The Saint Goes West (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 William J. MacDonald

  Introduction to “Palm Springs” from The Second Saint Omnibus (1951)

  Introduction to “Hollywood” from The Saint’s Choice of Hollywood Crime (1946)

  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: 9781477842829

  ISBN-10: 1477842829

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Mary and Denis Green

  to whose always welcome interruptions

  this opus owes so much of its distinctive dizziness

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  ARIZONA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PALM SPRINGS

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  HOLLYWOOD

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  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

  The Saint…well what can be said about our legendary swashbuckling avenging-angel-cum-Robin-Hood that hasn’t already been said by so many sage acolytes?

  My journey with the Happy Highwayman began in the early ’90s rather unexpectedly. I was attending a car auction in London when a beautiful 1966 Volvo P1800 rolled onto the docket with the notorious ST 1 license plate. This jogged memories of my youth in San Francisco where many of my classmates had enjoyed the ITC series starring Sir Roger Moore. I made inquiries about the literary rights and ultimately secured the rights at Paramount and we made the feature that was eventually released in 1997.

  Several years passed after the film’s release, and in 2006, by sheer coincidence, I inquired about the television rights and met Sir Roger’s son, Geoffrey, who was very keen on developing a series. Along with Roger, we formed a partnership, and my odyssey with Simon Templar began anew. This parsec on our trek has involved years of effort to bring the legend to audiences in the twenty-first century. Aside from creating a truly familial bond with the Moores and Ian Dickerson, the boy genius from Hampshire who has brought this first re-release of Leslie Charteris’s timeless hero to the digital world in this work, we learned much about how, evidently, the world had grown so cynical relative to its prior incarnations, that chivalry and a gallant esprit de corps was, on the surface, a bit too “aged.” This merry band has persevered nonetheless proving the fact that his world is timeless and that these new generations need a hero who is more brains over brawn, more clever rather than brutish, more insouciant rather than just wantonly rebellious…in a word, the Saint.

  As of this writing, our team has successfully developed and produced a pilot for the new series starring Adam Rayner and Eliza Dushku, a terrific teaming, a truly fantastic modernization of the characters of Templar and his cohort in his unique brand of larceny, retribution, and justice, Patricia Holm.

  I and our team invite the readers to immerse themselves anew in one of fiction’s most endearing, if irreverent characters…Simon Templar, aka the Saint, and enjoy him as we do.

  —William J. MacDonald (2014)

  ARIZONA

  1

  Simon Templar checked the fit of the specially built silencer on his .357 Magnum for the last time, and settled more snugly into the screen of tumbled rocks from which he was watching the road below. The crisp Arizona sun baked down on him out of a sky of such brilliant blue that it would have seemed artificial if it had not been so certain that no artifice on earth could have copied it, and his blue eyes that matched the sky as closely as anything could match it were narrowed slightly against the glare that came up from the open desert. A grey lizard lay and watched him from a little distance with one cold flat eye, its soft stomach pulsing quickly with breaths, but otherwise as motionless and as much a part of the landscape as he had become since he had seen the lazy billow of dust creeping along the twisted ribbon of dirt trail that wound past the foot of the knoll where he was lying.

  There were many men in the world who would have been surprised to see him there, much as they had learned to accept Simon Templar’s sudden and disturbing appearances in all kinds of unlikely places: men in the variegated police uniforms of a dozen European and South American countries, as well as a staidly bowler-hatted Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, and a certain gruff grey-haired detective in New York City, men who could have met at any time and talked lengthily on one common ground apart from their professional interest in the enforcement of the Law—namely, their separate and individual reminiscences of the impudent outlawries which had blazed Simon Templar’s trail around the earth. There were also an even larger number of public enemies from just as many places, who could have joined in the chorus with no less indigna
tion, who would have been equally surprised to find him in a setting so different from the urbane backgrounds against which he was usually tracing his debonair and dangerous saga of adventure. But these surprises would have been purely geographical: there would have been no surprise that he lay there on the threshold of more trouble, for trouble was a thing that clung like an aura to the presence of Simon Templar, whom some imaginative newspaperman had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime, but who was much better known to police files and the unwritten records of the underworld as the Saint.

