The Saint's Getaway (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 Burl Barer

  Preface first printed in the Fiction Publishing edition (1964)

  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: 9781477842683

  ISBN-10: 1477842683

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To P. G. Wodehouse,

  who had time to say a word for the Saint stories,

  when he could have written them so much better himself

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FELL FROM GRACE AND STANISLAUS WAS UNFORTUNATE

  1

  2

  CHAPTER TWO: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS UNREPENTANT AND THE PARTY WAS CONSIDERABLY PEPPED UP

  1

  2

  CHAPTER THREE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR MADE A JOURNEY AND PRINCE RUDOLF SPOKE OF HIS APPENDIX

  1

  2

  CHAPTER FOUR: HOW MONTY HAYWARD CARRIED ON

  1

  CHAPTER FIVE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CHASED HIMSELF AND MONTY HAYWARD DID HIS STUFF

  1

  2

  CHAPTER SIX: HOW MONTY HAYWARD SLEPT UNEASILY AND SIMON TEMPLAR WARBLED ABOUT

  1

  2

  CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR BORROWED A CAR AND AGREED TO BE SENSIBLE

  1

  2

  CHAPTER EIGHT: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CONTINUED TO BE DISCREET AND MONTY HAYWARD IMPROVED THE SHINING HOUR

  1

  2

  CHAPTER NINE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR HAD AN INSPIRATION AND TRESPASSED IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  1

  2

  CHAPTER TEN: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DISCOURSED ABOUT PROHIBITION AND PATRICIA HOLM WALKED LIKE A PRINCESS

  1

  2

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: HOW MONTY HAYWARD RECITED POETRY AND SIMON TEMPLAR TREATED HIMSELF TO A WASH

  1

  2

  CHAPTER TWELVE: HOW NINA WALDEN SPOKE AND MONTY HAYWARD LOOKED OUT OF A WINDOW

  1

  2

  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

  The sizzling fuse of Leslie Charteris’s career was still sparking short of full explosion in the early 1930s, although his fame was increasing, and the Saint was garnering a larger and larger fan base. The home port and first publisher of these early Saint adventures was The Thriller, where Charteris’s most durable close friend, Monty Haydon, was editor and much more.

  Despite the responsibilities and burdens of being controlling editor of a large group of journals, of which The Thriller was only one, Haydon gave Charteris help with practically every story appearing in his publication. Leslie and Monty would regularly kick plots and ideas around together at innumerable three-hour lunches, usually at the Press Club.

  Monty Haydon initiated a great deal of the irreverent nature of Saint adventures, and the “anything goes” approach was deliberate editorial policy—a policy of genius, because it was precisely this sense of the author’s own recklessness, this feeling that you were not only reading about a mocking desperado, but were actually in the hands of one, that was the most intoxicating thing about the early Saint stories in general, and The Saint’s Getaway in specific. It is in The Saint’s Getaway that Leslie Charteris takes his editor, Monty Haydon, and puts him smack in the middle of the action as Monty Hayward.

  The prologue to The Saint’s Getaway, missing from Fiction Publishing Company’s paperback in the 1960s but reinstated in this new edition, documents the Saint’s flight from England “with every penny of the accumulated profits of ten years of buccaneering rescued from a bank,” and “with one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of illicit diamonds in his pocket.”

  Fencing the jewels for seven hundred thousand guilders in Amsterdam, Simon and Patricia eventually arrive in Innsbruck. “Monty Hayward found him there, and Monty has a lot to do with this story. In fact, the Saint has been heard to say that the whole story was Monty’s fault from the very beginning.” Such a remark from Simon Templar is retrospective jocularity.

  From the prologue we know the Saint, Patricia Holm, and Monty Hayward ate dinner, drank beer, and walked together along the Rennweg when the adventure began. We don’t know who Monty is, or how he knows Simon Templar. The merriment is well under way before we discover Monty is a “respectable editor” employed by Consolidated Press.

  Having finished a week’s job in a couple of days, Monty reckons that he’s earned five days’ holiday. His history with the Saint remains undisclosed. The fact is simply that Monty is there, and this is Monty’s adventure.

  A good sidekick, as opposed to an effective stooge, offers the reader an option in identification. Monty is the “reader” pulled into the pages of a pulp adventure similar to those for which he corrects punctuation and syntax.

  “There had been times when he had deliberately tried to shut out from his mind the responsibility for Monty Hayward’s predicament, and yet it had never been very far below the surface of his thoughts.” Simon, in fiction, is responsible. In the real world, it is
Charteris.

