Featuring the Saint (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 Jack Kerley

  Introduction to “The Wonderful War” from The First Saint Omnibus (Doubleday Crime Club, 1939)

  Introduction to “The Man Who Could Not Die” From Paging the Saint (1945)

  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: 9781477842645

  ISBN-10: 1477842640

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Barbara

  London, November 1930

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE

  THE LOGICAL ADVENTURE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE WONDERFUL WAR

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE MAN WHO COULD NOT DIE

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  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 intended to write this introduction wearing my scholar’s cloak, with an academically freighted deconstruction utilizing references to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, the chivalric code, and inevitably, Freud. The erudition of my arguments and analyses would not only elucidate the psycho-ontological motivations behind Simon Templar, but make me look pretty damn smart as well.

  Then I picked up one of my ancient copies of Saint stories, selected “The Wonderful War,” and read about a banana republic invaded by one man with a delicious vision for justice. I smiled a lot and laughed aloud almost as often. I reread passages to be tickled yet again. I set the book aside when finished, but had it back in my hands within an hour.

  In short, I read with the giddy joy of a thirteen-year-old. Which makes perfect sense, since I was thirteen when I met the Saint. A reader leaning heavily toward the mystery/suspense genre, I had early immersion in the Bobbsey Twins, Seckatary Hawkins, and the Hardy Boys. I had read them to tatters when my father appeared in my bedroom one evening. “I think you’ll like these stories,” he said, bearing The First Saint Omnibus. “They concern a man named Simon Templar, the Saint. They’re more sophisticated than you’re used to, and certainly racier, but I suspect you’ll enjoy that aspect.”

  With those cryptic words he set the book in my palms and retreated, singing an odd song about the bells of hell. Hoping my old man had not gone fully ’round the bend, I opened the book and, in my own way, have never closed it.

  I have read all the Saint sagas, including the three gems in Featuring the Saint, at least a dozen times each. If there is anything I as a writer have taken from my father’s prescient gift—and I’ve taken as much from Leslie Charteris as from John D. MacDonald, Robert Parker, and James Lee Burke—it is that a good hero always has a moral code (though it not might be yours or mine), the innocent must be protected, and when the bad get a comeuppance, it should fit the crime.

  Oh…and beautiful women never detract from a story.

  “The Wonderful War” is an all-time favorite, boasting nearly all of the hallmarks of a Saint mini-epic: a comely lady, a masterful plan, a Saintly versification, racy quotes regarding the actress and the bishop, and The Song. Per a good Saint yarn, the malefactors are suitably venal and unattractive and—perhaps most irritating to Simon Templar—rude. All that’s missing is an appearance by Inspector Teal, though I suspect he might not be much at home in a South American bananocracy.

  And what grand invention is the country of Pasala…Charteris’s setting is a rip-roaringly comic and deviously accurate caricature of the era and locale. The world stops for siesta. The army is five-hundred strong, with a general or colonel for every nine men. The navy consists of…well, you get the idea.

  The Saint stories are not for analysis, I realize, at least not by me. Not for deconstruction or preconstruction or anything akin to psychobabble. They’re simply masterworks of delight, asking only that you pick up the pages of a champion storyteller, hold your breath, and step within.

  You don’t analyse joy. You revel in it.

  —Jack Kerley

  PREFACE

  Eighteen years went by between the first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet (1887), and the last, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went on to live twenty-five years after that, during which he saw great changes in the world. Throughout that time, so far as I know, the popularity of his detective was undimmed, and the books were always in print in some edition or other, as they are to this very day. But Sir Arthur never seems to have thought of revising them to keep them in touch with the changing times, and apparently found nothing incongruous in leaving Baker Street to the gaslight and hansom cabs which had long since b
een replaced by electricity and motor cars, to say nothing of radio in the home and airplanes roaring overhead.

  The stories in this volume were written almost an equivalent quarter-century ago, during which the changes in the world have been more drastic even than in Doyle’s. The radio has been supplanted by television, a science-fiction fantasy now made commonplace with commercials; aircraft still ply overhead, but they are jets at least, threatening to become supersonic, if they are not already rocket-launched satellites; and the automobiles, paradoxically, are mechanically capable of travelling about as fast on a good road as the planes that Doyle saw, but crawl through London traffic today at a pace which would have made one of those old horse carriages seem airborne. And I must admit that I don’t have Doyle’s self-restraint and that I have often been tempted to bring the oldest Saint stories up to date, and in a few cases have done something about this when they were reprinted.

