The Saint Steps In (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 Peter Robinson

  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: 9781477842836

  ISBN-10: 1477842837

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Betty,

  For more reasons than I can remember and more than I ever want to forget

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  CHAPTER ONE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DINED IN WASHINGTON AND SYLVESTER ANGERT SPOKE OF HIS NERVOUSNESS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER TWO: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR INTERVIEWED MR IMBERLINE, AND WAS INTERVIEWED IN HIS TURN

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  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER THREE: HOW MADELINE GRAY WAS PERSUADED TO EAT, AND MR ANGERT GAVE IT UP

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  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER FOUR: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR STUDIED BIOGRAPHY, AND WALTER DEVAN CAME VISITING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER FIVE: HOW ANDREA QUENNEL TRIED EVERYTHING AND INSPECTOR FERNACK ALSO DID HIS BEST

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER SIX: HOW HOBART QUENNEL DISCOURSED ABOUT BUSINESS, AND CALVIN GRAY DID WHAT THE SAINT TOLD HIM

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW SIMON WENT ON HIS WAY

  1

  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

  “Sanctity does have its rewards.”

  —Simon Templar, The Saint Steps In

  Whenever I think of the Saint, I can’t help but remember those magical Saturday mornings of my adolescence. In the early sixties, one of the highlights of my week was a Saturday morning visit to Stringers Book Exchange, in the bustling Kirkgate Market in Leeds. I would wander down the aisles listening to the stall holders shouting out their sales pitches for housewares and bolts of cloth, assailed on all sides by the smells of slightly rotten fruit and vegetables, perhaps stopping to pick up the latest Record Song Book or Melody Maker at the newsstand, then I would wander on past the glistening slabs of marbled red meat displayed on the butchers’ stalls, and finally get to Stringers, where box after box of paperback books lay spread out on the trestle tables.

  The system was simple: whatever you bought, you could bring back when you had finished it and get half the price you paid for it against a new purchase. Even back then, I liked to hang on to most of the books I bought, so I don’t think I took full advantage of the exchange feature. I was usually on the lookout for anything exciting—horror stories, spy stories, science fiction, and crime thrillers, mostly. One of my favourites was the Saint. My eagle eye was always scanning the stacks for the stick figure with the halo, and I’m quite certain that The Saint Steps In was among one of the many Leslie Charteris books I bought there and didn’t take back to exchange.

  For me, the Saint beats his countless competitors—the Toff, the Baron, Sexton Blake, Bulldog Drummond et al.—hands down, and he has remained one of the most enduring and best-loved figures in popular culture. I wish I still had my tattered old Saint paperback collection today, but after so many years and so many moves, covering two continents, it’s a wonder I have anything left from those days at all. But now, after so many years out of print, when they were available only in obscure omnibus editions, and practically impossible to find at even the most accommodating of second-hand book shops, it’s good to have the whole series coming back in handsome and accessible paperback editions. At last, the Saint receives his due.

  Many people will remember the TV series, starring Roger Moore, which aired from 1962 to 1969. Good as the series was, and terrific as Sir Roger was in the title role, which fit him far more comfortably than did James Bond, there remains a huge difference between the TV Saint and the character in the books. Though most of the early black-and-white episodes were based on Charteris’s stories, they were adapted by a number of different screen writers and, as happens in the world of TV, often ended up being changed beyond recognition. The later colour episodes were almost all based on original scripts, and though the Saint remained elegantly roguish and debonair throughout, he lacked some of the rougher and more foolhardy edges his character demonstrated in the books.

  The Saint in the books is much more violent, for example. In The Saint Steps In (1943), Simon Templar is quite happy to keep on beating a man to a pulp, and perhaps even to pour boiling water and nitric acid over his feet, to get information, but we are given to believe that he only does that to people he knows would do the same to him! And he swears like a trooper. Charteris never gives us the actual words, of course, but his description of the string of expletives Templar unleashes when he loses a suspect is unmistakable. There was definitely a whiff of the London underworld about Simon Templar when he first emerged in the late 1920s, along with that “faint hint of mockery behind his clear blue eyes,” and it stays with him throughout the series, despite the veneer of
civilisation and the expensive tastes. Though he is on the side of the law, he isn’t above bending it to suit his own particular sense of justice, and while he might have played Robin Hood on occasion, his lifestyle is certainly lavish, to say the least!

