The Brighter Buccaneer (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 Ian Dickerson

  Introductions to “The Unblemished Bootlegger” and “The Appalling Politician” 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: 9781477842706

  ISBN-10: 1477842705

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To H. W. Shirley Long,

  But for whose persistent salesmanship these stories would certainly not have been written, and I should have been saved no end of hard work

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE BRAIN WORKERS

  THE EXPORT TRADE

  THE UNBLEMISHED BOOTLEGGER

  INTRODUCTION

  THE OWNERS’ HANDICAP

  THE TOUGH EGG

  THE BAD BARON

  THE BRASS

  THE PERFECT CRIME

  THE APPALLING POLITICIAN

  INTRODUCTION

  THE UNPOPULAR LANDLORD

  THE NEW SWINDLE

  THE FIVE-THOUSAND-POUND KISS

  THE GREEN GOODS MAN

  THE BLIND SPOT

  THE UNUSUAL ENDING

  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

  I first met the Saint in the late 1970s. From September 1978 to March 1979, I avidly watched every single episode of Return of the Saint every Sunday evening, annoying my parents—who had to reschedule bath time—but making the following day at school a whole load more bearable. I was nine years old.

  I’ve always been a voracious reader, so when I discovered that one of my brothers had some books about a character called the Saint it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that said literature would find its way from his bookshelves to mine (and has stayed there ever since…sorry, Andy!). One of those books was The Brighter Buccaneer.

  So maybe that’s why I’ve always loved this book. After all, it helped inspire me to go and track down every other Saint book, join the Saint Club, meet Leslie Charteris, and ultimately become series editor of these reprints.

  No, I think it’s more than that. It is, partly, the uniqueness of getting fifteen different Saint adventures in a shade over sixty-eight thousand word. Fifteen Saint adventures! In one book! No wonder my nine year old self was happy…It’s also the location(s). These are classic Saint adventures, set in England before the Saint went on his travels with the team of Simon, Patricia, and more often than not dear old Claud Eustace—and perhaps there’s also an element of the fact it remains immune to the retitling that all the other early Saint books have suffered.

  Nope, still more than that.

  This book was published at a time of remarkable productivity for the Saint and Leslie Charteris: Getaway (a.k.a. The Saint’s Getaway) was published in September 1932, Once More the Saint (a.k.a. The Saint and Mr Teal) in January 1933, and this one followed a month later. Three books in six months. Charteris was hungry, he’d found a market for his work, and was determined to make the most of it.

  The fifteen stories herein were in fact first published in late 1932 by a now defunct Sunday newspaper entitled Empire News. Its fiction editor, Bill McElroy, had been looking for someone to write a weekly short story for the newspaper, and H. W. Shirley Long, who was then working as an assistant to Charteris’s agent Raymond Savage, persuaded McElroy that the Saint and Leslie Charteris were the men for the job. They were swiftly hired, and from August to November that year, Charteris wrote a weekly Saint story.

  This book and its cousin—The Saint Intervenes—are unique, for although Charteris dallied with full-length novels, novellas, and short stories, he never quite managed to squeeze as many Saint adventures into so few words ever again.

  These adventures show the Saint and Leslie Charteris at their very best: fifteen tales full of Saintly mischief, each one plotted and delivered in just a handful of pages. Many of them took inspiration from real life: Sir Joseph Whippelthwaite, “The Appalling Politician,” was based on the then British Cabinet Minister Sir Samuel Hoare; whilst “The Unpopular Landlord” was based on a landlord that Charteris’s mother was having problems with. And in “The Unblemished Bootlegger,” we meet Peter Quentin for the first time. Peter is a new recruit to the Saint’s cause and would go on to appear in several further Saint adventures.

  This was Charteris’s fifteenth book, his eleventh about the Saint. He was twenty-five years old when this was first published. What an astonishing output—even today with the advent of the Internet you struggle to find any twenty-five-year-old who’s written so much, so successfully.

  I often think his skill as a writer has often been overlooked; his full length novels are bona-fide thrillers, packed with tense scenes and wonderful characters. And for him to then turn round and deliver such finely plotted amusing short tales (and in some cases, very short tales) is the mark of a great story-teller and writer.

  That’s more like it.

  I have read and reread the adventures of the Saint. Sure, they’re dated now, but the quality of the characters and the writing shines through. Just don’t take them too seriously, this is fun, life-affirming, esc
apist entertainment told by a master story-teller.

