The Saint Closes the Case (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 Steve Bailie

  Preface © 1964 Interfund (London) Ltd.

  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: 9781477842621

  ISBN-10: 1477842624

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Jean and Jeannine,

  From whom I have learned so much

  Paris, January 1930

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE

  PRELUDE

  1 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT FOR A DRIVE, AND SAW A STRANGE SIGHT

  2 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR READ NEWSPAPERS, AND UNDERSTOOD WHAT WAS NOT WRITTEN

  3 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR RETURNED TO ESHER, AND DECIDED TO GO THERE AGAIN

  4 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR LOST AN AUTOMOBILE, AND WON AN ARGUMENT

  5 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT BACK TO BROOK STREET, AND WHAT HAPPENED THERE

  6 HOW ROGER CONWAY DROVE THE HIRONDEL, AND THE SAINT TOOK A KNIFE IN HIS HAND

  7 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS SAINTLY, AND RECEIVED ANOTHER VISITOR

  8 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ENTERTAINED HIS GUEST, AND BROKE UP THE PARTY

  9 HOW ROGER CONWAY WAS CARELESS, AND HERMANN ALSO MADE A MISTAKE

  10 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DROVE TO BURES, AND TWO POLICEMEN JUMPED IN TIME

  11 HOW ROGER CONWAY TOLD THE TRUTH, AND INSPECTOR TEAL BELIEVED A LIE

  12 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR PARTED WITH ANNA, AND TOOK PATRICIA IN HIS ARMS

  13 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS BESIEGED, AND PATRICIA HOLM CRIED FOR HELP

  14 HOW ROGER CONWAY DROVE THE HIRONDEL, AND NORMAN KENT LOOKED BACK

  15 HOW VARGAN GAVE HIS ANSWER, AND SIMON TEMPLAR WROTE A LETTER

  16 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR PRONOUNCED SENTENCE, AND NORMAN KENT WENT TO FETCH HIS CIGARETTE-CASE

  17 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR EXCHANGED BACK-CHAT, AND GERALD HARDING SHOOK HANDS

  18 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR RECEIVED MARIUS, AND THE CROWN PRINCE REMEMBERED A DEBT

  19 HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT TO HIS LADY, AND NORMAN KENT ANSWERED THE TRUMPET

  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

  It’s midnight. I’m in Paris. It’s a hot summer evening. The windows are open, the cafés in the Place du Tertre below are still buzzing, and I have just finished rereading The Saint Closes the Case for maybe the sixth or seventh time in my life, polished off the vin rouge, and come upstairs to write these words while the experience is still fresh in my mind.

  There is a direct link between the first reading and this latest one and why I am in Paris. I shall explain.

  The Saint Closes the Case was first published in 1930, under its far superior—and more accurate—title, The Last Hero. It was the second of Charteris’s Saint adventures to be published.

  I first read the novel as a teenager in Belfast in the early 1970s, a grey and forbidding city at that time, overrun by the madness of what we called “The Troubles.” I always found The Troubles to be a wholly inaccurate name for what was damn as near a full civil war at times, but it takes more than a few bombs and bullets before the Irish will declare a situation a war, an attitude which demonstrates a certain stoicism and optimism almost worthy of Simon Templar himself.

  In that gloomy era one of the great highlights of my week—having run the gauntlet of a particular prescribed path home which avoided certain street corners—was to get back from school in time to catch afternoon reruns of the 1960s Saint television series. The TV show led me to hunt down the books, and I still treasure, amongst many other volumes, a copy of Send for the Saint which I’ve been meaning to return to the public lending library for a few decades now.

  If your image of Simon Templar is conditioned by Sir Roger Moore’s witty and charming television performance, then the Saint of The Last Hero will add some interesting colour to the character. This Saint is not a solitary international playboy; rather, he is a cold-blooded killer, by knife, by gun, by bomb.

  He is the leader of a gang of fellow “Saints”: the equally dashing Roger Conway and Norman Kent, and the faithful ex-sergeant major cum housekeeper Orace. And perhaps most surprisingly of all—Templar has a steady girl, Patricia Holm, whom he met in his first published adventure.

  Patricia Holm embodies a certain type of woman—the cliché would be English rose: the well-bred, plucky heroine standing fast by her man’s side, unfazed by guns and bullets, supremely confident in her lover’s ability to cope with whatever danger comes their way.