  But that is a labour which could be endless, as my slothful instincts finally realized in the nick of time, and ultimately pointless anyhow, if my Immortal Works outlive me by a few centuries, as I expect them to.

  Therefore, let this book go out as another period piece in the making. I only ask readers not to be beguiled by any accidental modernities into forgetting how venerable the stories actually are, and how embryonic was the technology of the world in which they were laid.

  And also, if you would be critically tolerant, how young was the author, and how correspondingly youthful was his hero.

  —Leslie Charteris (1964)

  THE LOGICAL ADVENTURE

  1

  If there must be more stories of the Saint, I prefer to choose them from among his later exploits, from the days when he was working practically alone—although Patricia Holm was never far away, and Roger Conway was always within call at times of need. I often think that it best suited the Saint’s peculiar temper to be alone: he was so superbly capable himself, and so arrogantly confident of his own capability, that it irked him to have to deputise the least item of any of his schemes to hands that might bungle it, and exasperated him beyond measure to have to explain and discuss and wrangle his inspirations with minds that leapt to comprehension and decision less swiftly and certainly than his own. These trials he suffered with characteristic good humour, yet there is no doubt that he suffered sometimes, as may be read in other tales that have already been told of him. It is true that the Saint once became something perilously like a gang; there came about him a band of reckless young men who followed him cheerfully into all his crimes, and these young men he led into gay and lawless audacities that made the name of the Saint famous—or infamous—over the whole world; but even those adventures were no more than episodes in the Saint’s life. They were part of his development, but they were not the end. His ultimate destiny still lay ahead; he knew that it still lay ahead, but he did not then know what it was. “The Last Hero” he was called once, but the story of his last heroism is not to be told yet, and the manner of it he never foresaw even in his dreams.

  This story, then, is the first of a handful that I have unearthed from my records of those days of transition, when the Saint was waiting upon Fate. They were days when he seemed to be filling up time, and, as might have been expected of the man, he beguiled the time in his own incomparable fashion, with his own matchless zest. But it is inevitable that his own moods should be reflected in these tales which are exclusively his—that the twist of the tales should write what he himself felt about them at the time, that they were not really important, and yet that they were none the less fantastically delightful interludes. For Simon Templar was incapable of taking anything of life half-heartedly—even an interlude. And it may be that because of all these things, because he had that vivid sense of the pleasant unimportance of all these adventures, the spirit of laughing devil-may-care quixotry that some have called his greatest charm dances through these tales as it does through few others.

  I am thinking particularly of the story that stands first upon my list—a slight story, but a story. Yet it began practically from nothing—as, indeed, did most of the Saint’s best stories. It has been said that Simon Templar had more than any ten men’s fair share of luck in the way of falling into ready-made adventures, but nothing could be farther from the truth. It was the Saint’s own unerring, uncanny genius, his natural instinct for adventure, that made him question things that no ordinary man would have thought to question, and sent him off upon broad, clear roads where no ordinary man would have seen the vestige of a trail, and some volcanic quality within himself that started violent action out of situations that the ordinary man would have found still-born. And if there is any story about the Saint that illustrates this fact to perfection it is this story which opens—ordinarily enough—upon the American Bar of the Piccadilly Hotel, two Manhattans, and a copy of The Evening Record.

  “Eight to one,” murmured the Saint complacently, “and waltzed home with two lengths to spare. That’s another forty quid for the old oak chest. Where shall we celebrate, old dear?”

  Patricia Holm smiled.

