Saint Errant (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 Dick Lochte

  Introductions to “Jeannine,” “Teresa,” “Judith,” and “Dawn” originally published in The Second Saint Omnibus (1951)

  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: 9781477842874

  ISBN-10: 147784287X

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Bunny

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  JUDITH

  INTRODUCTION

  Simon Templar had…

  IRIS

  LIDA

  JEANNINE

  INTRODUCTION

  “Wine, that maketh…

  LUCIA

  TERESA

  INTRODUCTION

  “Bandits?” said Señor…

  LUELLA

  EMILY

  DAWN

  INTRODUCTION

  Simon Templar looked…

  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

  More than half a century ago I discovered a copy of the first American hardcover edition of this book, which seemed to be waiting for me, tucked away in a back room of the Basement Bookstore in my home town of New Orleans, Louisiana. It was, I felt at the time, a fabulous find, rarer than pearls.

  Why? Well, what could be more irresistible to a teenage boy, a diehard fan of Leslie Charteris’s famous swashbuckling character, than a book filled with nine unread Saintly adventures, each featuring a beautiful female? And that’s not including Patricia Holm, who graces several of the stories. I should explain also that, in the Crescent City at least, this was not the best of times for Saint addicts. The radio show had gone west. The TV series was still a few years away (and would not actually appear in New Orleans until its color seasons). The local newspaper, The Item, had discontinued the comic strip (causing some of us to spend entirely too much time in the only library in town that carried the New York Herald-Tribune). And even Charteris had admitted, in his afterword to The Second Saint Omnibus, that he could no longer state with assurance that the Saint would be back.

  For about a year, my friend Jacques and I had been scouring the newsstands and bookstores for Charteris titles and had scored a nice pile of not-quite-ancient Avon paperbacks, along with one or two tattered hardcovers. But, the copy I found at the Basement Bookstore was (and still is) encased in plastic and pristine.

  And, as it turned out, the nine stories were all as exciting and entertaining as I’d supposed.

  They cover a fifteen-year span of the author’s writing career, beginning with the tale, first published in a 1933 issue of American magazine, in which Simon agrees to help the beautiful “Judith” recover plans for a gearless car that had been stolen from the inventor. At the other end of the timespan is a story that debuted in the Winter 1948 issue of Mystery Book magazine, in which Simon is framed for attempting to blackmail the Chicago gangster husband of would-be actress “Iris.”

  “Judith” was, according to Charteris’s introduction in The Second Saint Omnibus, “a sentimental piece” for three reasons. It was the first short he ever sold to a slick paper (as opposed to pulp) magazine in the US. He was paid considerably more for it than he’d ever been paid for a short, and it was the first sale he made after arriving in America with “about fifty dollars in my pocket and nothing but an unshakable faith in my own destiny to support me beyond that.”

  It was shortly after the sale of “Judith” that he first got the idea for a collection of stories “primarily involving dames.”

  And the dames are as different as they are intriguing. “Lida” is a socialite friend of Pat’s who dies, possibly by her own hand, at a Miami nightclub whose host Simon sums up in a typically amusing thumbnail description as “(s)omething tall, dark, and rancid.”

  The Saint meets “Lucia” in what passes for a hotel on the outskirts of a tiny Texas border town where she’s working for her father, the owner of the establishment. When both father and daughter are placed in jeopardy by the arrival of a gangster, Simon steps in. Moving on to Mexico, he meets “Teresa,” who convinces him to assist her in locating her husband, last seen in the territory ruled by the legendary bandido El Rojo.

  “Luella,” the toothsome lure in a badger game setup, has the misfortune of catching the interest of Simon and Pat, who are visiting a post–WWII Los Angeles. For “Emily,” the Saint continues on alone to Northern California’s gold country to teach a couple of swindlers a lesson in selling worthless mines.

  It’s hard to pin down exactly where Simon meets “Dawn,” since not even he can come to grips with the events that transpire in what is generally considered the most unusual of all of his recorded adventures. And, like the story, the lady is special. “She came warily into (Simon’s) cabin, disheveled, her dress torn provocatively so that sun-browned flesh showed through, her cloud of golden hair swirled in fairy patterns, her dark eyes brooding, her mouth a parted dream…She was glamorous beyond belief.” Wow!

