The Saint in Europe (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 Mike Ripley

  Introduction to “The Golden Journey” and “The Spanish Cow” originally published in A Letter from the Saint, January 23, 1947.

  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: 9781477842881

  ISBN-10: 1477842888

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To my father, with love

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PARIS: THE COVETOUS HEADSMAN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  AMSTERDAM: THE ANGEL’S EYE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  THE RHINE: THE RHINE MAIDEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  TIROL: THE GOLDEN JOURNEY

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  LUCERNE: THE LOADED TOURIST

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  JUAN-LES-PINS: THE SPANISH COW

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  ROME: THE LATIN TOUCH

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  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

  Somehow I managed to miss the Saint during my formative reading years. As a schoolboy, I was addicted to the thrillers of Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, Geoffrey Jenkins, and Ian Fleming, and my fictional taste buds quickly matured (I like to think) when I discovered Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, and John le Carré.

  It wasn’t that I considered Leslie Charteris’s Saint stories old-fashioned or the product of a bygone Golden Age—I did, after all, admire John Buchan and Nevil Shute—I just, due to a bizarre blind spot, didn’t consider the Saint books at all.

  My first experience of Simon Templar came in the persona of Roger Moore in the television series, probably the first series in 1962, which was compulsory viewing in my parents’ house. I cannot claim that The Saint was required viewing because of my family’s love of Leslie Charteris’s books—I can never remember seeing one in the house—but rather because of my mother’s love of Roger Moore, who had quite stolen her heart as a real (sort of) knight in shining armour in the television series Ivanhoe. As a consequence, the Saint appeared to me to be a modern-day knight errant, the clunky armour and white horse being replaced with a white and anything but clunky Volvo sports car, which was of course far cooler.

  And unlike Ivanhoe, who rarely seemed to stray beyond Sherwood Forest, the Saint got to visit a school-atlas worth of interesting and sophisticated locations—places which an unsophisticated Yorkshire schoolboy could only dream of. (It was only thirty years later as a cynical scriptwriter I realised that the television Saint probably never got further than Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire.)

  So for me, the Saint was a television, rather than a literary hero and, I have to admit, one who quickly faced strong opposition in my youthful view, first from The Avengers (particularly the Emma Peel years), then Danger Man, Man in a Suitcase, and even the deliciously camp The Man From U.N.C.L.E. By the time the 1970s arrived, I had unconsciously wiped the Saint from my personal videotape of memories, if only to make room for newer stuff—and university students in those days, unlike these, never admitting to watching television. And in any case, Roger Moore was now James Bond.

  In the late 1980s I became a crime writer with the legendary Collins Crime Club and the reviewer of crime fiction for The Daily Telegraph, yet in neither of these worlds did I encounter the Saint or his creator. However, being cowardly by nature (or realistic about my meagre talent), I had not given up the day job, which just happened to be working for The Brewers’ Society, the trade association for the British brewing industry. It was through beer and pubs, not books, that I was to finally appreciate Leslie Charteris and, in 1992, get to meet him.

  It was in 1990 whilst researching The Brewers’ Society’s long-running corporate advertising campaigns that I came across a file of advertising agency proofs which had been earmarked for what we would call today “recycling,” but back then we just said “the rubbish bin.” This particular file dealt with the 1960s, when the brewers had switched from claiming “Beer Is Best” to a campaign which promoted the pub rather than the brew under the strapline “Look In at the Local” and which used well-known personalities of the day—mostly footballers it has to be said, but also, in one burst of press and television advertising, Leslie Charteris and his wife, Audrey, even though they only lived in the UK for half the year—extolling the virtues of the British pub.

  The file of agency proofs had been marked for disposal because (a) Brewers’ Society generic advertising had stopped in 1970 and (b) no one th
en employed at the society knew who Leslie Charteris was! Except me, even though I had never read a Saint story. Here, whether I had read him or not, was a legend of crime writing, and so I refused to allow the file to be recycled. (Today, I am proud to say, it survives in the archives of the library of the University of Warwick.)

