The Saint on Guard (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 Jim Martin

  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: 9781477842843

  ISBN-10: 1477842845

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Tom Ferris,

  For all the fun of Miami Beach, for the Algonquin Alligator, and especially for some of the more improbable parts of this book, which we happen to know are strictly true

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE BLACK MARKET

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  THE SIZZLING SABOTEUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  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

  Simon Templar has been with me since childhood.

  Let me rephrase. I fear that I was born a bit too late. My affection for golden age storytelling and heroic acts of valor that bridge crime and international espionage became less feasible (and despicably less fashionable) in the late twentieth century. Sadly, this is where my story began. The late twentieth century. My first memories from growing up take place in a small town in Massachusetts during the Reagan administration. It wasn’t dire…It was fine…but it wasn’t very sexy. It wasn’t jet-setting and world changing. It just was.

  Then my grandfather, JC (James Charles), took me to see Licence to Kill. I was shocked. I was a six-year-old in an adult movie theater watching James Bond do it all. It didn’t matter to me that it was Timothy Dalton (who was a better James Bond than he gets credit for) that I was watching. I was watching a handsome man with a British accent seduce women, pull guns, and ruin an evil drug dealer’s plot set in an exotic location. I was hooked. I wanted to watch every James Bond movie there was. Of course, this was before everything was streaming, and my grandparents didn’t have a lot of VHS tapes…so we had to wait for TV appearances.

  A year or so later, Moonraker showed up in TV Guide, and I was planted in front of the TV to watch it. My grandfather came in while I was watching the first twenty minutes or so. At a commercial break he broke me some strange news. “You’re not watching James Bond.” I was confused. TV Guide didn’t lie. “You’re watching Roger Moore. He’s Simon Templar.” He continued to tell me that Roger Moore was Simon Templar in one of the best damn TV shows from back when my dad was a boy. “Well when’s that on?” I asked. He picked up the TV Guide and smiled, “Let’s see.”

  From that point forward I was a vulture for old episodes of The Saint. I watched every piece I could. No DVR, no TIVO, just randomly channel searching through channels and finding whatever I could. I was pretty good at it, to be honest. I was so good that one day I found myself watching something called The Return of the Saint. It was weird. It wasn’t Roger Moore, and it was all in color…But then this white car pulled up and this suave turtleneck-wearing gent delivered a line that I can’t remember now…but I remember he had the dimple…and I decided right there that Ian Ogilvy was Simon Templar too.

  After all, Simon Templar is an alias, right? I suppose there can be a few Simon Templars…so long as they are as cool as Sir Roger Moore and Ian Ogilvy…Hell, I even wrote a pass for Val Kilmer when The Saint feature film was released. I knew that it wasn’t his fault…He wasn’t English, after all…He tried. Needless to say, I’m getting off topic here. This is supposed to be an introduction to a book, and instead I’m just wistfully remembering my introduction to Leslie Charteris’s antihero.

  But to be fair, any admiration I have for the character is well deserved. Simon Templar was a Robin Hood of modern crime. He was a ladies’ man with a violent dark side that I discovered in my teens and into college as I continued to pick up random Saint books that I could find. But it’s not all sex and violence. He’s funny as well. Simon has a charm and sardonic wit balanced with a measure of sarcasm that plays to me. And lest we all forget, in the grand scheme of things, the name Simon Templar was a choice. Simon Templar demonstrated hope, aspiration, and action. The Saint represents a belief that you can be anything you want to be. A perfect role model and icon for any nerdy Anglophile…I was in. I was and still am, a fan.

  Years passed and projects came and went. I always wanted to work on something Saintly. Finally, in 2012, after I had worked as a writer on the TV shows Heroes and Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja, my friend Alexandre Coscas mentioned that his company was producing a new TV pilot of The Saint. My jaw dropped and I started laughing. I needed to be involved. I begged to get a pitch in. My credits weren’t right to be a show runner yet, but I loved Simon Templar too much to let this opportunity slip through my grasp. I brought in a show runner and we were off and running.
To date I can say that I wrote for and coproduced a pilot called The Saint starring Adam Rayner as Simon Templar…I don’t know if the show will be picked up to series, but I’m extremely proud of the production. Thanks to that show, I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of the most Saintly people on earth. I’m not sure if I’m gloating or if I’m still in disbelief.