  “Won’t you ever take an interest in something outside the racing reports?” she asked. “I don’t believe you even know whether we’ve got a Conservative or a Labour Government at the moment.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said the Saint cheerfully. “Apart from the fact that a horse we’ve never seen has earned us the best dinner that London can provide, I refuse to believe that anything of the least importance has happened in England today. For instance”—he turned the pages of the newspaper—“we are not at all interested to learn that ‘Evidence of a sensational character is expected to be given at the inquest upon Henry Stobbs, a mechanic, who was found dead in a garage in Balham yesterday. I don’t believe the man had a sensational character at all. No man with a really sensational character would be found dead in a garage in Balham…Nor are we thrilled to hear that ‘Missing from her home at South Norwood since January last, the body of Martha Danby, a domestic servant, was discovered in a disused quarry near Tavistock early this morning by a tramp in an advanced state of decomposition.’ Not that we don’t feel sorry for the tramp—it must be rotten for the poor fellow to have to cruise about the world in an advanced state of decomposition—but my point is…”

  “That’ll do,” said Patricia.

  “O.K.,” said the Saint affably. “So long as you understand why I’m so…Hullo…what’s this?”

  He had been folding the paper into a convenient size for the nearest waste-basket when his eye was caught by a name that he knew, and he read the paragraphs surrounding it with a sudden interest. These paragraphs figured in that admirable feature “Here and There” conducted by that indefatigable and ubiquitous gossip “The Eavesdropper.”

  “Well, well, well!” drawled the Saint, with a distinct saintliness of intonation, and Patricia looked at him expectantly.

  “What is it?”

  “Just a little social chatter,” said Simon. “Our friend is warbling about the progress of civil aviation, and how few serious accidents there have been since light aeroplane clubs started springing up all over the country, and how everyone is taking to the air as if they’d been born with wings. Then he says, ‘There are, of course, a few exceptions. Mr. Francis Lemuel, for instance, the well-known cabaret impresario, who was one of the founders of the Thames Valley Flying Club, and who was himself making rapid progress towards his “A” licence, was so badly shaken by his recent crash that he has been compelled, on medical advice, to give up all idea of qualifying as a pilot.’ The rest is just the usual kind of blurb about Lemuel’s brilliant impresarioning. But that is interesting, now, isn’t it, to know that dear Francis was sighing for the wings of a Moth!”

  “Why?”

  The Saint smiled beatifically, and completed the operation of preparing The Evening Record for its last resting-place.

  “There are many interests in my young life,” he murmured, “of which you are still in
ignorance, dear lass. And little Fran is one of them, and has been for some time. But I never knew that he was a bold bad bird-man, outside of business hours…And now, old Pat, shall we dine here or push on to the Berkeley Arms?”

  And that was all that was said about Francis Lemuel that night, and for ten days afterwards, for at that time, bowing before Patricia’s pleading, Simon Templar was trying to lead a respectable life. And yet, knowing her man, she was a little surprised that he dropped the subject so quickly, and, knowing her man again, she heaved a little sigh of rueful resignation when he met her for lunch ten days later and showed quite plainly in his face that he was on the trail of more trouble. At those times there was a renewed effervescence about the Saint’s always electric personality, and a refreshed recklessness about the laughter that was never far from the surface of his blue eyes, that were unmistakable danger-signs. The smooth sweep of his patent-leather hair seemed to become sleeker and slicker than ever, and the keen brown face seemed to take on an even swifter and more rakish chiselledness of line than it ordinarily wore. She knew these signs of old, and challenged him before he had finished selecting the hors d’oeuvre.

  “What’s on the programme, Saint?”

  Simon sipped his sherry elegantly. “I’ve got a job.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know—work. Dramatis persona: Simon Templar, a horny-handed son of toil.”

  “Idiot! I meant, what’s the job?”

  “Private Aviator Extraordinary to Mr. Francis Lemuel,” answered the Saint, with dancing eyes. “And you can’t laugh that off!”

  “Is that what you’ve been so mysterious about lately?”

  “It is. I tell you, it wasn’t dead easy. Mr. Lemuel has an eccentric taste in aviators. I got a lot of fun out of convincing him that I was really a shabby character. Try to imagine the late lamented Solomon applying, incog., for the job of ‘Ask Auntie Abishag’ on the staff of The Lebanon Daily Leader…” The Saint grinned reminiscently. “But as an ex-RAF officer, cashiered for pinching three ailerons, four longerons, and a brace of gliding angles, I had what you might call a flying start.”