The Saint Goes On (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 Stephen Gallagher

  Preface from The First Saint Omnibus (Hodder & Stoughton, October 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: 9781477842737

  ISBN-10: 147784273X

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Prosper Buranelli,

  A small souvenir of many gallons of pre-Repeal wine, and many nights of superbly useless argument which I shall always love to remember

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE

  THE HIGH FENCE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE ELUSIVE ELLSHAW

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  THE CASE OF THE FRIGHTENED INNKEEPER

  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

  This is how he was, back in the day. Though you wouldn’t guess the age of these stories from the style alone. For me, the Saint of the early 1930s is as modern as the character gets; he’s hard, he’s principled, he seems to take nothing seriously, but he can turn in a second. It’s all an act. And underneath it is a very, very bright guy indeed.

  Scratch any “clubland hero” of the era, and underneath the jaunty exterior you’ll find a deeply conventional product of Empire, with sport-based principles and an eleven-year-old’s grasp of womankind. A public-school background and, most likely, a touch of the aristocracy somewhere in the genealogy. The officer class in civilian life. That’s how it was with the Bulldogs and the Tigers and so many other of those dated Hodder Yellow Jacket heroes.

  The Saint may have been born within that tradition, but he subverts it in a way that makes him always fresh to the reader. Leslie Charteris kept a deliberate air of mystery around the Saint’s early life, but I’m sure that if Simon Templar ever attended a public school, he was kicked out of it. If he saw military service, he achieved single-handed victories while treating orders as optional. And should there be any aristocracy in his bloodline, it would be of the black-sheep, bastard strain.

  Think about that one. All the kingly graces and none of the privileges, living by his wits, and living well, with no debt to tradition or the status quo, free to follow his own belief in what constitutes a just world. At ease in the upper echelons of wealth and society, but never at home. One of the reasons you have to love the Saint is that, in the classical/mythological sense, he’s a bastard loose in the court. He can move where he chooses, but can never drop his guard.

  In The Saint Goes On we have three novellas from the character’s first decade, two of them originally published under other titles in a British weekly publication, The Thriller (“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills”). “The High Fence” was originally titled “The Man Who Knew” and “The Elusive Ellshaw” appeared as “The Race Train Crime,” while “The Case of the Frightened Innkeeper” was written for the book.

  It was a prolific time for Charteris. These were far from early stories, but the Saint is still very much as the author conceived him. He’s yet to be modified by historical change (Charteris did some rethinking of his hero’s relationship with authority in the context of the Second World War), the author’s success-driven lifestyle (where the globetrotting good life led him to replace familiar London landmarks with more exotic locales), or the blurring of Templar’s in-print character with his differing incarnations in radio, film, newspaper comic strips, and eventually TV episodes.

  In The Saint Goes On, this is the Saint as I’ve always liked him best. Here, he’s a man with a complete disregard for authority and a rigorous code of personal fairness. He lives high on money that he takes from thieves and the greedy rich. He appears to seek a life of luxury and entertainment, while nothing entertains him more than righting an injustice done to an innocent. But every now and again, we get a glimpse of the utter steel underneath. We may get the sense that something really bad happened to him early in life, and it made him who he is. We never find out what that might have been, and it’s important that we don’t.

  This is London between the wars—its street names, its criminal underworld, its Metropolitan police force under Lord Trenchard (whose moustache gets a nod in the text). Whenever Simon Templar has a run-in with the police they’re usually represented in the figure of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, a dour and serious older man whom Simon delights in baiting. Teal endures the teasing with heroic stoicism. Though he’s a comic creation, he’s no fool and Simon knows it. They’re natural opponents in a game with rules, and on rare occasions they can set aside the rules and work as allies when there’s a powerful reason to do so. The bottom line, though
, is that Templar’s disregard for the letter of the law means that Teal wants to see him behind bars. He knows that Simon’s personal code makes him capable of anything, including murder.