  Right. But it’s not about me and how lucky I am…I’m here to write an introduction to The Saint on Guard. And, as a colonist (wait, I’m an American. Did I actually write “colonist?” Heavens…I think I have Stockholm syndrome), I think I got tasked with a good one.

  Taking place in the United States, The Saint on Guard features two epic tales. “The Black Market” and “The Sizzling Saboteur” are adventures that highlight Simon’s character. They include some of my favorite post–The Saint in New York (1935) aspects of Leslie Charteris’s Saint stories. These stories meet any Saint fan’s daily recommended dose of big heists, radioactive and potentially explosive weapons of mass destruction, mistaken identities, shady intelligence agencies, mysterious mobsters, sabotage, and beautiful women. It’s a veritable cornucopia of cool…all seen through ice-blue irises, commented on by one cold bastard. How can you not love this stuff? With Simon Templar, anything is possible.

  In “The Black Market,” we have one of my favorite recurring guest stars in the spotlight alongside Simon. The American counterpart to Claud Eustace Teal, John Henry Fernack, is a mutually active antagonist who we can empathize with and simultaneously laugh at. Simon’s too clever, cunning, and smart to fall for Fernack’s coercion and entrapment…but he’s also brash enough to use Fernack’s persistence to his advantage. And isn’t that what being a hero is all about? Making your adversary look like a buffoon while invariably putting him in position to make an arrest that will put a true sinner behind bars? Or does that make him an antihero?

  Again, maybe I’ve just been reading too many Saint books. But I don’t think that’s it. Simon Templar inspires hope in all of us, providing outlets for heroic activism in a handy book or television show. Simon Templar defines the characteristics represented in both heroes and antiheroes. He is the epitome of manhood.

  In “The Sizzling Saboteur” Simon travels to a pre–Jimmy Webb iteration of Galveston, Texas, in search of a man who has been terrorizing weapons factories…But all is not what it seems in the Gulf Coast island town. Simon must traverse the local authorities, mob connections, and a beautiful, if not typical, exotic Russian bombshell named Olga Ivanovitch. Again, I ask you—what else do you want? This is what storytelling is about!

  Simon Templar isn’t what most people think. He’s not a pristine altar boy. He’s not a villainous letch. He’s not religious. Instead Simon Templar is a religiously pristine letch who commits villainous acts against the ungodly who have compromised the Saintly across the world. Simon Templar is an ideal. He’s a vision. He’s a revelation that comes when one is in need. Simon Templar is a choice.

  He’s a choice that I have made since I was a young boy, watching black-and-white reruns on a nineteen-inch television in my grandpa’s den in Wales, Massachusetts. It’s one of the few choices that I’ve never questioned. The Saint has stuck with me since childhood. Simon’s still one of the characters that JC and I talk about to this day, and his stories will echo in my consciousness until I’m gone. Until another little kid picks up a remote control or opens a book and with it the mantle of do-goodery and Saintliness. And they will…and the sign of the Saint will continue to make the world a better place, one public-spirited citizen at a time.

  “Tell me,” said the Saint innocently. “What is the particular law that forbids any public-spirited citizen to do his little bit towards purifying a sinful world?”

  —Leslie Charteris

  “The Black Market”

  Now, I’m not a lawyer…but I’d venture to say that special rules exist for special people. So go forth, Simon Templar. Go on and do your thing. Keep being the Saint. Keep being On Guard…after all, the world needs a Saint.

  —Jim Martin (2014)

  THE BLACK MARKET

  1

  The headline in the New York World-Telegram said:

  SAINT TO SMASH IRIDIUM BLACK MARKET

  The story itself was relatively slight for so much black type but it was adequately padded with a fairly accurate résumé of the Saint’s career and exploits, or as much of them as had ever become a matter of record, for while the Saint himself was not naturally a modest man, there are certain facts which the dull legislatures of this century do not allow a person to publicise without fear of landing behind iron bars, and Simon Templar preferred bars with bottles to the less convivial kind.

  However, the mere fact that the Saint was involved made the item meaty enough from a journalistic standpoint to justify the expenditure of ink, and it is probable that hardly any of the readers felt that the space could have been more stimulatingly and entertainingly employed.