  When I learned that—thanks to the efforts of a true fan, Peter Lovesey—the Crime Writers’ Association was to award Leslie Charteris the Cartier Diamond Dagger, for lifetime achievement, in 1992, I had one of the press adverts from 1966 featuring Leslie and his wife reproduced as a photograph, and I presented it to him at the ceremony in the House of Lords. I think he was genuinely surprised and touched and also clever enough to realise that I was probably the one person in the Palace of Westminster that night who had never read one of his books!

  And now, twenty years on, here I am writing this introduction probably quite fraudulently and slightly shamefaced to be in the company of the genuine Saint fans doing the same thing in all the other volumes in this fabulous new edition.

  The Saint in Europe collection of stories was first published in 1954. In terms of crime writing, that places it in the era of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and Patricia Highsmith’s brilliantly titled The Talented Mr Ripley. If nothing else, to survive in such distinguished company and still be in print almost sixty years later can be no accident.

  As a complete Saint virgin, the first thing which struck me about the seven stories in The Saint in Europe was how perfectly formed they were as detailed treatments for episodes in, say, a long-running television series…

  Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered after a modicum of research on the jolly old interweb that four of the stories were in fact the basis for episodes in that very first series of The Saint, starring Roger Moore, which hit our television screens in October 1962 (“The Latin Touch,” “The Covetous Headsman,” “The Loaded Tourist,” and “The Golden Journey”) and was, coincidentally, my very first encounter with Mr Templar.

  But this is supposed to be an introduction to a book, not a review of a black-and-white television show, so do the stories deliver on the printed page? Certainly, they justify the title, for here is the Saint quite at home in Paris, Amsterdam, Juan-les-Pins, Lucerne, and Rome, as well on the Rhine and in the Tyrolean Alps, all of which must have seemed extremely exotic locations to a British reading public only just (1953) free of wartime rationing.

  And when touring Europe, the Saint didn’t exactly stint himself, partaking of elaborate dinners and the finest wines known to humanity at every opportunity. No wonder his lifestyle, like that of James Bond, was attractive to an audience starved of luxury, but where James Bond was in theory a civil servant with a salary and a boss, the Saint had even fewer restrictions placed upon him. He was a man of independent means with plenty of time on his hands, free to travel unencumbered by wife, family, mortgage, or taxes, and with a charm which drew attractive, available women to him like butterflies to honeysuckle. There could have been few male readers who did not envy such a hero, especially as such a carefree existence came liberally spiced with action and adventure at every turn…and the Saint didn’t even need Bond’s licence to kill when it came to the really rough stuff.

  Sometimes it got very rough indeed. In The Saint in Europe, three of the stories have particularly brutal endings, raising a few concerns about the Saint’s moral compass, but then, with fine irony, the Saint never actually professed to be a saint, always keeping one eye open to his own advantage. In one of the stories, though, “The Spanish Cow,” he is perilously close to coming across as a rather cruel gigolo in order to relieve an innocent but plump socialite of her jewels. (Actually, Charteris leaves us in no doubt that the widow Mrs Nussberg is not just built for comfort rather than for speed but is fat—very fat—and on the beach at Juan-les-Pins could easily be mistaken for a stranded orca. Indeed, throughout this collection there are sideways references to fat men, who invariably turn out to be villains.) Rescuing damsels in distress is one thing, but the attitudes shown to women in “The Spanish Cow” and in “The Golden Journey” have not dated well, and a modern reader may prefer the Saint to pick on someone his own size.

  The writing too has dated, from Charteris’s curious mixture of overblown English—“a gargantuan repast devoured with respectable deliberation” and all car journeys made at “suicidal velocity”—to his use of Americanised dialogue: “What’s boiling?” “My hot-shot’s outside,” and “What shemozzle are you up to here?” Yet this is only strange and unusual to me, someone who was brought up on the Roger Moore television incarnation, where the Saint is quintessentially English. Leslie Charteris, after all, lived for a large chunk of his life in the US and was, from the start, writing for both British and American audiences.

  And there are times when the Saint’s own dialogue resembles that of Bertie Wooster—“Don’t let him put you off your feed,” and “I should get a ducat for speeding”—but that is positively Shakespearean compared to the awful, laugh-at-the-foreigner French accent of a particularly shady character who declares at one point, “Eet say ’ere ze police ’ave learn nozzing new about ze tragedy of your brozzer. But do not fear. Zey are very pairseestent. Soon, I am sure, zey will ’ave ze clue.”