  Though television may capture some of the witty banter of Charteris’s dialogue, it cannot reproduce the energy and playfulness of his use of language in general. He clearly loved words, loved puns, alliteration, and metaphors, and his books are peppered with them. A lunch at the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar, for example, becomes, “He was driven by pangs of purely prosaic hunger to the Oyster Bar, where he took his time over the massacre of several inoffensive molluscs.” As teenagers, we used to repeat these phrases to one another, and they never failed to provoke howls of laughter.

  Leslie Charteris moved to the USA in 1932. His first book to be set there was The Saint in New York (1935), which was followed by a number of European adventures before he returned to the USA for The Saint in Miami (1940), then The Saint Goes West (1942), which immediately precedes The Saint Steps In, which finds him moving between Washington, DC; New York; and Stamford, Connecticut. The book was originally serialised in Liberty magazine in 1942, and published in volume form a year later by Hodder in the UK.

  The plot, such as it is, wouldn’t be out of place in an Alfred Hitchcock movie: North by Northwest, for example. A beautiful but straitlaced and enigmatic young woman called Madeline Gray comes to ask for Simon Templar’s help when she receives a threatening note. It appears that her father has invented a form of synthetic rubber that would be useful for the war effort—not to mention immensely profitable to whoever possesses it after the war—and she wants to make sure it ends up in the right hands. The formula becomes what Hitchcock called the “McGuffin,” the highly sought after documents or plans that set the events of the plot in motion. Everybody wants them, but we don’t always know why, or even what they are. Soon, Templar gets a threatening note, too, then there is a scuffle in the street when it appears that someone is trying to abduct Madeline. When Templar and Madeline get to Stamford, they find that her father is missing, then the plot thickens…

  In contrast to Madeline Gray, we also meet the rather less wholesome Andrea Quennel, who has “the build and beauty and colouring that Wagner was probably dreaming of before the divas took over.” Charteris clearly enjoyed writing his descriptions of Andrea, especially her clothes, and this is where he gets to show off his love of metaphor to best advantage. “She wore a soft creamy sweater that clung like suds to every curve of her upper sculpture, and her lips were full and inviting.” Charteris also has an eye for the nuances. Later in the book, Andrea wears a kind of dress that “would get by anywhere between a ballroom and a boudoir and still always have a faint air of belonging somewhere else.” Throughout the book, Andrea offers the Saint anything he wants, and Madeline withholds herself.

  By the time of the events recounted in The Saint Steps In (1943), Simon Templar is ruing the fact that he is now far more widely known than he used to be. This he blames on the war. Instead of donning a military uniform in order to serve the Allies against the Axis powers, he has so far worked mostly behind the scenes, and has had to forge working relationships with government departments and security agencies he would once have shied away from. His new found fame doesn’t seem to do him much harm, although he laments being “almost legal,” as he still manages to carry on much as he likes. The only difference is that now he does it with the cooperation of the authorities. In The Saint Steps In, he even works with the FBI. How ironic Inspector Teal would find that!

  The presence of the war permeates The Saint Steps In, even from a distance, holding it together and providing some of its more serious moments, as when Templar contrasts the peace and beauty of New England with the distant horrors of war, the slaughter going on in Europe and the Far East. As he puts it, with characteristic understatement, “all that the paranoia of an unsuccessful house-painter was trying to destroy.” Templar also becomes quite eloquent in an argument towards the end of the book, when he argues that most Americans only perceive the war as a distant event that doesn’t impinge too much on their daily lives because they haven’t felt its effects at first hand, as London did in the blitz. One wonders here where Charteris’s voice ends and Templar’s begins.

  Like most of the Saint stories, The Saint Steps In is a novel of adventure, mixing mystery and suspense with a fair amount of action and snappy dialogue in the vein of Raymond Chandler, whose The Lady in the Lake came out the same year. Also around the same time, RKO Pictures had more or less plagiarised the Saint for the movies and rechristened him the Falcon, with George Sanders (an ex-movie Saint) in the title role. Oddly enough, the third Falcon film, The Falcon Takes Over (1942), was based on Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely—so, in a strange way, the Saint became Philip Marlowe, however briefly!

