The Saint in Action (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 Jonathan Rigby

  Preface first published in the Hodder edition of The Saint in Action, 1962

  Introduction to “The Unlicensed Victuallers” first published in The First Saint Omnibus, 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: 9781477842768

  ISBN-10: 1477842764

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Patricia Charteris

  hoping she may meet a Saint someday

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE

  THE SPANISH WAR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE UNLICENSED VICTUALLERS

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  THE BEAUTY SPECIALIST

  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

  Anyone taking even a cursory interest in the Leslie Charteris bibliography will quickly stumble upon numerous sources of confusion. Many of them arise from Charteris’s unwillingness—or, more accurately, his publishers’ unwillingness—to leave a title alone.

  That magazine stories should undergo title changes when promoted to book form is perhaps unsurprising. But Charteris’s book titles were fiddled with, too, particularly when it became clear that he may have stumbled in not applying the marketable “Saint” name to all the volumes featuring the character. As a result, plenty of Charteris’s pre-war books were re-branded for post-war audiences. The Last Hero, for example, became The Saint Closes the Case. She Was a Lady (never a good title) became The Saint Meets His Match. The Holy Terror became The Saint vs Scotland Yard… and so it went on.

  But, of Charteris’s twenty-one pre-war Saint titles, three remained conspicuously unaltered. I like to think that Charteris made a point of not changing these ones because they so perfectly encapsulate the devil-may-care appeal of his chosen hero. Let’s face it, The Brighter Buccaneer, The Ace of Knaves, and The Happy Highwayman are so good they really don’t need the added assistance of the Saint name. Admittedly, The Ace of Knaves was known in some US editions as The Saint in Action, but this was one of the few Saint re-titlings that didn’t stick. Indeed, this 2013 reissue marks the first time it has been used in the UK, twenty years after Charteris’s death.

  In essence, The Brighter Buccaneer, The Ace of Knaves, and The Happy Highwayman are all the same title, pinning down precisely the rollicking, and occasionally amoral, adventurer who blazes his way through the pages within. They also involve the kind of wordplay in which Charteris delighted. The first and last are simple alliterations, while The Ace of Knaves punningly combines a non-existent playing card with a Shakespearean synonym for “rogue.” Indeed, the phrase was so memorable it was later appropriated as one of the Joker’s aliases in the Batman comic books.

  Punning and alliteration may not in themselves qualify as high style, but you don’t have to look at Charteris’s pre-war Saint books for very long before realising that here was a light fiction stylist of the highest order. The very earliest Saint stories may have betrayed a tendency towards rather clotted and overlong sentences, while the Saint himself had a distressing fondness for composing facetious poems and inflicting them on the reader at unnecessary length. But these were the fledgling gaucheries of a writer who, after all, was a mere twenty years of age when he invented Simon Templar.

  Soon enough Charteris proved himself a master of three literary forms—the short story, the novella, and the full-length novel. For dazzling proof of this, try (just taking three titles at random) “The Green Goods Man” (1932), “The Elusive Ellshaw” (1934), and The Saint Plays with Fire (1938). (It will come as no surprise that these three were originally known as “The Very Green Goods Man,” “The Race Train Crime,” and Prelude for War.) With Simon Templar as his dashingly piratical mouthpiece, Charteris used these and other stories as a means of expressing his contempt for the flabby evasions and hidden corruption of contemporary life. In the process, the Saint earned the sobriquet “the Robin Hood of modern crime” while Charteris was hailed as the natural successor to Edgar Wallace.

  To me, though, Charteris’s real literary master was P. G. Wodehouse.

  As a boy my bedside table was rarely without a Wodehouse, as often as not coupled with an Ian Fleming, both books being read in tandem. Moonraker might rub shoulders with Joy in the Morning, Dr No with The Luck of the Bodkins, and so on. Had I also been familiar with Charteris at that early age, I would have made a marvellous discovery—for here was a writer who combined the cruel a
ction-thriller excitement of James Bond with Galahad Threepwood’s highly developed sense of the absurd.

  In The Ace of Knaves, for example, you’ll encounter one of Charteris’s most memorable creations, the Saint’s hapless would-be nemesis, Claud Eustace Teal. “He bit on his chewing gum,” writes Charteris, “with the ferocious energy of a hungry cannibal tasting a mouthful of tough missionary.” Elsewhere, a beautiful film star looks at the Saint “with so much loathing and hatred and disgust that Simon knew just what it felt like to be one of those wriggly things with too many legs that make their abode under flat stones.”