  Although the Saint makes light of their relationship late in the novel, there is no doubt that this is a young couple in love. And when Patricia is kidnapped by the novel’s villain, the physically giant warmonger Rayt Marius, he unleashes a rage in Templar that has never been portrayed on screen. This Saint will kidnap, torture, and cold-bloodedly murder the Ungodly in his quest to save Patricia.

  Much of this was a surprise to me when I undertook that first reading of the novel. The television Saint would only use a gun if he took it from a bad guy. He most certainly never carried a knife, let alone fetishised them by giving them names, as he does in early Saint books.

  But in the Belfast of the 1970s, Charteris’s writing was
a great source of joy—comfort even—to a young man trying to make sense of the daily evils that were happening in his hometown. The Saint articulated what we all knew—that evil men did exist, that they were often beyond redemption, and that sometimes justice needed to step in where The Law could not.

  The books and TV episodes opened up new worlds to me. Somewhere off the shores of Ireland there were other countries. They had beautiful landscapes and beautiful food and beautiful women. I wanted to go see them for myself.

  I was less keen on getting into punch-ups, however. So I transferred those energies to the written word, and my earliest fumblings with pen and ink were juvenile rip-offs of Saint stories, lovingly handwritten in exercise books.

  Somewhere over the years that became a career, and here I am in Paris, where tomorrow we shall be filming a scene in a TV series I’ve been writing for, wherein a lone hero dismantles four bad guys single-handedly, then drives off into the night with a beautiful mademoiselle by his side. Exactly the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to write since the Saint first brightened a day for me. Even now, I can identify a fellow Saint fan by his writing style, pick up the small subtle influences that I know originated from a love of the character. I doubt the writers of Leverage, Burn Notice, or Hustle among many others would disagree with me.

  So as I sit here tonight I know for sure that Charteris’s Saint stories impacted on my adolescent development and sent me in search of a life of the sort that leads a man to be writing in a Parisian apartment under the shadow of the Sacré-Cœur in the wee small hours.

  Two things from this book lived on in my head right from that very first reading, some thirty-odd years ago now. To this day I can quote a passage verbatim, as the author, then Templar himself, espouse the Saint’s basic philosophy:

  He believed that life was full of adventure and he went forth in the full blaze and surge of that belief…“Into battle, murder and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver me up to the neck!”

  But what lived with me even more is the ending of The Last Hero. I will give no spoilers here, but it is as powerful and noble a final few pages as I have read in any of the great romantic adventures.

  So I hand you over to Leslie Charteris himself for your further reading. This is an embryonic Saint, a young man living beyond his means, crackling with youthful energy, but already on the path he has chosen himself for life. In later books you will find a more polished Saint, but in this novel the sheer joie de vivre of Simon Templar’s thirst for adventure is impossible to resist.

  And as soon as you have finished it, go straight to The Avenging Saint, which picks up three months after The Last Hero ends. Then read The Saint’s Getaway. Together, all three volumes make up one of the Saint’s biggest and greatest adventures.

  —Steve Bailie

  Montmartre, August 2012

  PREFACE

  This was the first “big” Saint novel—that is, the first story in which he went up against king-size international dragons, as against the ordinary leeches, rats, skunks, and other vermin of the Underworld—and it still seems to be one of the prime favorites of those loyal readers who have followed his adventures almost from the beginning.

  For the benefit of those who may be taking up the series so much later, however, I feel it may be necessary to slip in this reminder that the book was written in 1929, when the world was politically, technologically, and temperamentally a totally different place from the one we live in today.

  In those days, there was a genuine widespread suspicion, which I was inclined to share with a great many of my generation, that modern wars were plotted and deliberately engineered by vast mysterious financial cartels for their own enrichment. There was also a vague idea that fighting, itself, was still a fairly glamorous activity, or would be if the scientists would leave it alone. No doubt there were romantics in other periods who thought it was more sporting to be shot at with arrows than with bullets, and they were followed by others who thought that rifles were more fun than machine-guns and howitzers, and after them came those who thought that poison gas was the last step to reducing glorious war to sordidness.

  This book is based on the Saint’s accidental discovery that the usual slightly goofy scientist has dreamed up something called an “electron cloud,” a sort of extension of the gas horror with radioactive overtones, and his decision that it should not only be kept out of the hands of the stateless war-mongers, but for the good of humanity should be suppressed altogether, on the theory that this would still leave heroes happily free to enjoy the relatively good clean fun of air raids and ordinary mustard gas. (The original title of the book was The Last Hero, and in it the Saint first expounded his philosophy of “battle, murder, and sudden death” as a joyous form of self-expression.)