  Unlike Marlowe, though, Simon Templar doesn’t have the dubious respectability of a private detective’s licence; he does, however, have the same sense of himself as an adventurer, a sort of knight errant, as a man who, in Chandler’s words, is “a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it…The best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” He is, after all, the Saint.

  —Peter Robinson (2014)

  CHAPTER ONE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DINED IN WASHINGTON AND SYLVESTER ANGERT SPOKE OF HIS NERVOUSNESS

  1

  She was young and slender, and she had smiling brown eyes and hair the colour of old mahogany. With a lithe grace, she squeezed in beside Simon Templar at the small table in the cocktail room of the Shoreham and said, “You’re the Saint.”

  Simon smiled back, because she was easy to smile at, but not all of the smile went into his very clear blue eyes that always had a faint glint of mockery behind them, like an amused spectator sitting far back in a respectful audience.

  He said, “Am I?”

  “I recognised you,” she said.

  He sighed. The days of happy anonymity that once upon a time had made his lawless career relatively simple seemed suddenly as far away as his last diapers. Not that even today he was as fatefully recognisable as Clark Gable: there were still several million people on earth to whom his face, if not his name, would have meant nothing at all, but he was recognised often enough for it to be what he sometimes called an occupational hazard.

  “I’m afraid there’s no prize,” he said. “There isn’t even a reward out at the moment, so far as I know.”

  It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time, actually not so very long ago, when half the police departments of the world carried a dossier on the Saint in their active and urgent file, when hardly a month went by without some newspaper headlining a new story on the amazing brigand whom they had christened the Robin Hood of modern crime, and when any stranger accosting the Saint by name would have seen that lean, tanned, reckless face settle into new lines of piratical impudence, and the long sinewy frame become lazy and supple like the crouch of a jungle cat. Those days might come back again at any time, and probably would, but just now he was almost drearily respectable. The war had changed a lot of things.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said.

  “You seem to be making out all right.” He looked into his empty glass. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Dry Sack.”

  He managed to get the attention of one of the harried waiters in the crowded place, with an ease that made the performance seem ridiculously simple. He ignored the glowerings of several finger-snapping congressmen, as well as the dark looks of some young lieutenants and ensigns who, because they fought the “Battle of Constitution Avenue” without flinching, thought they deserved a priority on service, Washington’s scarcest commodity. Simon ordered the Dry Sack, and had another Peter Dawson for himself.

  “What shall we talk about?” he said. “I can’t tell you the story of my life, because one-third of it is unprintable, o
ne-third is too incriminating, and the rest of it you wouldn’t believe anyhow.”

  The girl’s eyes flashed around the crowded noisy smoky place, and Simon felt the whirring of gears somewhere within him, the gears which instinctively sprang into action when he sensed the possibility of excitement in the offing. And the girl’s behaviour was just like the beginning of any adventure story.

  Her voice was so low that he barely caught her words when she said, “I was going to ask you to help me.”

  “Were you?”

  He looked at her and saw her eyes dart about the cocktail lounge again as if she were momentarily expecting to see someone whose appearance would be decidedly unwelcome. She felt his gaze on her and made an effort to ease the tautness of her face. Her voice was almost conversational when next she spoke.

  “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I’d sort of imagined you in a uniform.”

  Simon didn’t look tired, because he had heard the same dialogue before. He had various answers to it, all of them inaccurate. The plain truth was that most of the things he did best were not done in uniforms—such as the interesting episode which had reached its soul-satisfying finale only twelve hours ago, and which was the reason why he was still in Washington, relaxing over a drink for the first time in seven very strenuous days. But things like that couldn’t be talked about for a while.

  “I got fired, and my uniform happened to fit the new doorman,” he said. He waited until the waiter placed the two drinks on the table. “How do you think I could help you?”

  “I suppose you’ll think I’m stupid,” she said, “but I’m just a little bit frightened.”

  The slight lift of his right eyebrow was non-committal.

  “Sometimes it’s stupid not to be frightened,” he said. “It all depends. Excuse the platitudes, but I just want to find out what you mean.”

  “Do you think anything could happen to anyone in Washington?”