  And yet, for me, personally, it was “Jeannine” who proved to be the most fascinating of all the females. I could be wrong, but I think she may be the only woman, besides Pat, to ever make a second app
earance in a Saint story. Even better, the story is beautifully crafted, with a particularly satisfying close. And, adding a cherry to the top of this Saintly sundae, the events take place in my hometown.

  Starting to read “Jeannine,” I blinked when I arrived at the sentence identifying the location where Simon and Detective Wendel were dining. “They sat in a booth in Arnaud’s, which Simon had chosen over the claims of such other temples of New Orleans cuisine as Antoine’s or Galatoire’s because the oak beams and subdued lights seemed to offer a more propitious atmosphere for a meal which he wanted to keep peaceful.”

  Because my father’s company insured Arnaud’s, we’d dined there often. I’d probably sat in that same booth. Certainly I’d experienced, as presumably had Charteris, the ambiance the beams and lighting produced. To a fourteen-year-old fan, this connection to both writer and character seemed monumental. Now, having spent the last several decades as a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist, I’ve met face-to-face with a fair share of my favorite authors and other celebrities. I’ve corresponded with Leslie Charteris and even spent a pleasant afternoon with the best of all the interpreters of Simon Templar, Sir Roger Moore. One might presume that at this point in life, I might be just a little less affected by the Saint’s visit to a place where I have not lived for many, many years. Instead, rereading “Jeannine” for this introduction, I was transported back to that time and place and experienced that same sense of teenage wonder at the idea that the Saint and I had shared not only the same city, but the same restaurant.

  I guess the lesson to be learned is: once a Saint fan, always a Saint fan.

  —Dick Lochte

  JUDITH

  INTRODUCTION

  This story is a sentimental piece to me because (1) it was the first short story I ever sold to a smooth-paper American magazine, (2) I got paid more for it, many times more, than I had ever received for a short story until then, and (3) this was the first sale I made after I landed in the United States in 1932, with about fifty dollars in my pocket and nothing but an unshakable faith in my own destiny to support me beyond that.

  You may well ask why such an ancient manuscript should crop up so late in not even the First, but actually the Second Saint Omnibus.

  The reason turns out to be very simple.

  A writer writes short stories and sells them at intervals to magazines. Presently he has enough to make a collection suitable for publishing in volume form. And if he wants to milk his work for the last golden drop, he does just that.

  I went a little further. Long ago I had the idea for the title Saint Errant, which would be a book of short stories primarily involving dames. This story, “Judith,” would be the first.

  Now it is only a matter of record that fifteen years went by before that imagined collection was complete.

  I wrote other stories in between, and even whole books. But Saint Errant did not complete itself until 1947. And in the Omnibus we are dipping into the books in the order in which they were published, without regard to the order of first publication, or even conception, of their ingredients.

  I hope this explanation will satisfy the most fanatical of my self-appointed bibliographers, who have picked the hell of a subject to give themselves ulcers about.

  And while we are at it, one more amplification seems to be called for. I said in the foreword to this monument that I had not tried to revise any of the stories, or bring them up to date. And a glance at this story makes me realize that that was only a half-truth.

  I have not changed anything between the source volumes and this one. But the story originally began in Paris, and ended with the Saint on his way to Stuttgart. When Saint Errant was finally being readied for the printers, that kind of movement would have invalidated a plot point for contemporary-minded readers. So I simply switched the geography across a few thousand miles of ocean.

  There was nothing to it, really. Any other writer could have done the same, with a mere wave of his magic ball-point pen.

  —Leslie Charteris

  Simon Templar had to admit that the photograph of himself which adorned the front page of the copy of the New York Daily Gazette on his knee left nothing to be desired.

  Taken only a couple of years ago, at the studio of an ambitious photographer who had clearly seen the potentialities of future revenue from an authentic likeness of such a disreputable character, it brought out to perfection the rakish curve of his jaw, the careless backward curl of black hair, the mocking challenge of a gay filibuster’s mouth. Even the eyes, by some trick of lighting in the original which had been miraculously preserved through the processes of reproduction, glinted back at him from under the bantering lines of eyebrow with all the vivid dangerous dance of humor that was in his own.

  The story illustrated by the picture occupied two columns of the front page and was continued somewhere in the interior. One gathered from it that that elusive and distressingly picturesque outlaw, the Saint, had set the Law by the ears again with a new climax of audacities: his name and nom de guerre waltzed through the bald paragraphs of the narrative like a debonair will-o’-the-wisp, carrying with it a breath of buccaneering glamour, a magnificently medieval lawlessness, that shone with a strange luminance through the dull chronicles of an age of dreary news. “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” they called him, and with that phrase the Saint himself had least fault of all to find.

