The Happy Highwayman (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 Andrew Cartmel

  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: 9781477842805

  ISBN-10: 1477842802

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Stuart Walker,

  To whom time and changes make no difference

  But always leave him just the same grand guy

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE MAN WHO WAS LUCKY

  THE SMART DETECTIVE

  THE WICKED COUSIN

  THE WELL-MEANING MAYOR

  THE BENEVOLENT BURGLARY

  THE STAR PRODUCERS

  THE CHARITABLE COUNTESS

  THE MUG’S GAME

  THE MAN WHO LIKED ANTS

  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

  With over fifty books featuring the Saint’s adventures, most of them containing a number of short tales about the charming and buccaneering Simon Templar, there is certainly no shortage of Saint stories.

  But The Happy Highwayman is an important and notable collection on a number of counts.

  Simon Templar is something of a timeless hero. He made his debut in 1928 and took his final bow in print either in 1963 (the last of the true Leslie Charteris titles) or 1983 (the last of the books attributed to Charteris and various collaborators). In all those years of legal and illegal activity, mayhem, mischief, and amorous adventures, Templar remains essentially ageless and unchanging.

  The world around him, however, changed considerably. With the result that some of the Saint’s earlier adventures could seem like slightly creaky period pieces when they were still being reprinted in much later years. This particularly became an issue as the time span began to stretch between the earliest editions and later reprints. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was Featuring the Saint, with nearly forty years between its first appearance (1931) and its revamped reissue (1969).

  By that time Charteris had decided to deal with the dated aspects of some of the stories by the simple expedient of including an apology in the foreword to the volume.

  But before this he’d actually taken pains to try and update the early stories, so they could “pass” among contemporary readers. And The Happy Highwayman (first published 1939, reissued 1963) is an example of such a revised volume.

  You can see the effects of these revisions most clearly in “The Star Producers” where luminaries of the 1930s have been replaced by more modern movie stars—although the fees quoted remain the same. So we have Marlon Brando and William Holden, where the earlier equivalents were John Barrymore and William Powell. Interestingly, Charles Laughton features in both versions, a tribute to his longevity as a star.

  This updating can also be discerned, more subtly, in “The Man Who Liked Ants,” which was first published in 1937 in the magazine Double Detective. Any devotee of comics will instantly spot the reference in the story to the art of Walt Kelly, famous for his satirical funny-animal newspaper strip Pogo—and know that this couldn’t have dated from 1937, when Kelly was still labouring as an anonymous animator at The Walt Disney Studios.

  Indeed, the original 1937 text contains instead a reference to the art of Otto Soglow, who created the comic strip The Little King, which ran in magazines and newspapers from 1931 until 1975. But by the 1960s Soglow and his creation had become sufficiently obscure for Charteris to make the Walt Kelly alteration.

  But “The Man Who Liked Ants” is notable for much more than this subtle adjustment. It stands as one of the Saint’s few forays into pure horror and science fiction—and probably the most notable one, serving as it did for the basis of an unforgettable episode of the television series, evocatively retitled “The House on Dragon’s Rock.”

  If the reader wants to avoid spoilers they should go no further here before reading the story itself.

  “The Man Who Liked Ants” deals with a classic mad scientist who has hit on a method (refreshingly, not radiation but simply the application of red light—this was 1937, after all) of breeding ants of an extraordinary size.

  No prizes for guessing what goes wrong.

  The mad scientist is also possessed of the obligatory beautiful niece (although in some cases it’s a daughter) whom Simon Templar rescues, before dispatching the scientist himself, Dr Sardon, with astonishing casual ruthlessness: “the door had started to move when he shot him twice through the heart.”

  Of course, the madman has been pointing a gun at Templar—having only momentarily swung it carelessly away from his target—and he is about to unleash a plague of massive ants on humanity…

  Moral considerations aside, “The Man Who Liked Ants” is a very striking piece of fiction. The dryly low-key title adds considerably to the power of the tale, as does the painstaking care taken to build up a convincing background for Sardon’s research. Real scientists and real technical terms are skilfully blended with pure fantasy.

  And the sparing, elliptical descriptions of the monstrous ants also add to their impact.

