Follow 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 Adrian Magson

  Introduction to “The Affair of Hogsbotham” from The First Saint Omnibus (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: 9781477842799

  ISBN-10: 1477842799

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE MIRACLE TEA PARTY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  THE INVISIBLE MILLIONAIRE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  THE AFFAIR OF HOGSBOTHAM

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  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.

  To Hap and Bonnie with love

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  It might seem odd for a Saint fan to recall one particular volume over another, and to be honest, it wasn’t easy. But Follow the Saint seems to resonate most for me because it brings together various aspects about the series which go to make Simon Templar what he is. (Indeed the front cover blurb of some previous editions reads, “Nothing ordinary ever happens to the SAINT”—a statement which, to me as a young boy, held all the promise of a good read that I could possibly imagine, and formulated my desire to write crime fiction).

  The book consists of three stories:

  “The Miracle Tea Party” opens with an introduction (for those who need it) to the Saint’s main poking fun victim—Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. As the hapless representative of Scotland Yard, Teal’s shoulders had to cope with all the criticism that Templar loved heaping on the police. As the author states, “…Teal was allergic to the Saint.” And like most allergies, it follows him around. Yet Teal was not merely a whipping post for the Saint’s barbed wit; he was an important part of the Saint’s story, an anchor point to the conventional world, and the exchanges between the two have a part to play.

  “The Invisible Millionaire” brings in another of the Saint’s happy band, Hoppy Uniatz. Hoppy is an American gangster, short on brains (thinking causes him pain) and looks (face like a gorilla), with a love of Vat 69 and hitting people, or shooting them—either will do. He’s a sharp contrast to the urbane Templar, but he has his uses and introduces an element of humour and handy violence when needed. Indeed, I think it was meeting Uniatz that eventually drew me to reading American crime fiction.

  “The Affair of Hogsbotham” displays the ability of the author to begin a story in an unremarkable way (Templar reading a newspaper and commenting on it to Patricia Holm, his paramour and elegant sidekick)…then to ramp it up by degrees into something less ordinary. It also allows him to comment on war (briefly), on his annoyance with society’s insistence on interfering with public morals—something the Saint has no time for—and most of all, to turn a profit from adversity by relieving the villains of some cold, hard cash.

  In all, Follow the Saint is a useful introduction to anyone new to this character, serving as a form of shorthand to Leslie Charteris’s loveable rogue and the world he inhabits.

  —Adrian Magson

  THE MIRACLE TEA PARTY

  1

  This story starts with four wild coincidences, so we may as well admit them at once and get it over with, and then there will be no more argument. The chronicler makes no apologies for them. A lot of much more far-fetched coincidences have been allowed to happen without protest in the history of the world, and all that can be done about it is to relate them exactly as they took place. And if it should be objected that these particular coincidences led to the downfall of sundry criminals who might otherwise never have been detected, it must be pointed out that at least half the convicts at present taking a cure in the cooler were caught that way.

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal sat in a tea shoppe that was not much more than a powerful stone’s throw from Scotland Yard. Dispassionately considered, it was quite a suitable target for stone-throwing, being one of those dens of ghastly chintz-curtained cheerfulness which stand as grisly omens of what the English-speaking races can expect from a few more generations of purity and hygiene, but Mr Teal held it in a sort of affection born of habit.

  He had finished his tea, and he sat glancing over a newspaper. And in order that there may be positively no deception about this, it must be admitted at once that not even the most enthusiastic advocate of temperance would have chosen him as an advertisement of the place that he was in. Mr Teal, in fact, who even at his best suffered from certain physical disadvantages which made it permanently impossible for him to model for a statue of Da
ncing Spring, was at that moment not even in the running for a picture of Mellow Autumn. His round pink face had a distinctly muddy tinge under its roseate bloom; the champing of his jaws on the inevitable wodge of spearmint was visibly listless, and his china-blue eyes contained an expression of joyless but stoical endurance. He looked, to speak with complete candour, rather like a discontented cow with a toothache.

  After a while he put the newspaper aside and simply sat, gazing mournfully into space. It was a Sunday afternoon, and at that rather late hour he had the place to himself, except for a vacant-faced waitress who sat in a corner knitting some garment in a peculiarly dreadful shade of mustard yellow. A small radio on the mantelpiece, strategically placed between a vase of artificial flowers and a bowl of wax fruit, was emitting strains of that singularly lugubrious and eviscerated music which supplies the theme song of modern romance. Mr Teal appeared to be enduring that infliction in the same spirit as Job might have endured the development of his sixty-second boil. He looked as if he was only waiting for someone to come along and relieve him of the cares of the Universe.