  Then there’s Patricia Holm, sometimes described as the Saint’s girlfriend, but their relationship is way more subtle and complicated than that. Sex is occasionally implied, but they’re not a couple. It’s as if Charteris had invented the concept of “friends with benefits” way before anyone else dared to think of it. She’d have him if he were a normal, available guy, but she knows him well—probably better than anyone—and knows that he isn’t. Whatever shaped him, it’s made that hard core impenetrable. You can get up close—and Patricia Holm gets closer than anyone—but there’s no way in. So she dates other men and knows he has flings with other women. Sometimes she worries about him as a mother might. If she were in danger, Simon would move the earth to save her. And God help the person who did her any harm. She doesn’t play a featured role in every story, but in these early years she’s a consistent thread in Templar’s life.

  Also appearing here is Hoppy Uniatz, a boneheaded and thickly accented gangster from New York’s Lower East Side who serves as the Saint’s London sidekick in a number of stories. Hoppy is largely comic relief, loyal to Simon, rendered in broad strokes and mostly defined by his appetites for booze and busting heads. Along with the minor but memorable Orace, a taciturn former military valet who’s the caretaker of Simon’s country hideaway (and no, he’s not featured here), for me these three characters represent the core of the Saint “family.”

  There were a zillion “Gentlemen Outlaws” in ’30s fiction, and none of them had the genes for survival we find in the Saint. That shouldn’t be too hard to understand—Leslie Charteris’s own description of him as “the Robin Hood of modern crime” pretty much tells us all we need to know.

  And then…coming up in these pages, there’s Junior Inspector Desmond Pryke. He’s a bit of a…well, just be careful how you pronounce it.

  Charteris always knew exactly what he was doing.

  —Stephen Gallagher (2014)

  PREFACE

  I am rather well aware that the Saint Saga is somewhat noticeably sprinkled with a large number of allusions to the British Public School, the Public School Man, and the Public School Spirit, and that all of these allusions are so conspicuously devoid of proper reverence that it begins to look as if I might have a complex on the subject. But I had to re-read the next story in our collection, which plays the same tune with more than ordinarily concentrated consistency, to realise that the time might be coming when some astute reader would be liable to pounce on me for an explanation of this violent prejudice.

  Whereupon I also realised that I should also have to be very cautious in my choice of the explanation I gave, since a study of what I proudly call my fan mail statistics reveals that a large percentage of my most faithful readers are either past or present members of some British Public School.

  The more deeply I pondered the various horns of this dilemma, the more clearly I saw the fact that there was positively no explanation I could give (since any definitive explanation must, a priori, involve a statement of my own personal opinions on several broad but very ticklish subjects) that would not be doomed to expose me to the undying hatred of just about as many readers as it would deathlessly endear me to. And I therefore hereby give notice that any future questions addressed to me on the subject will be tactfully but ruthlessly ignored.

  But since on this one occasion something inescapably had to be said about it, I have taken refuge in that sublime genius for equivocation and diplomacy which was so tragically stolen from the world of politics when my first publisher accepted my first novel. I propose, as my last public utterance on the matter (until next time) to tell a very short story which is also scripturally true.

  This was during one of my last months at one of the Public Schools which we are talking about. The class was devoted to the study of English—a language which, to judge by the curriculum and the hushed whispers in which it was referred to, became extinct quite early in the nineteenth century. The crucial point was an exercise in composition on some dreary subject such as An Appreciation of the Humour of Shakespeare’s Clowns.

  Feeling, at the time, somewhat full of oats, I had ventured, for perhaps the first time in my academic career, to kick over the traces of what my British Public School considered to be the inviolable commandments of respectable English prose. I was waggish and disrespectful. I pulled the wisecrack and the long nose. I cannot say that I wrote anything that would have held any interest for the passionate commentator; on the other hand, I am equally sure that nobody else in the class did, either. But I am no less certain—even after so many years—that any editor of any popular publication would have read more than the first paragraph of it, which is more than he would have read of any of the other theses submitted.

  Returning my opus to me, with many indignant blue-pencillings of my choicest epigrams, and with the lowest marks at his disposal written in the largest figures that there was room for, my instructor peered at me over his spectacles and said severely:

  “My advice to you, Charteris, is to confine yourself to the subject you are supposed to be studying, and get rid of the idea that you are starting on some sort of literary career of your own.”