  Again, one has to try and remember that the Saint had been around a long time and the early novels were actually written in the era of Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey—and indeed Hercule Poirot, if one is searching for strangled French accents.

  To expect modern-day political correctness from a book written sixty years ago is mere carping. Do these stories deliver what they set out to deliver back in 1954 (and much earlier), which was basically exciting, escapist entertainment? Yes, of course they do. They are also important in the history of crime fiction because the character Simon Templar forms the perfect literary bridge between John Buchan’s Richard Hannay (and EW Hornung’s gentleman thief Raffles) and Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

  The Saint’s buccaneering, devil-may-care attitude to law and order, total freedom from life’s boring responsibilities, and his uncanny ability to find skulduggery in the most exotic locations are surely every schoolboy’s daydream, and the Saint stories deliver full value. The schoolboys may have grown up, but they still daydream.

  —Mike Ripley

  PARIS: THE COVETOUS HEADSMAN

  1

  “I hope, Monsieur Templar,” said Inspector Archimède Quercy, of the Paris Police Judiciaire, in passable English, “that you will not think this meeting is unfriendly.”

  “Nevertheless,” Simon replied, in perfect French, “to be summoned here on my very first day in Paris seems at least an unusual distinction.”

  “The Saint is an unusual personage,” said Inspector Quercy, reverting gratefully to his native tongue.

  He was a long thin man with a long thin nose, and even with rather long thin hair. He had a solemn anxious face and wistful eyes like a questioning spaniel. Simon knew that that appearance was deceptive. It was the Saint’s business, in the cause of outlawry, to know the reputations of many police officers in many places, and he knew that on the record Inspector Quercy’s instincts, if the canine parallel must be continued, leaned more towards those of the bloodhound, the retriever, and the bulldog.

  “If you come here as a simple tourist,” Quercy said, “France welcomes you. We have, as you well know, a beautiful country, good food, good wine, and pretty girls. They are all at your disposal—for you, no doubt, have plenty of those good American dollars which France so badly needs. But as the Saint—that would be altogether different.”

  “Monsieur the Inspector is, perhaps, anti-clerical?” Simon suggested gravely.

  “I refer, Monsieur, to the nom de guerre under which you are so widely known. I have not, it is true, been informed of any charges pending against you anywhere, nor have the police of any other country requested me to arrest you for extradition, but I have read about your exploits. Your
motives are popularly believed to be idealistic, in a peculiar way. That is not for me to judge. I only tell you that we want none of them here.”

  “What, no ideals—in the Palais de Justice?”

  Quercy sighed. He gazed across his littered desk into the dancing blue eyes under quizzically tilted brows, and for a moment the lugubriousness in his own gaze was very deep and real. The sight of the tall broad-shouldered figure sprawled with such impudent grace in his shabby armchair made a mockery of the conventional stiffness of the room, just as the casual elegance of its clothing affronted the hard-worn dilapidation of the furniture; the warm bronze of the preposterously handsome face seemed to bring its own sun into the dingy room, whispering outlandish heresies of open skies and wide places where the wind blew, and because of this man the office seemed more cramped and drab and dustier than ever, and the gloom of it touched the soul of its proper occupant. It was a sensation that many other policemen had had when they came face to face with that last amazing heir to the mantle of Robin Hood, when they knew it was their turn to try to tame him and realized the immensity of the task…

  “I mean,” said Inspector Quercy patiently, “that there are servants of the Republic, of whom I am one, employed here to concern themselves with crime. If you, as an individual, acquire knowledge of any crime or criminals, we shall be glad to receive your information, but we do not allow private persons to take over the duties of the police. Still less do we permit anyone to administer his own interpretation of justice, as I hear you have sometimes claimed to do. Furthermore I must warn you that here, under the Code Napoleon, you would not have the same advantage that you have enjoyed in England and America. There, you are legally innocent until you are proved guilty; here, with sufficient grounds, you may be placed on trial and required to prove yourself innocent.”

  The Saint smiled.

  “I appreciate the warning,” he murmured. “But the truth is, I did come here for the food, the wine, and the pretty girls. I hadn’t thought of giving you any trouble.” The devil in him couldn’t resist adding, “So far.”