  Inspector John Henry Fernack was one very solid exception. He may have been stimulated, in an adrenal way, but he was certainly not entertained. He was, in fact, a rather solemnly angry man. But he had been conditioned by too many previous encounters with Simon Templar’s unique brand of modern buccaneering to view the threat of a fresh outbreak without feeling a premonitory ache somewhere in his sadly wise grey head.

  He came all the way uptown from Centre Street to the Saint’s suite at the Algonquin, and thrust the paper under Simon’s nose, and said grimly, “Would you mind telling me just what this means?”

  The Saint glanced over it with lazy and bantering blue eyes.

  “You mean I should read it to you, or are you just stuck on the longer words?”

  “What do you know about iridium?”

  “Iridium,” said the Saint encyclopedically, “is an element with an atomic weight of 193-1. It is found in platinum, and also in lesser quantities in some types of iron and copper ores. In metallurgical practice it is usually combined with platinum, producing an alloy of great hardness and durability, suitable for the manufacture of electrical contacts or for boring holes in policemen’s heads.”

  Fernack breathed deeply and carefully. “What do you know about this black market?”

  Simon ran a hand through his dark hair.

  “I know that there is one. There has to be. That isn’t any great secret. Iridium is one of the essential metals for war production, and it’s awful scarce—so scarce that after Pearl Harbor the price shot up to about four hundred dollars a Troy ounce. The present official price is about a hundred and seventy dollars, or about two thousand bucks a pound, which is still very expensive groceries. If you can get it. But you can’t get it.”

  “You’re supposed to get it if you have the proper priority.”

  “So the Government gives you a pretty licence to buy it. They could probably give you a licence to buy a web-footed unicorn, too. And then all you have to do is find it.”

  “What’s wrong with the regular markets?”

  “They just haven’t got it. There never has been much to spare, and the armament boom has just been going through it like steak through a shipwrecked sailor. And that consignment that was hijacked in Tennessee about a month ago did as much damage as putting an aeroplane factory out of production for six months. It wasn’t written up that way, but that’s what it amounted to.”

  The incident he referred to had made enough headlines on its own merits, nevertheless. The sheer callous audacity of the job was obvious front-page material, and the value of the loot ranked it with the great robberies of all time.

  Three glass-lined quart containers of iridium powder—the usual method of shipping the metal—were being flown from Brazil to the Fort Wayne laboratories of the Uttershaw Mining Company. They were transhipped from Pan American Airways at Miami, and there was another transfer to be made at Nashville, Tennessee. Since the consignment was insured for three hundred thousand dollars, its actual value, there were two armed guards provided by th
e insurance company to supervise the transhipment at Nashville, but it is certain that no trouble was expected. Perhaps it was because the value of the cargo was only dimly appreciated, in spite of the figures on the policy: iridium was just a word to most people, it wasn’t like jewels or bullion or any of the well-publicised forms of boodle that automatically bring exciting thoughts to mind. Perhaps the guards were negligent, or merely bored; perhaps the precautions were simply routine, and nobody took the idea of such an attack seriously. Anyway, the result was already history.

  A car drove on to the airfield while the case containing the heavy flasks was being unloaded. The two armed guards were shot down before they even realised what was happening, the case was thrown into the car, and the raiders were gone again before any of the spectators had recovered enough to make a move. It had been as simple as that.

  Fernack said, “What do you know about that job?”

  “Only what I read in the papers.”

  “You think some of that stolen iridium is finding its way into the black market?”

  “I wouldn’t drop dead with shock if it was.”

  “Then it would really be a thieves’ market.”

  “I wouldn’t quibble. I imagine you ought to have a priority number even to buy stolen iridium. The point is that it’s an illegal market.”

  “But how could a respectable manufacturer buy in a market like that?”

  “Respectable manufacturers have contracts with the Government. They want to fill those contracts, patriotically or for profit or both. If the only way they can get vital materials is that way, any of them are still liable to buy. It’s just about as safe as any form of criminal connivance. Only one or two men in the firm would need to know, and iridium is compact and easy to handle in the quantities they use, and it would be the hell of a thing to track down and hang on them individually. So they have some iridium, and none of the workers who are using it is going to ask questions or give a damn where it came from, and maybe they had it in stock all the time.”