  “The Man Who Liked Ants” is a highly influential story. It was not only the basis for a memorable episode of the
television series, it may also have served as inspiration for the classic giant ant movie Them! (1954). Saint scholar Jonathan Rigby has pointed out that the story was reprinted in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in June 1953, and Them! began production in October of the same year at Warner Bros. Hmm…

  The fact that “The Man Who Liked Ants” is such an unusual story in the Simon Templar canon has led to speculation that it was ghost-written. This is entirely possible. It’s well known that Leslie Charteris did employ ghost writers at various times, and to varying degrees. And what some regard as the uncharacteristic prose style of this story, along with its wildly unusual subject matter, argue strongly that it may well be one of those which Charteris farmed out.

  To many Saint aficionados the question is not so much whether the story was ghost written, as who the ghost writer might have been.

  A number of science fiction, horror, and fantasy writers have been named as collaborating with Charteris on Saint stories. It’s quite a distinguished roll call, including Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harry Harrison.

  But the name which most persistently attaches itself to “The Man Who Liked Ants” is Cleve Cartmill. One of the more obscure science fiction writers of the period, Cartmill also has the distinction of being identified as the author of that other great Saint horror tale “The Convenient Monster,” which features a well-known watery beast from Loch Ness…

  Balanced against this is a conversation in the 1990s with Charteris which Ian Dickerson recounts, where the author happily admitted Cartmill’s extensive involvement with the Saint story “The Darker Drink” (a.k.a. “Dawn”) but seemed quite certain, even these many years—and stories—later, that “The Man Who Liked Ants” was entirely his own work.

  The story is also a little early for such ghost writing or collaborations (appearing in print ten years before “The Darker Drink”).

  In any case, Cleve Cartmill remains one of Leslie Charteris’s most intriguing collaborators. And he certainly had the science fiction—and science—credentials for involvement with one of the Saint’s most fantastical adventures.

  Under his own name Cartmill was responsible for a genuine, 24-karat science fiction classic, and a milestone of the genre. This was his short story “Deadline.” Published in 1944 in Astounding magazine, it gave such an eerily prescient account of a nuclear fission weapon—of exactly the kind being secretly developed by the Manhattan Project—that it resulted in the magazine’s editor being questioned by the FBI.

  Such a writer could surely have taken giant ants in his stride.

  But, personally, I like the theory that Cartmill wrote “The Man Who Liked Ants” for a much simpler reason—because he may well be a distant relative of mine.

  —Andrew Cartmel (2014)

  THE MAN WHO WAS LUCKY

  Somewhat optimistically, the editorial writer of the News-Chronicle, spoke one morning to a million breakfasting Britons, as follows:

  The rebel of yesterday is the hero of tomorrow.

  Simon Templar, known as the Saint, whose arrest was the ambition of every policeman in London a few years ago because of his efforts to enforce his own brand of extra-legal justice, is photographed beside film stars at first nights, and has to be rescued by the police from a mob of admirers clamouring for his autograph.

  The converse is also true.

  Lucky Joe Luckner, the idol of Soho, leader of a race-gang which came close to being an English equivalent of the racketeers of America, is committed for trial on a charge of attempted murder.

  We see no need for the Saint to go back to his old games. Our criminals are taken care of as they should be, by the men who are employed to do so, with the whole strength of public opinion behind them.

  Simon Templar kept the cutting. He had a weakness for collecting the miscellaneous items of publicity with which the press punctuated his career from time to time.

  He had been publicly called a great many names in his life, and they all interested him. To those who found themselves sadder or poorer or even deader by reason of his interference in their nefarious activities, he was an unprintable illegitimate. To those whose melancholy duty it was to discourage his blithe propensity for taking the law into his own hands, he was a perpetually disturbing problem. To a few people he was a hero; to himself he was only an adventurer, finding the best romance he could in a dull atomic age, fighting crime because he had to fight something, and not caring too much whether he himself transgressed the law in doing so. A quite simple code, really.

  Sometimes his adventures left him poorer, more often they left him richer, but always they were exciting. Which was all that the Saint asked of life.

  He showed the cutting to Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal at Scotland Yard the next day, and the detective rubbed his round chin and gazed at him with sleepy china-blue eyes.

  “There’s something in it,” he said.

  Simon detected the faintly hesitant inflection in the other’s voice, and raised his eyebrows gently.

  “Why only something?”

  “You’ve seen the papers?”