  It is one thing to read a roaring adventure, another to live one. Murder, mayhem, and wild car chases affect one differently in real life from in vicarious involvement. For the Saint, of course, it is all one thing. Monty Hayward is the real person arriving in the unreal world.

  Peter Sellers opted to play his character in 1967’s Casino Royale, the satirical send-up of James Bond, as the one real person in a cast of characters. Prior to filming Being There, this was Sellers’s favorite screen performance—the one of which he was most proud. His character is reminiscent of Monty Hayward—the true person thrust into a moving, 3-D comic book. Yes, this is Monty’s adventure.

  The Saint’s getaway in the novel’s prologue is told in past tense. The Saint’s getaway at the novel’s end is future tense. Monty Hayward stands at a window, safely extricated from the adventure, watching the Saint and Patricia whirl away into the night. “There would be armed men at every frontier, but those two would get away. He knew they would get away.”

  Of course he knew they would get away. All readers know the Saint and Patricia will get away. That was never the question. Even how they will get away is unimportant. The title of the novel is not the novel’s story. The Saint gets away in the prologue; the Saint gets away at the end. In between the getaway and the getaway is the adventure. This is escapist fare—a rattling good adventure providing the perfect getaway for any reader. Between the pages, we are in the Saint’s world rather than our own.

  At novel’s end, the Saint and Patricia continue without us. We experience the climax not from the Saint’s point-of-view, but from Monty’s. When the last sentence of the last page has been decoded and visualized, we, like Monty Hayward, are left behind in the “real world” while the Saint and Patricia continue their adventure in a world we only share when we open the book, turn the pages, and find ourselves once again on a wild ride in the Bavarian Hills with the famous Simon Templar.

  Here then is The Saint’s Getaway, one of the most action packed and entertaining of all Saint novels. Yes, the explanation for much of the mayhem hinges on a most outrageous and unlikely coincidence, but Charteris’s impudence is obvious. Both Charteris and his editor, Monty Haydon, were perfectly aware that the sudden explanation offered in the finale is wildly improbably, perhaps even absurd. In the world of Simon Templar, absurd is simply one more endearing attribute. Come then, there is a train pulling out…and you’re invited…get on board and hold on tight…there is an adventure rolling down these tracks, and you don’t want to miss it!

  —Burl Barer

  PREFACE

  This story is virtually the third volume of a trilogy begun by The Saint Closes the Case and The Avenging Saint. Although it was written a few years after them—with, in fact, four or five other books in between—it was still first published as far back as 1933. I was a lot busier in those days.

  In it, the Saint concludes his personal feud with Prince Rudolf, his most interesting opponent in the first two rounds. His other arch enemy, Rayt Marius, does not appear in this one, and actually is only heard of again, posthumously, in The Saint in London. As I have had to explain in other prefaces, these were villains out of a mythology which today seems almost as dated as the Ruritanias from which they came. But this book, although the tittle may seem less appropriate now than the first one, in retrospect, actually winds up a sequence as well as an era.

  Some of the most dated notions which motivated the first two books, the themes of mercenary war-makers pulling strings behind the international scene, to activate the puppet but ambitious rulers of minor countries such as Prince Rudolf’s, play an almost casual part in this story, and do not need elaborate explanation here. This book can stand, better than the first two, purely on its merits as an adventure and a chase.

  Needless to say, however, because of its period, it contains anomalies which may have to be pointed out to some readers who have met the Saint only in his latest environments.

  The Austria in which it begins, and the Germany in which it ends, were not only pre-NATO, but pre-Hitler. (Although Adolf was busily on his way at the time, he had still not attained any great power, and was largely written off as a minor crackpot who would never really amount to anything.) The kind of mythical principality ruled by Prince Rudolf was still loosely acceptable to the popular imagination, at least as a nostalgic tradition, even though in fact here were precious few left which anyone could actually name.

  It is, perhaps, a timely consolation to the writers of high adventure who would try to survive the present trend towards sordid back-street “realism” that although those fascination plot-fertile Balkans have long since disappeared behind the grey shadows of the Iron Curtain, the surge of anti-colonialism and indiscriminate independence elsewhere has led to a proliferation of even more pint-sized and retrograde republics and dictatorships, all over the globe, than anyone but the United Nations secretariat and the most studious amateur geographers can keep track of. Perhaps, after all, these themes may yet have a romantic renaissance, in some new-born African or Asian Graustark.