  Someone did come along, but not with that intention. The crash of the door opening made Mr Teal’s overwrought nerves wince, and when he saw who it was he closed his eyes for a moment in sheer agony. For although Mr William Kennedy was easily the most popular of the Assistant Commissioners, his vast and jovial personality was approximately the last thing that a man in Mr Teal’s condition is able to appreciate.

  “Hullo, laddie!” he roared, in a voice that boomed through the room like a gale. “What’s the matter? You look like a cold poached egg left over from yesterday’s breakfast. What are you doing—thinking about the Saint?”

  Mr Teal started as if an electric current had been applied to his posterior. He had expected the worst, but this was worse than that. If anything could have been said to fill his cup of suffering to the brim, that something had been said. Mr Teal now looked as if there was nothing left except for him to find some suitably awful spot in which to die.

  Scientists, whose restless researches leave no phenomenon unprobed, have discovered that certain persons are subject to quite disproportionately grievous reactions from stimuli which to other persons are entirely innocuous. These inordinate sensitivities are known as allergies. Some people are allergic to oysters, others to onions; others need only eat a strawberry to be attacked by violent pains and break out in a rash.

  Chief Inspector Teal was allergic to the Saint. But it must be admitted that this was an acquired rather than a congenital allergy. It is true that Mr Teal, on account of his profession, was theoretically required to be allergic to every kind of law-breaker, but there was nothing in his implied contract with the State which required him to be pierced by such excruciating pains or to break out in such a vivid erythema as he was apt to do whenever he heard the name or nickname of that incorrigible outlaw who had been christened Simon Templar.

  But the Saint was the kind of outlaw that no officer of the Law can ever have had to cope with since the Sheriff of Nottingham was pestered into apoplexy by the Robin Hood of those more limited days. There was no precedent in modern times for anything like him, and Mr Teal was convinced that it could only be taken as evidence of the deliberate maliciousness of Fate that out of all the other police officers who might have been chosen for the experiment the lot had fallen upon him. For there was no doubt at all in his mind that all the grief and woes which had been visited upon him in recent years could be directly attributed to that amazing buccaneer whose unlawful excursions against evil doers had made criminal history, and yet whose legal conviction and punishment was beginning to seem as hopelessly improbable an event as the capture of a genuine and indisputable sea-serpent. Kennedy was not being deliberately cruel. It was simply his uninhibited proclamation of what was an almost automatic association of ideas to anyone who knew anything at all about Teal’s professional life: that whenever Mr Teal looked as if he was in acute agony he was undergoing a spell of Saint trouble. The fact that Mr Teal, as it happened, had not been thinking about the Saint at all when Kennedy came in only gave the reminder a deeper power to wound.

  “No, sir,” said Mr Teal, with the flimsiest quality of restraint. “I was not thinking about the Saint. I haven’t seen him for weeks, I don’t know what he’s doing, and what’s more, I don’t care.”

  Kennedy raised his eyebrows.

  “Sorry, laddie. I thought from your appearance—”

  “What’s wrong with my blasted appearance?” snarled the detective, with a reckless disregard for discipline of which in normal times he would never have been capable, but Kennedy had no great respect for trivial formalities.

  “Blasted is right,” he agreed readily. “You look like something the lightning had started out to strike and then given up as a work of supererogation. What is it, then? Have you been getting hell for falling down on that espionage business?”

  Mr Teal was able to ignore that. It was true that he had made very little headway with the case referred to, but that was not worrying him unduly. When official secrets spring a leak, it is usually a slow job to trace the leakage to its source, and Teal was too old a hand to let himself be disturbed by the slowness of it.

  His trouble was far more intimate and personal, and the time has now come when it must be revealed.

  Mr Teal was suffering from indigestion.

