The Saint to the Rescue (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 Gillian Horvath

  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: 9781477842935

  ISBN-10: 147784293

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE EVER-LOVING SPOUSE

  THE FRUITFUL LAND

  THE PERCENTAGE PLAYER

  THE WATER MERCHANT

  THE GENTLE LADIES

  THE ELEMENT OF DOUBT

  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

  By that measure, Simon Templar succeeds on all fronts. His lean, sartorially splendid silhouette made quite an impact on my formative female years. Apologies to all suitors who came afterwards—you had a lot to live up to.

  Before the siren song of science fiction took hold of my imagination (and my career prospects), I began my literary yearnings among detective stories, graduating from an obsession with The Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators to avid consumption of Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, and Rex Stout. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was eagerly awaited and pored over in every detail. I read Ian Fleming’s James Bond books—and delighted, in my pedantic teenage way, in regaling friends with the ways in which the films failed to capture the true spirit of 007.

  My youthful romantic imagination was captured by two elegant British “detectives”: Peter Wimsey and Simon Templar. Both, indeed, though classified as detectives on the surface, were more in the way of knights in shining armour, coming to the rescue of those in need. The Saint, in fact, rarely investigates on the page—he easily obtains the particulars of those most deserving his attention, and the stories are free to concentrate on his method of bringing down those who need it—and his relaxed charm while doing so.

  Although the Charteris canon contains a number of novel-length tales of the Saint, it’s the Templar of the short stories that earned my youthful adoration, still vividly recalled—Templar the episodic adventurer, choosing justice over strict legality. It is the Saint of 1934’s The Saint Intervenes (published as Boodle in the UK) and of this volume of stories, collected in 1961 under the title The Saint to the Rescue, that I fell in love with as a girl.

  It is this archetype of the gentleman thief, the man operating outside the law, by his own code of honour, that remains an icon. This archetypal rogue Paladin has reappeared again and again, renewing his appeal in forms ranging from James Rockford and Robert McCall (The Equalizer) to today’s Rick Castle and Neil Caffrey (White Collar). This casual rake, the “gay outlaw” with his own moral code, has dozens of descendants in literature and TV. It’s a type that gets me every time—and I’m clearly not alone.

  In those heady teenage years, I tried my hand at my own detective stories, striving to capture some version of “hard-boiled” from my naive unworldly perspective. I had plans to become a poet, much to my mother’s dismay. It was television’s take on the gentleman thief in the series Remington Steele that first gave me the impetus to become a TV writer. The character of Steele was another charming rogue, unconcerned with conventional morality, with a breezy air of irresponsibility concealing a deep commitment to justice and a fierce loyalty to his compatriots. When star Pierce Brosnan was bruited as the next James Bond, oh how I wished that he had instead followed Roger Moore into Simon Templar’s shoes. Many years later, I can still picture that perfect match of man and role. Perhaps it exists in an alternate universe. If there’s an afterlife, I hope to find that series in my heavenly Netflix queue.

  The Saint to the Rescue is aptly named. This is indeed a man who “Intervenes,” “Steps in,” and “Avenges,” as other books are titled. The Saint operates outside authority; agent of none, he has no “license to kill,” which means he takes on all the risk to his freedom, and all the burden to his conscience. His refusal to accept any imposed limits on his actions becomes the very definition of personal responsibility. He feels an obligation to step in and act, and he will bear the consequences of his acts—in fact, he considers it necessary to his honour that he risks himself personally in pursuit of his ideals. This may be the very definition of masculinity, albeit an idealized one, unobtainable to mere men of flesh and blood. This is the stuff of heroes. But it is not without its dark side—Simon Templar is a literary ancestor not only of Remington Steele and of Han Solo, but also of Dexter Morgan. If you’re a warrior by nature, if you’re a weapon coiled to spring, then the responsible thing to do is to find a deserving target.

  In looking back at my own oeuvre, I see the influence of the Saint’s archetype in the character of Methos, created with colleague David Tynan during my time on Highlander: The Series, under the stewardship of David Abramowitz. The insouciance, the sinewy good looks, the propensity for taking time out for a good beer in the face of a crisis are all traits Methos shares with Simon Templar. As played by Welshman Peter Wingfield, Highlander’s Methos even has the plummy accent appropriate to the “laughing cavalier” (as Charteris calls Simon in “The Last Hero”). It’s not conscious homage—these characters come from places of universal resonance. The fictional Immortal Methos has been alive, in the face
of constant challenges, for five thousand years, which explains his easygoing humour under duress. And Simon Templar too, though no Immortal, has cheated death enough to warrant a confidence verging on arrogance. He’s a man who clearly has a breadth of experience behind him, despite his everlasting youth—in fact, some suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept just how much history he seems to carry with him. But such is the pleasure of well-crafted fiction. It is far more appealing to buy into the Saint mythos, to adore him in all his splendour, than to examine the unlikelihood of his existence.

