The Saint and Mr. Teal (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 John Goldsmith

  Introduction to “The Death Penalty” from The First Saint Omnibus, October 1939

  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: 9781477842690

  ISBN-10: 1477842691

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Lawrence H. Wharton

  My dear Lawrence,

  A dedication to your noble self has long been overdue, although you have been on our highly exclusive Free List for some time. Was it not you, in the beginning, who officially pronounced the Immortal Works worthy of introduction to the great American Public…But that would be a sordid commercial reason to give for such an occasion as this. So let us say that it is most especially because you have always been one stalwart partner in the reviling of all humbug and ballyhoo; because you were not only with us in the Adventure of the Unspeakable Landlubber, the Retreat from Sarfend, and the Introduction to Total Immersion, but also in many of the scenes which you will find faithfully chronicled in the last story in this volume; and because you concoct such an excellent Salmon Mayonnaise; that this book is offered for your proper admiration.

  Ever thine,

  Leslie Charteris

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE GOLD STANDARD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  THE MAN FROM ST LOUIS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  THE DEATH PENALTY

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  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

  In 1953, the journalist and author Richard Usborne published a seminal book called Clubland Heroes. It was an affectionate, nostalgia-tinged analysis and celebration of the fictional gentleman-adventurers whose exploits had thrilled him when he was a boy, the protagonists of three immensely popular novelists of the inter-war period: John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, “Sapper’s” Bulldog Drummond and Dornford Yates’s Jonathan Mansel.

  These characters had a great deal in common. They all enjoyed substantial private means and were rich enough not to let anything as vulgar as earning a living interfere with their adventuring. They were proudly upper-class and except in Hannay’s case, Public School and Oxbridge. They had all had damned good wars. They drove Rolls-Royces. They were viscerally racist and anti-Semitic. They believed in rough justice, an eye for a tooth, in stepping in where plodding policemen feared to tread, or were unable to tread because of inferior birth and breeding. They regularly bumped off the villains on the grounds—if they thought about it at all—that they were simply saving the hangman the bother. Crucially, they were all members of London Clubs, those exclusive enclaves in the St. James’s area, where the elite lunched and dined in splendour, wreathed in cigar smoke, waited on by silent, obsequious servants.

  But there was another writer, competing in the same market, equally successful, equally adored by generations of school-boys. His name was Leslie Charteris and his hero was Simon Templar, the Saint.

  Usborne does not ignore Charteris and the Saint entirely. He does something rather more disagreeable: he dismisses them both in a few disparaging lines. The Saint, he feels, is a lesser character than Hannay, Drummond, and Mansel; Charteris is a lesser writer than Buchan, Sapper, and Yates.

  In the strict technical sense, Usborne is right not to include the Saint in his pantheon because Simon Templar would not have been seen dead in one of those stuffy St. James’s clubs. Indeed, throughout the Charteris oeuvre the Saint is devastatingly satirical about the denizens of such places, with their snobbery, prejudices, prudery, and superannuated political opinions. (Hannay, Drummond, and Mansel were all firmly of the Conservative Right.) But in writing off the Saint as a character and Charteris as a prose stylist, Usborne was wrong.

  I first encountered the Saint, as I did the other three, in the 1950s when I was banged up in a Prep School in Hertfordshire. Even for that dismal era, the school was a time warp, a little world of its own that would still have been comfortably familiar to Hannay, Drummond, and Mansel but which would have excited the Saint’s mockery—and pity for its young inmates.

  We were taught to worship Games and (a grimly Protestant) God. In the Cadet Corps we were trained to bayonet the “Hun”—as per the First World War—rather than the “Boche” of the Second World War. For competitive events—almost all sporting—the school was divided into sets named after military heroes: Roberts, Kitchener, Haig, and Beatty. Our physical horizons were bounded by the red brick turrets and walls of the school buildings, reminiscent of a Victorian prison, and fenced, gated playing fields and parkland. Beyond lay forbidden territory, strictly out of bounds, inhabited mainly by dangerou
s ruffians called oiks. Our intellectual horizons were limited to a curriculum designed for a sole purpose: to get one into a decent Public School. The food was abominable, the school rules numberless and enforced by the frequent swishing of cane and slipper.