  The dust-cloud lengthened sluggishly towards him, churned up by the wheels of a well-worn car whose labouring engine sent a faint grumble of protest to his ears through the great stillness, and the Saint waited for it with the infinite patience of any Indian who might have lain in the same ambush more than a hundred years before, watching a covered wagon crawl through the scrub-sprinkled valley below his eyes. You might have seen something of the same Indian, too in the intent lines of his tanned reckless face, but that would have been an easy illusion. The same lines would have fitted as naturally into the picture of a conquistador scanning the shore of a new world, or of d’Artagnan mocking the courts of France: they were only the heraldry of a character that would have been the same in any age or place, the timeless brand of the born buccaneer. Perhaps that was another reason also why he seemed as much at home there as he would have been against the shining sophistication of a city boulevard—because it was inevitably right that he should fit in wherever adventure offered, because he himself was the living embodiment of adventure…But the Saint himself would never have thought about it so romantically as that, being strictly concerned at the moment with the mechanical job that he was there to do.

  The car rattled around another curve, with the driver nursing it gingerly over ruts and washboard, and then it was as close to where he was hiding as it would ever be. At that, he estimated the range at a little more than a hundred yards, and rested his brown right hand on a rock in front of him as coolly as if he had been trying a trick shot for his own amusement. Judgment of distance, speed, and elevation merged into one imperceptible coordination as he squeezed the trigger. The Magnum jarred in his grip with a discreet flup! but he still held the aim until he saw the car swerve on one flattened front tyre, bump a little way off the road, and come to a grinding stop. It had never had enough speed to be in any danger of overturning, and he had had no such fate in mind for it anyway.

  Satisfied that he had done no more and no less than he meant to do, he slid away down the other side of the hillock, straightened up as soon as he was safely below the skyline, and walked quickly to the big Buick parked in the sandy arroyo below the sheltering slope, unscrewing the cumbersome silencer as he went; a few minutes later the long sedan jounced out of the wash on to the dirt road half a mile south, turned back, and battered its way north again over the tracks left by the car which he had just brought to an effective standstill.

  Simon braked as he came up with it, and a white-haired man in a neat but incongruous business suit eased his back from a pained and unprofitable scrutiny of the deflated tyre. Simon leaned out and grinned amiably at him.

  “Anything wrong?” he inquired.

  The white-haired man gazed back at him through silver rimmed spectacles with the peculiarly sadistic tolerance reserved by all right-minded voyagers for those persons who ask futile questions in unspeakable situations.

  “We had a blow-out,” he said, with admirable restraint.

  “Maybe I can help,” said the Saint cheerfully.

  He swung out of his car and inspected the evidence of his marksmanship with concealed satisfaction. His single bullet had done its job as neatly as he could have desired, ripping through tube and casing without leaving any evidence of its transit except for an expert. But the Saint only said, “Do you have a spare?”

  “You could help me to get it out,” said the girl.

  She backed her head out of the trunk to say it, and Simon placed a cigarette between his lips as he turned to look at her with a casualness that was only another concealment. For this was a part of the encounter which he had irrelevantly looked forward to all day—in fact, since he had first caught a passing glimpse of her the evening before.

  She was only a minor character in the business that his mind was on, and yet he had been hoping that the impression he had been saving wouldn’t be destroyed. Now he saw that he need not have worried. Even with her brown hair a little scattered, her face a little flushed, she had the same quality that had caught in his memory. It was not the standard prettiness of blue eyes, of a smiling generous mouth, of a small nose that was still a cameo of classic modelling, but something much more, much rarer, and yet so simple that the only words for it seemed inadequate. You could only say that in one glance at her you knew that without being naive or stupid she was utterly without guile or coquetry or deceit, that her mind was as clean-cut and untrammelled as her sapling figure in its plain white shirt and blue slacks, and that whatever she did would be as real and honest as the friendly hills. But to the Saint, who had known so many other fascinations, this was one of the most arresting certainties that he had ever known.

  “I’d love to,” he said.