  Pure Wodehouse.

  The genius of Charteris, however, is that he subverts this breezy style with grisly underworld details and thus creates a style all his own. “In the course of a long and wide experience,” pronounces the Saint with perfect sang-froid, “I’ve rarely seen a head bashed in with so much thoroughness. I shouldn’t be surprised if they found his brains coming out through his eyes when they turned him over.”

  And Charteris tightens the screw yet further by having the Saint playfully characterise the monster responsible for this hideous head-bashing as, of all things, Pongo. What Wodehouse fan can fail to be reminded of that mild-mannered habitué of the Drones Club, Pongo Twistleton?

  On top of this, Charteris’s relish for language finds him tossing in ten-dollar words like pachydermatously, fuliginous, and epizootic (the last two on consecutive pages), describing the noise of a lorry’s engine as “scrangling,” calling a consignment of illegal liquor “contraband stagger soup,” and having a minor hood mistake his f’s for m’s when using phrases like “none of your muckin’ business.” Lovely stuff.

  The Ace of Knaves was first published in June 1937 and finds Charteris, and the Saint, at the height of his powers. Throughout all three of the novellas contained in it, Charteris’s prose offers a sparkling combination of the lean and laconic with the florid and fruity.

  “The Spanish War” originated as “Return of the Saint” in the 13 February 1937 issue of The Thriller and is, at bottom, a classic clash between Templar and Teal, with the Spanish Civil War as an unlikely catalyst. It also features a mild instance of the kind of racism that cropped up so frequently among Charteris’s contemporaries. Himself an Anglo-Chinese, Charteris almost never succumbed to this kind of thing, though one could perhaps point to the torturer Ngano in “The Million Pound Day” (aka “Black Face”) and the revoltingly lecherous Abdul Osman in “The Death Penalty.” Here, however, there’s a very peculiar reference to Luis Quintana’s teeth as a “characteristic Spanish row of irregular fangs covered with greenish-yellow slime.” Immediately after The Ace of Knaves, Charteris published the novel Thieves’ Picnic (aka The Saint Bids Diamonds), which contains more slurs against the natives of Tenerife (where Charteris had recently taken a Christmas vacation) than one would have thought possible.

  Unusually, “The Unlicensed Victuallers” had had no prior existence as a magazine story. This bracing night-time tale of liquor smuggling in 1930s Dorset is distinguished by three things. First, there’s the intriguing figure of society girl-turned-smuggler Brenda Marlow, who seems like a trial run for the scintillating Lady Valerie Woodchester in Charteris’s classic novel The Saint Plays with Fire. Second, the Saint falls, uncharacteristically, into a very transparent trap. Finally, the outrageously brutal ending can leave the unsuspecting reader slack-jawed with amazement even today. Here, the Saint’s amoral code dispenses the roughest of rough justice, literally fighting fire with fire.

  “The Beauty Specialist,” which started life as “The Z-Man” in the 27 March 1937 edition of The Thriller, is a gruesome delight from start to finish, with a particularly odious and sadistic villain whom Simon compares to both Count Dracula and Boris Karloff. The milieu of the British film industry gives the story added flavour, with Beatrice Avery, Irene Cromwell, and Sheila Ireland roughly comparable to such real-life stars as, say, Jessie Matthews, Vivien Leigh, and Merle Oberon.

  The film industry was no doubt much on Charteris’s mind at the time, since film rights to the Saint had recently been snapped up by RKO. The first Saint film, The Saint in New York, was completed in March 1938 and starred Louis Hayward as the ideal cinematic Simon Templar. Twenty-odd years later, of course, another definitive Saint turned up on TV in the form of Roger Moore. And with him came—inevitably—yet another round of re-titlings.

  “The Spanish War” became a 1963 episode called “The Work of Art,” in which the Spanish Civil War was supplanted by Algeria’s more topical struggle for independence from France, with the black-browed Martin Benson ideally cast as Quintana. The same year, “The Beauty Specialist” became “Marcia.” This one was named after the story’s deceased film star (whom Charteris had called Mercia) and featured budding star Samantha Eggar as “Claire” Avery. It also offered a delightfully detailed insight into The Saint’s home studio, Elstree, as would other film industry episodes like “Starring the Saint” and “Simon and Delilah.” Then in 1964 “The Unlicensed Victuallers” was radically adapted as “The Hi-Jackers,” which replaced Dorset with Munich’s Oktoberfest and turned Brenda Marlow into Mathilde Baum. Why? To facilitate the casting of German beauty Ingrid Schoeller.