  —Ian Dickerson (2014)

  THE BRAIN WORKERS

  “Happy” Fred Jorman was a man with a grievance. He came to his partner with a tale of woe.

  “It was just an ordinary bit of business, Meyer. I met him in the Alexandra—he seemed interested in horses, and he looked so lovely and innocent. When I told him about the special job I’d got for Newmarket that afternoon, and it came to suggesting he might like to put a bit on himself. I’d hardly got the words out of my mouth before he was pushing a tenner across the table. Well, after I’d been to the phone I told him he’d got a three-to-one winner, and he was so pleased he almost wept on my shoulder. And I paid him out in cash. That was thirty pounds—thirty real pounds he had off me—but I wasn’t worrying. I could see I was going to clean him out. He was looking at the notes I’d given him as if he was watching all his dreams come true. And that was when I bought him another drink and started telling him about the real big job of the day. ‘It’s honestly not right for me to be letting you in at all,’ I said, ‘but it gives me a lot of pleasure to see a young sport like you winning some money,’ I said. ‘This horse I’m talking about now,’ I said, ‘could go twice round the course while all the other crocks were just beginning to realize that the race had started, but I’ll eat my hat if it starts at a fraction less than five to one,’ I said.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, the mug looked over his roll and said he’d only got about a hundred pounds, including what he’d won already, and that didn’t seem enough to put on a five-to-one certainty. ‘But if you’ll excuse me a minute while I go to my bank, which is just round the corner,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you five hundred pounds to put on for me.’ And off he went to get the money—”

  “And never came back,” said the smaller speaking part, with the air of a Senior Wrangler solving the first problem in a child’s book of arithmetic.

  “That’s just it, Meyer,” said Happy Fred aggrievedly. “He never came back. He stole thirty pounds off me, that’s what it amounts to—he ran away with the ground-bait I’d given him, and wasted the whole of my afternoon, not to mention all the brain work I’d put in to spinning him the yarn—”

  “Brain work!” said Meyer.

  Simon Templar would have given much to overhear that conversation. It was his one regret that he never had the additional pleasure of knowing exactly what his pigeons said when they woke up and found themselves bald.

  Otherwise, he had very few complaints to make about the way his thirty years of energetic life had treated him. “Do others as they would do you,” was his motto, and for several years past he had carried out the injunction with a simple and unswerving whole-heartedness, to his own continual entertainment and profit. “There are,” said the Saint, “less interesting ways of spending wet weekends…”

  Certainly it was a wet weekend when he met Ruth Eden, though he happened to be driving home along that lonely stretch of the Windsor Road after a strictly lawful occasion.

  To her, at first, he was only the providential man in the glistening leather coat who came striding across from the big open Hirondel that had skidded to a standstill a few yards away. She had seen his lights whizzing up behind them, and had managed to put her foot through the window as he went past—Mr Julian Lamantia was too strong for her, and she was thoroughly frightened. The man in the leather coat twitched open the nearest door of the limousine and propped himself gracefully against it with the broken glass crunching under his feet. His voice drawled pleasantly through the hissing rain.

  “Evening, madam. This is Knight Errants Unlimited. Anything we can do?”

  “If you’re going towards London,” said the girl quickly, “could you give me a lift?”

  The man laughed. It was a short, soft lilt of a laugh that somehow made the godsend of his arrival seem almost too good to be true.

  An arm sheathed in wet sheepskin shot into the limousine—and Mr Lamantia shot out. The feat of muscular prestidigitation was performed so swiftly and slickly that she took a second or two to absorb the fact that it had indubitably eventuated and travelled on into the past tense. By which time Mr Lamantia was picking himself up out of the mud, with the rain spotting the dry portions of his very natty check suiting and his vocabulary functioning on full throttle.

  He stated, amongst other matters, that he would teach the intruder to mind his own unmentionable business, and the intruder smiled almost lazily.

  “We don’t like you,” said the intruder.

  He ducked comfortably under the wild swing that Mr Lamantia launched at him, collared the raving man below the hips, and hoisted him, kicking and struggling, on to one shoulder. In this manner they disappeared from view. Presently there was a loud splash from the river bank a few yards away, and the stranger returned alone.

  “Can your friend swim?” he inquired interestedly.