  He struck a match and put it to his cigarette as he strolled over, but he didn’t throw the burnt stem away. As he wrestled the spare wheel out, and carried it around the car, he kept working the match-stem into the valve, letting the air escape whenever there were other noises to mask the hiss of it, so that a few minutes later he could press the tyre flat with his hand and say, “It’s too bad, but this seems to be another dead one.”

  “Now, that’s perfectly swell,” said the girl.

  Simon let the wheel drop, and philosophically revived his cigarette.

  “The nearest garage is back at Lion Rock,” he remarked. “I’ll leave word there later if you like. Or could I take you anywhere?”

  The man said, “We were heading for the Circle Y—it’s three miles further on, off this road.”

  “Visiting?”

  “No. I…er…I happen to own it.”

  “When were you going to be back at Lion Rock?” asked the girl. “We don’t want to take you out of your way, but it’s getting late. I mean…”

  The Saint smiled down at her, rumpling his dark hair with apparent thoughtfulness. It was indeed getting late, as he had hoped it would be: bright as it still was, the sun was already dipping towards the high range to westward, and under the slanting light the barren battlements that ringed three of their horizons were putting on soft chiffons of rose and purple against the promise of an early twilight.

  He said, “It might be quite a while before I see Lion Rock again. Perhaps I’d better take you to the Circle Y and you can send in to the garage tomorrow.”

  “We hate to trouble you,” said the white-haired man half-heartedly.

  “Don’t give it another thought,” said the Saint. “Have you got any parcels or things you want to take along?”

  Five minutes later the Buick was rocking and rolling north again with two extra passengers, and the older man was making conversation from the other end of the front seat.

  “I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name is Don Morland, and this is my daughter Jean.”

  “I’m Simon Templar,” said the Saint.

  The name meant nothing immediately to them, and was not meant to. But he had known who they were before he lay down to wait for them not long after breakfast, behind the pulpit of erupted boulders which had already merged into the violet-shaded diorama behind.

  “I’m sure glad you happened along,” Morland went on. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed trying to find my way home from there if we’d been caught after dark.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a rancher talking,” Simon remarked lightly.

  “I’m not really a rancher—of course you could tell that. I just happen to own a ranch. As a matter of fact, we’ve only been here a couple of days. It’s al
l quite an accident.”

  Simon grinned.

  “You won the Circle Y in a raffle?”

  “It belonged to my brother. He died just recently, and I inherited it. I was a dentist in Richmond, Virginia. I’d been thinking I was about ready to retire, and Jean always wanted to see the West. So we thought we’d give it a trial.”

  “Too bad it had to happen that way,” said the Saint. “I mean through your brother.”

  Morland began filling a stubby pipe.

  “Yes. It was very sudden. His horse threw him and kicked him—fractured his skull. He only bought the place himself about eighteen months ago…Well, if he could turn himself into a rancher I expect I can.”

  “You think you’ll keep the place.”

  “Probably. Our next-door neighbour from the J-Bar-B made me a rather attractive offer as soon as we got here, but I don’t think I’ll sell. I think I might get to like it here. Jean is going to buy me a big hat and some high-heeled boots and try to make me look like the real thing.”

  The Saint’s strong hands worked on the wheel with imperturbable skill, his calm eyes picking the smoothest path over the derelict track as nonchalantly as though his role had actually been as fortuitous and disinterested as it was meant to seem. But into his mind went just a little more information than he had had before, and with it a repetition and revival of one grim question that he had already asked himself a great many times. Yet no one could have guessed that there were such things as murder in his thoughts.

  Jean Morland was studying him with straightforward interest, taking in his quietly checkered blue shirt, his well-worn Levis, and coming back again to his lean tanned face with its hint of mockeries and mischief that must have known even wider fields than those traditionally great open spaces.

  “I don’t think you’ve lived around here all your life, either,” she said.

  He smiled at her.

  “That isn’t really very hard to guess. As a matter of fact, I haven’t really been around here for about ten years. But I can still give a working imitation of the genuine article. I was riding herd in the Panhandle when you weren’t any further than the fourth grade. You need a good hand on the Circle Y?”