  It was a complaint that had first intruded itself on his consciousness some weeks ago, since when its symptoms had become steadily more severe and regular, until by this time he had come to regard a stomach-ache as the practically inevitable sequel to any meal he ate. Since Mr Teal’s tummy constituted a very large proportion of Mr Teal, his sufferings were considerable. They made him pessimistic and depressed, and more than usually morose. His working days had become long hours of discomfort and misery, and it seemed an eternity since he had spent a really restful and dreamless night. Even now, after having forgone his Sunday dinner in penitence for the price he had had to pay for bacon and eggs at breakfast, the cream bun to whose succulent temptation he had not long ago succumbed was already beginning to give him the unhappily familiar sensation of having swallowed a live and singularly vicious crab. And this was the mortal dolour in addition to which he had had to receive a superfluous reminder of the Saint.

  The waitress at last succeeded in gaining audience.

  “Yes,” boomed Kennedy. “Tea. Strong tea. And about half a ton of hot buttered crumpets.”

  Mr Teal closed his eyes again as another excruciating cramp curled through him.

  In his darkened loneliness he became aware that the music had been interrupted and the radio was talking.

  “…and this amazing tea is not only guaranteed to relieve indigestion immediately, but to effect a complete and permanent cure,” said a clear young voice with a beautiful Oxford accent. “Every day we are receiving fresh testimonials—”

  “My God,” said Teal with a shudder, “where is that Eric-or-Little-by-Little driveling from?”

  “Radio Calvados,” answered Kennedy. “One of the new continental stations. They go to work every Sunday. I suppose we shall have to put up with it as long as the BBC refuses to produce anything but string quartets and instructive talks on Sundays.”

  “Miracle Tea,” said Eric, continuing little by little. “Remember that name. Miracle Tea. Obtainable from all high-class chemists, or direct by post from the Miracle Tea Company, 909, Victoria Street, London. Buy some Miracle Tea tonight!…And now we shall conclude this programme with our signature song—Tea for You.”

  Mr Teal held on to his stomach as the anguishing parody proceeded to rend the air. “Miracle Tea!” he rasped savagely. “What’ll they think of next? As if tea could cure indigestion! Pah!”

  The way he said “Pah!” almost blew his front teeth out, and Kennedy glanced at him discerningly.

  “Oh, so that’s the trouble, is it? The mystery is solved.”

  “I didn’t say—”

 
Kennedy grinned at him.

  The door of the tea shoppe opened again, to admit Inspector Peters, Kennedy’s chief assistant.

  “Sorry I was so long, sir,” he apologised, taking the vacant chair at their table. “The man was out—”

  “Never mind that,” said Kennedy. “Teal’s got indigestion.”

  “You can fix that with a bit of bicarb,” said Peters helpfully.

  “So long as it isn’t something more serious,” said Kennedy, reaching for the freshly arrived plate of hot buttered crumpets with a hand like a leg of mutton and the air of massive confidence which can only be achieved by a man of herculean physique who knows that his interior would never dare to give him any backchat. “I’ve been noticing his face lately. I must say I’ve been worried about it, but I didn’t like to mention it before he brought it up.”

  “You mean the twitching?” asked Peters.

  “Not so much the twitching as the jaundiced colour. It looks bad to me.”

  “Damn it,” began Teal explosively.

  “Acid,” pronounced Kennedy, engulfing crumpets. “That’s generally the beginning of the trouble. Too much acid swilling around the lining of your stomach, and where are you? In next to no time you’re a walking mass of gastric ulcers. You know what happens when a gastric ulcer eats into a blood-vessel?”

  “You bleed to death?” asked Peters interestedly.

  “Like a shot,” said Kennedy, apparently unaware of the fact that Teal was starting to simmer and splutter like a pan full of hot grease. “It’s even worse when the ulcer makes a whacking great hole in the wall of the stomach and your dinner falls through into the abdominal cavity…”

  Mr Teal clung to his chair and wished that he had been born deaf.

  It was no consolation at all to him to recall that it had actually been the Saint himself who had started the fashion of making familiar and even disgusting comments on the shape and dimensions of the stomach under discussion, a fashion which Mr Teal’s own colleagues, to their eternal disgrace, had been surprisingly quick to adopt. And now that it had been revealed that his recent irritability had been caused by acute indigestion, the joke would take a new lease of life. It is a curious but undeniable fact that a man may have a headache or a toothache or an earache and receive nothing but sympathy from those about him, but let his stomach ache and all he can expect is facetiousness of the most callous and offensive kind. Mr Teal’s stomach was a magnificently well-developed organ, measuring more inches from east to west than he cared to calculate, and he was perhaps excessively sensitive about it, but in its present condition the most faintly flippant reference to it was exquisite torment.