  Meanwhile, this book is offered simply as an adventure. It never aspired to be anything more.

  —Leslie Charteris (1964)

  PROLOGUE

  Wrote Chief Inspector Teal, of Scotland Yard, grimly refrigerating his personal emotions down to the temperature required of an official report:

  The fact that Simon Templar has long since given up even pretending that he is not “The Saint” has never made it any easier to deal with him. In almost every case which has so far come to my notice, he has either made certain that his victim will not dare to charge him, or he has provided himself with an alibi that we cannot upset. He has resources which our organisation was scarcely designed to cope with. From the very beginning of his career I have done everything in my power to secure an arrest, but all the evidence we have been able to accumulate so far has been practically valueless…

  The tense of the report was past—past and apologetic—though no one would have hated to admit it more than Teal. For, since the epoch to which that prefatory paragraph referred, certain things had changed. The trouble was that they had not changed in any particularly helpful way. This the Chief Commissioner had made distressingly plain. He did so with what several people considered to be an excessive amount of verbiage, decoration, and detail, but he was a pardonably angry man. Simon Templar, having a more cheerful point of view, put it to Patricia Holm much more succinctly.

  “Somewhere,” said the Saint, with the old gay wave of his hand, and the light of the old Saintly laughter dancing in his eyes, “somewhere in the great sprawling mess that constitutes the Official Drain—Brain—of Scotland Yard—there is a little more evidence. And at the same time, in the great palpitating area watched over by the Brain—there is a lot less Saint. Who cares?”

  Well, as a matter of fact, a good many people cared. And a fat lot of use that was. Wherefore their tribulation is mentioned merely as a thing of transient interest, in the same casual way as the Saint himself would have referred to it.

  Gunner Perrigo cared—but his feelings never seemed to have been considered at any stage of the proceedings. He languished in Brixton Prison on remand and meditated gloomily on Life, and the tenor of his meditations was that Life had handed him the rawest of raw deals. For he, Gunner Perrigo, could once have claimed a half-share in the largest packet of illicit diamonds ever smuggled into England, and now the prison inventory of all his worldly goods made him out to be worth exactly eight shillings and four-pence cash. Those were the two cardinal facts of his existence, and no statistician on earth could have figured them out into a more comprehensive assortment of permutations and combinations than he had already elaborated for himself.

  And Scotland Yard cared. Scotland Yard, into whose Official Ear, as representatively rooted to the scalp of Chief Inspector Teal, the umpteenth Saintly flea had neatly been injected, was seriously annoyed—and that from no motives of sympathy with the bereaveme
nt of Gunner Perrigo. And the index of that annoyance could have been calculated from the dour faces of the three dozen bulbous luminaries of its CID who littered themselves in pairs about strategic points in every port of the United Kingdom, waiting for the anticipated getaway, throughout one clammy week in April. Like the hosts of Midian, they prowled and prowled around, looking tremendously impressive, but achieving nothing more substantial than that. One of them caught a cold, which was just too bad.

  And the Saint was away out of England—away ten thousand feet over their heads, in a flying streak of silver droning between the piled red pinnacles of the evening clouds. He was away with Patricia Holm and his freedom, with every penny of the accumulated profits of ten years of buccaneering rescued from a bank that Teal had not been quick enough to find and close against him, with one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of illicit diamonds in his pocket, and the wide world before him.

  Beyond the Channel they were waiting for him. Out of six police departments in six different countries the humming intercontinental wires conjured forth men to watch for him at Cherbourg, Havre, Dieppe, Boulogne, Dunkirk, Ostend, Hook of Holland—way east as far as Helsingfors and Riga. They glimpsed him over Etaples and were ready for him between Amiens and Paris, but he landed at midnight in the empty wastes of the High Fen behind Monschau, and came to Aachen in a borrowed lorry before the dawn. And there the trail ended.

  Van Roeper, the little blue-eyed Jew who paid seven hundred thousand guilders for the diamonds, trotted peacefully around Amsterdam on his own business, and saw no reason to come forward with the little help he could have given to the chase. And he was the last man who knew that he had seen the Saint. None of the frontier guards of Europe knew that the Saint had passed them, for Simon Templar travelled by his own trails. But it is only a matter of history that one day three weeks later Simon Templar and Patricia Holm walked south from Lenggries, which is in Bavaria, and passed through the woods to Achenwald in Austria by a path which the Saint knew, and so came presently to Innsbruck.