly being shown to the world for the first time. On his left wrist was a gold watch, and he carried a gold-mounted ebony walking-stick.

  Everything, you understand, quietly but unmistakably of the very best, and worn with that unique air of careless elegance which others might attempt to emulate, but which only the Saint could achieve in all its glory…

  As for the man—well, the Snake’s Boys had never had any occasion to doubt that their reputation for toughness was founded on more substantial demonstrations than displays of their skill at hunt-the-slipper at the YMCA on Saturday afternoons. The man was tall—about six feet two inches of him—but they didn’t take much count of that. Their combined heights totted up to twenty-four feet three inches. And although he wasn’t at all hefty, he was broad enough, and there was a certain solidity about his shoulders that would have made a cautious man think carefully before starting any unpleasantness—but that didn’t bother the Snake and his Boys. Their combined widths summed up to a shade over six feet. And the Saint had a clear tanned skin and a very clear blue eye—but even that failed to worry them. They weren’t running a beauty competition, anyway.