  —Leslie Charteris (1939)

  THE HIGH FENCE

  1

  Apart from the fact that neither of them was a productive or useful member of the community, Johnny Anworth and Sunny Jim Fasson had very little in common. They did not own allegiance to the same Dear Old School; they had no meeting-ground in a passion for the poems of William Wordsworth, no shared devotion to collecting birds’ eggs or the rarer kinds of cheese. But the circumstances in which they ceased to adorn their usual places in the files of the Records Office at New Scotland Yard had a connecting link, which must be the chronicler’s excuse for reciting them in quick succession.

  Johnny Anworth entered a jeweller’s shop in Bond Street during the Easter holidays of that year, and omitted to pay for what he took out. He entered through the ceiling, from an apartment on the floor above which he had rented temporarily. It was a pretty neat job, for Johnny was a sound worker in his line, but it had his personality written all over it, and Headquarters put out the routine dragnet and in twenty-four hours duly brought him in.

  He was taken to Market Street Police Station, where he was seen by the Divisional Inspector. The awkward part of it from Johnny’s point of view was that he had most of the proceeds of his burglary on him when he was caught—at any rate he had all the precious stones, which had been prised out of their settings, carefully packed in a small cardboard box, and done up with brown paper and string. What he had not had time to do was to write an address on the package, and for this reason the DI was very gentle with him.

  “You were going to send that stuff to the High Fence, weren’t you, Johnny?” he said.

  “I dunno wot yer talkin’ abaht, guv’nor,” answered Johnny mechanically. “I fahnd the stuff lyin’ in the gutter in Leicester Square, an’ I did it up to send it to the Lost Property Office.”

  The Divisional Inspector continued to be gentle.

  “You’ve been in the stir six times already,” he said, consulting a memorandum on his desk. “If we wanted to be hard on you now, we could have you sent to the Awful Place. You could go to the Moor for seven years, and then have three years’ preventive detention waiting for you. On the other hand, if you told us who you were going to send this parcel to, we might forget about those previous convictions and put in a word for you.”

  Johnny considered this. There is honour among thieves, but it is not designed to resist bad weather.

  “Orl right, guv’nor,” he said philosophically. “I’ll squeal.”

  This story might have ended there if the station shorthand writer had been available. But he had already gone out to lunch, and the Divisional Inspector was also hungry.


  They put Johnny Anworth back in his cell with instructions to order anything he wanted to eat at the DI’s expense, and an appointment to make his statement at two o’clock. His lunch, which consisted of roast beef and cabbage, was delivered from a near-by restaurant by an errand-girl who deposited it in the charge-room. Almost as soon as she had gone, after some flirtatious exchanges with the charge-sergeant, it was picked up by the gaoler, who carried it in to Johnny. He was the last man who saw the talented Mr Anworth alive.

  The girl had taken the tray from the chef in the kitchen, and no one had stopped her or spoken to her on the way. The chef had had no unusual visitors. The only people in the charge-room when the girl delivered the tray were the gaoler, the charge-sergeant, and Inspector Pryke. And yet, somehow, somewhere on the short journey which Johnny Anworth’s last meal had taken, someone had contrived to dope the horseradish sauce with which his plate of roast beef was garnished with enough cyanide to kill a regiment.

  The murder was a nine days’ wonder which provoked its inevitable quota of headlines, newspaper criticisms, and questions in Parliament. Every inquiry seemed to lead to a dead end. But the Criminal Investigation Department has become phlegmatically accustomed to dead ends, and Chief Inspector Teal was still working methodically on the case, six weeks later, when Mr James Fasson clicked to the tune of five thousand pounds’ worth of gems to which he had no legal right whatsoever.

  The assets of Sunny Jim Fasson were a smile which made children and hard-boiled business men trust him instinctively, a wardrobe of prosperous-looking clothes, some high-class American luggage plastered with a wonderful collection of expensive cosmopolitan labels, enough ready cash to create an impression of affluence at any hotel where he stayed, and a girlfriend who posed as his wife, sister, niece, or old widowed mother with equal success and distinction.

  On this occasion he stayed at the Magnificent, a hotel which he had not previously honoured with his presence. He was a wealthy American on his honeymoon, and for a few days he and his charming wife were quite happy seeing the sights and making a round of the theatres. One day, however, a small rift appeared in their marital bliss.