  The girl stepped out into the road, feeling rather at a loss for any suitable remark. Somewhere in the damp darkness Mr Lamantia was demonstrating a fluency of discourse which proved that he was contriving to keep at least his mouth above water; and the conversational powers of her rescuer showed themselves to be, in their own way, equally superior to any awe of circumstances.

  As he led her across to his own car he talked with a charming lack of embarrassment.

  “Over on our left we have the island of Runnymede, where King John signed the Magna Carta in the year 1215. It is by virtue of this Great Charter that Englishmen have always enjoyed complete freedom to do everything that they are not forbidden to do…”

  The Hirondel was humming on towards London at a smooth seventy miles an hour before she was able to utter her thanks.

  “I really was awfully relieved when you came along—though I’m afraid you’ve lost me my job.”

  “Like that, was it?”

  “I’m afraid so. If you happen to know a nice man who wants an efficient secretary for purely secretarial purposes, I could owe you even more than I do now.”

  It was extraordinarily easy to talk to him—she was not quite sure why. In some subtle way he succeeded in weaving over her a fascination that was unique in her experience. Before they were in London she had outlined to him the whole story of her life. It was not until afterwards that she began to wonder how on earth she had ever been able to imagine that a perfect stranger could be interested in the recital of her inconsiderable affairs. For the tale she had to tell was very ordinary—a simple sequence of family misfortunes which had forced her into a profession amongst whose employers the Lamantias are not so rare that any museum has yet thought it worthwhile to include a stuffed specimen in the catalogue of its exhibits.

  “And then, when my father died, my mother seemed to go a bit funny, poor darling! Anyone with a get-rich-quick scheme could take money off her. She ended up by meeting a man who was selling some wonderful shares that were going to multiply their value by ten in a few months. She gave him everything we had left, and a week or two later we found that the shares weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.”

  “And so you joined the world’s workers?”

  She laughed softly.

  “The trouble is to make anyone believe I really want to work. I’m rather pretty, you know, when you see me properly. I seem to put ideas into middle-aged heads.”

  She was led on to tell him so much about herself that they had reached her address in Bloomsbury before she remembered that she had not even asked him his name.

  “Templar—Simon Templar,” he said gently.

  She was in the act of fitting her key into the front door, and she was so startled that she turned round and stared at him, half doubtful whether she ought to laugh.

  But the man in the leather coat was not laughing, though a little smile was flickering round his mouth. The light over the door picked out the clean-cut buccaneering lines of his face under the wide-brimmed filibuster’s hat, and glinted back from the incredibly clear b
lue eyes in such a blaze of merry mockery as she had never seen before…It dawned upon her, against all her ideas of probability, that he wasn’t pulling her leg…

  “Do you mean that I’ve really met the Saint?” she asked dizzily.

  “That’s so. The address is in the telephone book. If there’s anything else I can do, any time—”

  “Angels and ministers of grace!” said the girl weakly, and left him standing there alone on the steps, and Simon Templar went laughing back to his car.

  He came home feeling as pleased as if he had won three major wars single-handed, for the Saint made for himself an atmosphere in which no adventure could be commonplace. He pitched his hat into a corner, swung himself over the table, and kissed the hands of the tall slim girl who rose to meet him.

  “Pat, I have rescued the most beautiful damsel, and I have thrown a man named Julian Lamantia into the Thames. Does life hold any more?”

  “There’s some mud on your face, and you’re as wet as if you’d been in the river yourself,” said his lady.

  The Saint had the priceless gift of not asking too much of life. He cast his bread with joyous lavishness upon the waters, and tranquilly assumed that he would find it after many days—buttered and thickly spread with jam. In his philosophy that night’s adventure was sufficient unto itself, and when, twenty-four hours later, his fertile brain was plunged deep into a new interest that had come to him, he would probably have forgotten Ruth Eden altogether, if she had not undoubtedly recognized his name. The Saint had his own vanity.

  Consequently, when she rang up one afternoon and announced that she was coming to see him, he was not utterly dumbfounded.

  She arrived about six o’clock, and he met her on the doorstep with a cocktail shaker in his hand.

  “I’m afraid I left you very abruptly the other night,” she said. “You see, I’d read all about you in the newspapers, and it was rather overpowering to find that I’d been talking to the Saint for three-quarters of an hour without knowing it. In fact, I was very rude, and I think it’s awfully sweet of you to have me.”