  —Gillian Horvath (2014)

  THE EVER-LOVING SPOUSE

  The Saint met Otis Q Fennick on the fire escape of the Hotel Mercurio, in San Francisco at about four o’clock in the morning.

  Like many another eminently simple statements, the foregoing now involves an entirely disproportionate series of explanations.

  Simon Templar was staying at the Mercurio, which was a long way from attaining the luxurious standards of the kind of hotel that he usually frequented, because when he headed for San Francisco he had neglected to inform himself that a national convention of the soft-drink and candy industry was concurrently infesting that otherwise delightful city. After finding every superior hostelry clogged to the rafters with manufacturers and purveyors of excess calories, he had decided that he was lucky to find a room in any hotel at all.

  The room itself was one of the least desirable even under that second-rate roof, being situated at the back of the building overlooking a picturesque alley tastefully bordered with garbage cans and directly facing an eye-filling panorama of grimy windows and still grimier walls appertaining to the edifice across the way. The iron steps of the outside fire escape partly obscured this appealing view by slanting across the upper half of the window, and it was there that Simon first heard the stealthy feet of Mr Fennick, and a moment later, being of a curious disposition, saw them through a gap at the edge of the ill-fitting blind. He had dined at his friend Johnny Kan’s temple of oriental gastronomy on Grant Avenue for old times’ sake, and afterwards Johnny had insisted that they should go out together and look for some late entertainment that might not have been discovered by the assembled exploiters of appetizing toothache, and what with one thing and another it had been very late when he got home, and he had only just shed most of his clothes and brushed his teeth when he heard the furtive scuffling outside which was the surreptitious descent of Mr Fennick.

  In such a situation, the ordinary sojourner in even a second-rate hotel would either have remained gawking in numb perplexity or have started howling an alarum, with or without the intermediacy of the house phone. Not being ordinary in any way, Simon Templar rolled up the shade with a craftsman’s touch which almost miraculously silenced its antique mechanism—he had already switched off the lights in order to see out better, and the window had never been closed since he accepted the room, on account of the stuffiness of its location—and swung himself across to the nearest landing of the fire escape with the deceptively effortless grace of a trained gymnast, having reacted with such dazzling speed that he arrived there simultaneously with the cautiously groping prowler.

  “Me Tarzan,” said the Saint seductively. “You Jane?”

  His voice should not have been at all terrifying—in fact, it was carefully pitched low enough to have been inaudible to anyone who had not already been disturbed by Mr Fennick’s rather clumsy creeping. But Mr Fennick was apparently unused to being accosted on fire escapes, or perhaps even to being on them at all, at any rate, it was immediately obvious that no intelligible sound was going to emerge for a while from the fish-like opening of his mouth. It became clear to Simon that the acquaintance would have to be developed in a more leisurely manner and less unconventional surroundings.

  “You’d better come in before you catch cold or break your neck,” he said.

  Mr Fennick gave him no struggle. He was a small man, and the Saint’s steel fingers almost met their thumb around the upper arm that they had persuasively clamped on. He squeezed his eyes very tightly shut, like a little boy, as Simon half lifted him across the space to the window sill, which was really no more than a long stride except for having about forty feet, of empty air under it.

  With the blind drawn and the lights on again, the Saint inspected his catch with proprietary interest. Mr Fennick wore a well-pressed brown double-breasted suit of conservative tailoring, a white stiff-collared shirt, a tie very modestly patterned with neutral greens, and even a clean felt hat of sedate contour. To match his skinny frame, he had a rather wizened face with a sharp thin nose, a wide thin mouth, and lively intelligent brown eyes when he opened them. He looked much more like a member of some Chamber of Commerce and pillar of the Community Church than a felonious skulker on fire escapes.

  “You know,” said the Saint at last, “I don’t think you’re a burglar after all. And this would be a rather desperate hour for a Peeping Tom. I guess you must be a candy cooker.”