  Into this narrow, isolated realm stepped the Saint. He was dashing, debonair, didn’t give a damn about rules and regulations, lived by his own code, went where he wanted to go, did what he wanted to do, leaving policeman and criminal alike gasping in his wake. He didn’t drive a boring, boxy Rolls-Royce; he drove a sleek, superfast Hirondel. He was a citizen of the world, perfectly at home in any great city where, of course, he would know which was the best hotel, the finest restaurant, and where there was always an old friend to lend a hand in his latest endeavour. He was rich, yes, but the money didn’t come from a country estate or a share portfolio: he earned it by creaming off his usual ten per cent of the booty or scooping a reward. He was a free spirit, open-minded, without a racist or anti-Semitic bone in his immaculately clothed body. His adventures sprang naturally out of his globe-trotting life, his insatiable curiosity about everything and everybody, his infallible nose for a mystery, his quixotic sense of justice. He was witty. He was clever. He had style, panache. He killed, certainly, but mostly in self-defence, and his preferred modus operandi was to step deftly aside and let dog eat dog. He never displayed the sadistic relish of Bulldog Drummond, the patriotic fervour of Richard Hannay, or the Old Testament righteousness of Jonathan Mansel. Most thrilling of all, perhaps, he lived openly with a woman, Patricia Holm, who was not his wife and whose charms could be only furtively and feverishly imagined.

  Although I loved reading about Hannay, Drummond, and Mansel, they were, in a sense, only Senior Prefects writ large. They conformed to the rules—indeed, they strictly imposed them on others. They would triumph on the cricket field, the football pitch, and in the boxing ring and eventually rise to be Head Boy. The Saint, by contrast, might perhaps win the Poetry Prize but would undoubtedly be expelled.

  He was completely different. He was a liberator. He pointed a finger, or rather two fingers, with a cigarette held nonchalantly between them, towards a wider, more sophisticated world. He showed that silly or irksome rules could and should be circumvented, pomposity laughed at, an individual path pursued.

  So much for the character. What of the literary skills of his creator?

  It was only years later, when I had the job of adapting some of the stories for the screen, that I came fully to appreciate what a superb writer Leslie Charteris was.

  The first task of the adaptor is to analyze the plot. I quickly discovered that in terms of the overall impact of a given story, the plot plays a relatively minor role. Certainly, the plots are well, often brilliantly, constructed, with all the requisite twists and turns and surprises and—most important—a rigorous logic. But the real fascination lies elsewhere: in description, in the development of a particular situation or scene, above all, in dialogue. The prose is spare and sinewy where the pace of the narrative demands it, but where there is space for a pause, Charteris fills it with paragraph after paragraph, sometimes page after page, of highly entertaining, perfectly honed writing, with a lightness of touch and a refined humour worthy of P. G. Wodehouse. (“By the tum-tum of Tutankhamen!” the Saint exclaims to Mr Teal in the first story in the present collection. Bertie Wooster himself couldn’t have put it better.)

  The dyspeptic critic might dismiss all this as mere padding: Charteris either lacked the powers of invention or was simply too idle to construct an elaborate plot and made up for it by shoving in a lot of extraneous guff. This would be to miss the point completely. The minimisation of plot and maximisation of other elements is the warp and woof of the Charteris style. What other thriller writer would think of (or dare to proceed with) spicing up a murder mystery with satirical verse? And the verse itself is worthy of Ogden Nash:

  Trained from an early age to rule

  At that immortal Public School

  Whose playing fields have helped to lose

  Innumerable Waterloos),

  His brains, his wit, his chin, were all

  Infinitesimal…

  So how does Charteris, the prose stylist, measure up to the writers Usborne set above him? Take Sapper (the nom de plume of an officer-turned-prison governor called H. C. McNeile.) His literary skills can most charitably be described as workmanlike. There is none of the verve, vivacity, and pure relish for words that you find in Charteris. And the character of Drummond himself verges on the Fascistic. John Buchan is a much better writer, a fine writer in fact, but his plots rely unnervingly on coincidence and his attempts to reproduce the slang of the criminal classes, or even worse of Americans, are embarrassing. Dornford Yates is in a category of his own. He developed a unique style, full of archaisms and purple passages that some admire (I am one of them) and others find ludicrous. His plotting is superb, perhaps because his method was never to know himself, at the end of a day’s writing, what was going to happen next. But he is most definitely an acquired taste.