  Well, this was an attitude of youth which of course I shared with him, or he got from me. And in those days there were no mushroom clouds on the horizon to make even Vargan’s electron cloud look like a comparatively harmless toy. But this should not for a moment be taken to imply that either of us, today, would be supporters of the “Ban the Bomb” kind foggy-minded idealism. There are many things which seemed like eternal truths to both of us in those days, which no longer look so immutable. In fact, I myself am often tempted now to lean with the optimists who think that the Bomb may actually achieve what the moralists failed to do, and abolish major warfare by making it impossible for anyone, financier or despot, to hope to profit by it.

  Be tolerant, then, of one or two outworn ideas, and enjoy it simply as a rattling good adventure story of its time, which I think it still is.

  —Leslie Charteris (1964)

  PRELUDE

  It is said that in these hectic days no item of news is capable of holding the interest of the public for more than a week; therefore journalists and news editors age swiftly, and become prematurely bald and bad-tempered, Tatcho and Kruschen availing them naught. A new sensation must be provided from day to day, and each sensation must eclipse its predecessor, till the dictionary is bled dry of superlatives, and the imagination pales before the task of finding or inventing for tomorrow a story fantastic and colossal enough to succeed the masterpiece of yesterday.

  That the notorious adventurer known as the Saint should have contrived to keep in the public eye for more than three months from the date of his first manifestation, thereby smithereening all records of that kind, was due entirely to his own energy and initiative. The harassed sensationalists of Fleet Street welcomed him with open arms. For a time the fevered hunt for novelty could take a rest. The Saint himself did everything in that line that the most exacting editor could have asked for—except, of course, that he failed to provide the culminating sensation of his own arrest and trial. But each of his adventures was more audacious than the last, and he never gave the interest aroused by his latest activity time to die down before he burst again upon a startled public with a yet more daring coup.

  And the same enterprising lawlessness continued for over three months, in the course of which time he brought to a triumphant conclusion some twenty raids upon the persons and property of evildoers.

  Thus it came to pass that in those three months the name of the Saint gathered about itself an aura of almost supernatural awe and terror, so that men who had for years boasted that the law could not touch them began to walk in fear, and the warning of the Saint—a ridiculous picture of a little man with one-dimensional body and limbs, such as children draw, but wearing above his blank round head an absurd halo such as it rarely occurs to children to add to their drawings—delivered to a man’s door in plain envelope, was found to be as fatal as any sentence ever signed by a Judge of the High Court. Which was exactly what the Saint himself had desired should happen. It amused him very much.

  For the most part, he worked secretly and unseen, and his victims could give the police nothing tangible in the way of clues by which he might have been traced. Yet sometimes it was inevitable that he should be known to the man whose downfall he w
as engineering, and, when that happened, the grim silence of the injured party was one of the most surprising features of the mystery. Chief Inspector Teal, after a number of fruitless attempts, had resigned himself to giving up as a bad job the task of trying to make the victims of the Saint give evidence.

  “You might as well try to get a squeak out of a deaf-and-dumb oyster in a tank of chloroform,” he told the Commissioner. “Either the Saint never tackles a man on one count unless he’s got a second count against him by which he can blackmail him to silence, or else he’s found the secret of threatening a man so convincingly that he still believes it the next day—and all the days after that.”

  His theory was shrewd and sound enough, but it would have been shrewder and sounder and more elaborate if he had been a more imaginative man; but Mr Teal had little confidence in things he could not see and take hold of, and he had never had a chance of watching the Saint in action.

  There were, however, other occasions when the Saint had no need to fall back upon blackmail or threats to ensure the silence of those with whose careers he interfered.

  There was, for instance, the case of a man named Golter, an anarchist and incorrigible firebrand, whose boast it was that he had known the inside of every prison in Europe. He belonged to no political faction, and apparently had no gospel to forward except his own mania for destruction, but he was anything but a harmless lunatic.

  He was the leader of a society known as the Black Wolves, nearly every member of which had at some time or another served a heavy sentence for some kind of political offence—which, more often than not, consisted of an attempted assassination, usually by bomb.

  The reason for such societies, and the mentality of their adherents, will always provide an interesting field of speculation for the psychiatrist, but occasions will arise when the interest ceases to be the abstract diversion of the scientist and becomes the practical problem of those whose business it is to keep peace under the law.