  “That’s right,” Mr Fennick said eagerly. “The Fennick Candy Company. You must have heard of it.”

  He whipped out a wallet and extracted a card from it with an automatic dexterity which even his temporarily shattered condition could not radically unhinge. He went on, in a kind of delirious incantation: “Jumbo Juicies, Crunchy Wunchies, Crackpops, Yummigum—”

  “That sounds like a powerful spell,” said the Saint respectfully. “Now are you supposed to vanish in a puff of smoke, or am I?”

  “I wish I could,” said Mr Otis Q Fennick, President, forlornly.

  Having read everything on the card, Simon put it down on the dresser and picked up a cigarette.

  “It begins to seem as if you have a problem,” he said. “But presumably it isn’t anything so sordid as not being able to pay your bill. You weren’t doing the moonlight flit, were you?”

  “Oh, dear me, no! I’m quite comfortably well off, I assure you. In fact, I was most upset with the convention Committee for booking me into a place like this. Of course, they said that all the rooms were allotted by drawing names out of a hat, but I noticed that they all got the Mark Hopkins or the Drake. This isn’t at all the class of hotel I’d choose for myself.”

  “We have that in common, anyhow.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you at any of the meetings. What’s your line?”

  “I was referring to our taste in hotels, Otis. I’ve never taken much interest in candy, unless it happened to be poisoned.”

  “Oh.” Mr Fennick looked pardonably vague. “Well, I am attending this soft-drink and candy convention which you may have heard of—”

  “I could hardly help it. It stuck me with this dump—and me not even a delegate. So what were you doing just now? Trying to sneak in on one of your competitors and steal his secret formula for the ultimate frightful blend of peppermint, popcorn, and peanut butter, with the miracle self-inflating ingredient and the atomic crackle?”

  “No, nothing like that—”

  “Then it must have been his new sales gimmick to top your offer of a rocket trip to Venus in exchange for fifty million Crunchy Wunchy wrappers.”

  Mr Fennick blinked at him.

  “You must be misinformed, sir. The Fennick Candy Company never made any such offer.”

  “Then I’ll make you a present of the idea. So what were you doing?”

  “Well, I suppose I was just in a panic. I knew I was being framed.”

  “Maybe you were,” said the Saint cheerfully. “But I still don’t get the picture. Why don’t you begin at the beginning?”

  Mr Fennick gulped, wriggled miserably, and took a deep breath like a diver about to plunge.

  “All right. I was out last night—it would be last night, wouldn’t it? I was out with some business connections. We had dinner at the Sheraton Palace, and went to some night clubs. We were at the Forbidden City, and Bimbo’s.

  Of course, we drank quite a lot—”

  “Coke, or chemical fruit punch?”

&n
bsp; “No, I like a real drink when I go out. But I wasn’t drunk. You must believe me. I only mentioned it to explain why I must have fallen asleep especially soundly when I got to bed, which was about two o’clock.”

  “Why must you?”

  “Because when I woke up, there was this girl in bed with me, with nothing on. And I hadn’t heard her come in, or get undressed, or anything.”

  The Saint’s blue eyes became slightly wider.

  “Wow!…I mean, that must have been disappointing. You probably missed the best strip-tease of the evening.”

  “I give you my word, sir, I’m not used to anything like that. At least, not at such close quarters.”

  “Don’t be discouraged, chum. It may grow on you yet. The savoir faire comes with practice. What did you do—offer her some Yummigum?”

  “I think I woke up when the lights suddenly went on. Or when she leaned over and put her arms around me. Both things seemed to happen together. I was completely fuddled, of course. And then, before I could really get my bearings at all, the light blinded me. I think there was someone else in the room, but I was too dazzled to have anything more than an impression. And then, something hit me on the head, and it hurt terribly, and everything went black. It all seems like a bad dream now, except…”

  The little man took off his prim felt hat and gingerly touched the upper side of his cranium. The mousy hair had ebbed far enough from that region for the Saint without even coming closer to authenticate a swelling that was already making its first experiments with the palette of color effects.

  “What happened when you woke up again?” Simon asked.

  “There wasn’t anyone there. Except me, of course. And as soon as I could think it out, I knew I’d been framed. That blinding light—obviously, a flash bulb. Somebody had taken a picture of me, in that awful situation.”

  “Was this doll really gruesome?”

  “No. No, not at all. That’s what makes it so dreadful. In fact, she was…well, er…”