  By any standard, Leslie Charteris is worthy to stand beside Buchan and Yates—and well above “Sapper.” And in The Saint and Mr Teal he is on top form. He was twenty-six when he wrote it, and it has all the freshness and vigour of an early work. The three stories are exciting, surprising, funny—and great, great fun. The character of the Saint is fully formed, with all the swashbuckling sparkle that kept him alive through the following decades and saw him emerge, in the form of the incomparable Roger Moore, as a globally recognized figure.

  In the late 1970s I found myself one day in a remote fishing village on the coast of Brazil. When I told the locals that I was a writer they naturally asked me what I had written. I mentioned various novels and television shows, all of which were met with blank stares. But when I mentioned the Saint faces lit up, recognition was instant. It was smiles and ecstatic cries of “El Santo! El Santo!” all round. The Saint had travelled a long, long way. He is still travelling.

  —John Goldsmith (2014)

  THE GOLD STANDARD

  1

  Simon Templar landed in England when the news of Brian Quell’s murder was on the streets. He read the brief notice of the killing in an evening paper which he bought in Newhaven, but it added scarcely anything to what he already knew.

  Brian Quell died in Paris, and died drunk; which would probably have been his own choice if he had been consulted, for the whole of his unprofitable existence had been wrapped up in the pleasures of the Gay City. He was a prophet who was without honour not only in his own country and among his own family, but even among the long-suffering circle of acquaintances who helped him to spend his money when he had any, and endeavoured to lend him as little as possible when he was broke—which was about three hundred days out of the year. He had arrived ten years ago as an art student, but he had long since given up any artistic pretensions that were not included in the scope of studio parties and long hair. Probably there was no real vice in him, but the life of the Left Bank is like an insidious drug, an irresistible spell to such a temperament as his, and it was very easy to slip into the stream in those days before the rapacity of Montmartre patrons drove the tourist pioneers across the river. They knew him, and charmingly declined to cash his cheques, at the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Select, and all the multitudinous boîtes-de-nuit which spring up around those unassailable institutions for a short season’s dizzy popularity, and sink back just as suddenly into oblivion. Brian Quell had his fill of them all. And he died.

  The evening paper did not say he was drunk, but Simon Templar knew, for he was the last man to see Brian Quell alive.

  He heard the shot just as he had removed his shoes, as he prepared for what was left of a night’s rest in the obscure little hotel near the Gare Montparnasse which he had chosen for his sanctuary in Paris. His room was on the first floor, with a window opening on to a well at the back, and it was through this window that the sharp crack of the report came to him. The i
nstinct of his trade made him leap for the nearest swatch and snap out the lights without thinking what he was doing, and he padded back to the window in his stockinged feet. By that time he had realised that the shots could be no immediate concern of his, for the shots that kill you are the ones you don’t hear. But if Simon Templar had been given to minding his own business there would never have been any stories to write about him.

  He swung his legs over the low balustrade and strolled quietly round the flat square of concrete which surrounded the ground-floor skylight that angled up in to it like his own, but all of them except one were in the centre of the well. Other windows opened out on darkness. The lighted window attracted him as inevitably as it would have drawn a moth, and as he went towards it he observed that it was the only one in the courtyard besides his own which had not been firmly shuttered against any breath of the fresh air which, as all the world knows, is instantly fatal to the sleeping Frenchman. And then the light went out.

  Simon reached the dark opening, and paused there. He heard a gasping curse, and then a hoarse voice gurgled the most amazing speech that he had ever heard from the lips of a dying man.

  “A mos’ unfrien’ly thing!”

  Without hesitation, Simon Templar climbed into the room. He found his way to the door and turned on the lights, and it was only then that he learned that the drunken man was dying.

  Brian Quell was sprawled in the middle of the floor, propping himself up unsteadily on one elbow. There was a pool of blood on the carpet beside him, and his grubby shirt was stained red across the chest. He stared at Simon hazily.

  “A mos’ unfrien’ly thing!” he repeated.

  Simon dropped on one knee at the man’s side. The first glance told him that Brian Quell had only a few minutes to live, but the astonishing thing was that Quell did not know he was hurt. The shock had not sobered him at all. The liquor that reeked on his breath was playing the part of an anaesthetic, and the fumes in his brain had fuddled his senses beyond all power of comprehending such an issue.