  At the next table on his left a fair-haired girl was struggling to explain the secret of successful Rumhattan mixing to an unsympathetic waiter. At other tables, other guests of the Windsor Hotel’s Peacock Alley read their evening papers, sipped cocktails, chattered, argued, and gazed incuriously at fellow birds in that pleasantly gilded cage. Outside, but inaudible in that discreetly expensive sanctuary, flowed the common traffic of Montreal, the last outpost of Old France in the New World.

  In those surroundings anyone but a Simon Templar might have been embarrassed by the knowledge that a lifelike portrait of himself, accompanied by an account of his latest misdeeds and a summary of several earlier ones, was at the disposal of any citizen who cared to buy a newspaper. The Saint was never embarrassed, except by warrants for his arrest, and in those days he was most careful to leave no legal grounds for one of those.

  He folded his paper and lighted a cigarette with the comforting assurance that any casual glancer at his classic features would be far less likely to suspect him of a hideous past than to suspect the eminent politician or the debutante victim of a motor accident whose portraits, in smaller frames, had flanked his own on either side. Certainly he saw no reason to creep into a corner and hide.

  At the next table the girl’s gray eyes wavered in humorous despair toward him, meeting his own for an instant, which to a Simon Templar was sufficient invitation.

  “Ecoute, toi!” The Saint’s voice lanced through the air with a sudden quiet command, the edge of a blade so sweetly keen that it seemed to caress even while it cut, sapping the waiter’s wandering eyes around like a magnet dropped within an inch of twin compass needles. “Mademoiselle desires that one mix three parts of Ron Rey with one part of sweet vermouth and a dash of Angostura. After that, one will squeeze into it a very thin piece of lemon peel. It is quite simple.”

  The waiter nodded and moved away in a slight daze. In his philosophy, foreigners were not expected to speak his own patois better than he did himself, nor to cut short his studied obtuseness with a cool self-possession that addressed him in the familiar second person singular. In the doorway he paused to explain that at length to a fellow waiter. “Sâles Américains,” he said, and spat. Simon Templar was not meant to hear, but the Saint’s ears were abnormally sensitive.

  He smiled. It would never have occurred to him to report the waiter to the management, even though he was sure they would have been grateful to be warned about such a saboteur of goodwill. To the Saint any city was an oyster for his opening, a world for conquest; anything was an adventure, even the slaying of an insolent waiter and the
rescue of a damsel in distress about nothing more serious than a cocktail.

  He let his cigarette smolder in absolute contentment. The Rumhattan arrived. The girl tasted it and grimaced ruefully—he decided that she had a mouth that couldn’t look anything but pretty even when it tried.

  “It’s a good idea, but it needs co-operation,” he said.

  “I wish I could speak the language like you do,” she said. “I’d have something to tell that waiter.”

  “I’ve spent more time in Paris than any respectable man should,” said the Saint cheerfully. “I used to be the concierge of a home for inebriate art students in the Rue des Deux Paires de Chaussettes de M. Alexandre Dumas. We all lived on absinthe and wore velvet next the skin. It went very well until someone discovered that half the inmates were wearing false beards and reading Ellery Queen in secret.”

  The gray eyes laughed.

  “But do you know your way about here?”

  “Montreal is yours,” said the Saint with a gesture. “What would you like? Respectable night clubs? Disreputable saloons? Historic monuments?”

  She seemed to be thinking of something else. And then she turned towards him again in a pose very like his own. The deep friendly eyes had a queer wistfulness.

  “Tell me, stranger—where do you think a girl should go on a great occasion? Suppose she had something rather desperate to do, and if it went wrong she mightn’t be able to choose where she went anymore.”

  The Saint’s very clear blue eyes rested on her thoughtfully. He had always been mad, always hoped to be.

  “I think,” he said, “I should take her out St Lawrence Boulevard to a quiet little restaurant I know where they make the best omelets in North America. We should absorb vitamins and talk about life. And after that we might know some more.”

  “I should like to go there,” she said.

  Simon flicked a twenty-dollar bill across his table and beckoned the waiter. The waiter counted out change laboriously from a well-filled wallet.