  Consistently glossy and charming as The Saint series was (and remains), it suffered from the same in-built problem that afflicted the contemporaneous BBC series The World of Wooster. Roger Moore and Ivor Dean may have been ideal as Templar and Teal, just as Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael were perfectly suited to Jeeves and Wooster. But there was really no substitute for Charteris’s—and Wodehouse’s—prose.

  For that, of course, you have to go back to the original books. And, in the annals of the Saint, The Ace of Knaves is one of the very best. In fact, its US first edition carried a two-word endorsement (“Simply corking!”) from—guess who?

  That’s right. P. G. Wodehouse.

  —Jonathan Rigby

  PREFACE

  Although this is by no means one of the first Saint books—in fact, it stands seventeenth in the series—I still think it may be helpful to preface this umpteenth reprinting with a reminder that it was first published more than a quarter-century ago, and its adventures take place amid the current history of those times.

  The Spanish War referred to in the first story is therefore the one which began in 1935. The truck driver’s wages of ten pounds a week mentioned in the second story were not bad wages in those days. Nor would the £10,000 quoted in the last story have seemed quite as small a bite of a film star’s fortune as it does today. The reader will come upon many other such symptoms of a certain antiquity.

  I am leaving them unchanged, as I have decided to do in other reprints, because after all it’s obvious that all the Saint’s adventures could not have happened last week, and that is what life was like in those days.

  —Leslie Charteris (1962)

  THE SPANISH WAR

  1

  Simon Templar folded his newspaper with a sigh and laid it reverently to rest in the wastebasket.

  “We live in a wonderful country,” he observed. “Did you read how two policemen and one policewoman practically lived in a night-club in Brighton for about three weeks, drawing their wages from the ratepayers all the time and drinking gallons of champagne at the ratepayers’ expense, until they finally managed to lure some poor fathead into the place and get him to buy them a drink after time? And that’s what we pay taxes for. Our precious politicians can go to Geneva and swindle the Abyssinians with all the dignity of a gang of bucket-shop promoters, and slap the poor deluded Spaniard on the back and tell him he’s just dreaming about Italians and Germans helping the rebels in his so-called civil war, but the honour of England has been vindicated. A bloke is fined fifty quid for selling a whisky and soda at half-past eleven and another bloke is fined a fiver for drinking it, two policemen and one policewoman have had a wonderful free jag and helped themselves towards promotion, and the world has been shown that England respects the La
w. Rule, Britannia.”

  Patricia Holm smiled tolerantly.

  “I love you when your gorge rises,” she said, and the Saint chuckled.

  “It’s a beautiful gorge, darling,” he answered. “And talking about the Law, it seems a long time since we saw anything of dear old Chief Inspector Teal.”

  “He doesn't go abroad very much,” Patricia pointed out. “If you stayed at home for a bit I expect you’d see plenty of him.”

  Simon nodded.

  “There’s plenty of him to see,” he agreed, “and I suppose we’ll be seeing it. I can’t go on being respectable indefinitely.”

  He got up from the breakfast table and stretched himself lazily by the open windows.

  The spring sunshine lay in pools between the trees of the Park and twinkled on the delicate green of the young leaves that were still too freshly budded for the London air to have dulled their colour, and the same sunshine twinkled in the smile with which the Saint looked back at Patricia. It was a smile that made any disclaimer of respectability seem almost superfluous. Respectability was a disease that could never have attacked a man with a smile in which there was so much unconquerable devilment it couldn’t have found a foothold anywhere in any one of the seventy-four inches of slimly muscular length that separated his crisp black hair from the soles of his polished shoes. And with that smile laughing its irresistible way into her eyes, Patricia felt again as fresh and ageless as if she were only meeting it then for the first time, the gay disreputable magic of that incomparable buccaneer whom the newspapers had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime, and whom the police and the underworld alike had called by many worse names.

  “I suppose you can’t,” she said resignedly, and knew that she was stating one of the few immutable certainties of this unsettled world.

  Simon lighted a cigarette with an impenitent grin, and turned to the door as Orace’s walrus face poked itself into the room.