  The Saint shrugged.

  “Well, they’ve passed him on to the Old Bailey, and that’s further than you ever got him before.”

  “Oh, yes.” The detective’s tone was blunt and sardonic. “He’ll be tried at the next sessions—if there’s any case left by that time. And meanwhile one of the principal witnesses has already been coshed so badly that it’s about ten chances to one he’ll die of it, and the other’s disappeared.”

  The Saint nodded thoughtfully. “There’s no doubt that he’s guilty?”

  “You know as much as I do about juries,” said Teal with caustic restraint. “You think it out for yourself. That fellow that the attempted murder charge is about is a little bookie who’d only just started in business. The Luckner Boys told him he’d got to pay protection for his pitch. You know—the usual race-gang procedure. He said he didn’t see why he should pay for their protection, so they bashed him. I got that straight from his assistant, Romaro, after it happened.

  “It was just our luck that Luckner was at Epsom himself and the scene of the bashing, and this fellow Romaro recognized him. But you saw how they coshed Romaro after he picked out Luckner at the identification parade, so whether Romaro will tell the same story at the Old Bailey is another matter.”

  Teal unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum and bit on it with concentrated viciousness.

  “You know your way round as well as I do, Saint—or you used to. And you ask me if Luckner’s guilty!”

  Simon swung a long leg over the arm of his chair and gazed at the detective through the drifting smoke of his cigarette with a glimpse of idle mockery twinkling deep down in his blue eyes.

  “One gathers that Lucky Joe wouldn’t be so lucky if you were allowed to use the third degree over here,” he remarked.

  Mr Teal blinked, but he nodded. “If Luckner could be hanged on this charge, he would not get more than he deserves. He’s the kind of thug we can do without in this country—”

  He stopped rather abruptly, as though he had only just realized the trend of his argument. Perhaps the quietly speculative smile on the Saint’s lips, and the rakish lines of the dark fighting face, brought back too many memories to let him continue with an easy conscience.

  For there had been days, before that tacit armistice to which the leader writer of the News-Chronicle had referred when that lean, debonair outlaw lounging in his armchair had been disconcertingly prone to put such unlawful ideas into sensational effect.

  “I don’t mean what you’re thinking,” Teal said heavily. “Luckner is going to be taken care of. That’s the sort of job I’m here for. And don’t you forget the rest of that article. You stick to taking Marlene Dietrich to first nights and signing autograph albums, and we shan’t have any trouble.”

  The Saint grinned lazily.

  “You know me, Claud,” he murmured. “I never want to make you overtax your brain.”
r />   His tone was so innocent and docile that Teal glared at him for a moment suspiciously. But the Saint laughed at him and took him out to lunch and talked to him so engagingly about the most harmless topics that that momentary flash of uneasiness had faded from the plump detective’s mind by the time they parted. Which was exactly what the Saint had meant it to do.

  Simon Templar never asked for superfluous trouble—quite enough of it came his way in the normal course of events without encouraging him to invite extra donations without good reason.

  As a matter of fact, the luck of Lucky Joe Luckner might well have slipped away into the background of his memory and remained there permanently, for it seemed to be one of those cases where it was hardly necessary for him to intervene.

  He had thought no more about it a couple of days later when he saw a face that he remembered coming out of a travel agency in Piccadilly. The girl was so intent on hurrying through the crowd that she might not have noticed him, but he caught her arm as she went by and turned her round.

  “Hullo, Cora,” he drawled. “Are you going to see the world?”

  She looked at him with a queer mixture of fear and defiance that surprised him. The look had vanished a moment after she recognized him, but it remained in his memory with the beginning of a question mark after it. He kept his hand on her arm.

  “Why—hullo, Saint!”

  He smiled. “Hush,” he said. “Not so loud. I may be an honest citizen to all intents and purposes, but I haven’t got used to it. Come and have a drink and tell me the story of your life.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  Did he imagine that she still seemed a trifle breathless, just as he might have imagined that swift glimmer of fright in her eyes when he caught hold of her?

  “Not just now. Can’t we have lunch or something tomorrow? I…I’ve got an appointment.”

  “With Marty?” Simon asked.

  He was sure now. There was a perceptible hesitation before she answered, exactly as if she had paused to consider whether to tell him the truth or invent a story.