The Saint Plays with Fire (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 Paul Simpson

  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: 9781477842782

  ISBN-10: 1477842780

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Bartlett Cormack

  My Dear Bart,

  Once upon a time, when a chance letter of yours dragged me into a dizzy whirl on the madman’s merry-go-round called Hollywood, I decided to write a book called The Saint in Hollywood, and I knew then that it must be dedicated to you. But the years have ambled on, and somehow or other that story still hasn’t been started, and I’m ashamed to keep you waiting any longer for what I meant to give you so long ago. So will you take this instead, with the same affection and gratitude as I should have dedicated that unwritten adventure?

  Always,

  Leslie Charteris

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  CHAPTER ONE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT TO A FIRE AND PATRICIA HOLM HEARD OF A “FINANCIER”

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  CHAPTER TWO: HOW LADY VALERIE COMPLAINED ABOUT HEROES AND MR FAIRWEATHER DROPPED HIS HAT

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  CHAPTER THREE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DROVE TO LONDON AND GENERAL SANGORE EXPERIENCED AN IMPEDIMENT IN HIS SPEECH

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  CHAPTER FOUR: HOW KANE LUKER SPOKE HIS MIND AND HOPPY UNIATZ DID THE BEST HE COULD WITH HIS

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  CHAPTER FIVE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR OBLIGED LADY VALERIE AND CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL REFUSED BREAKFAST

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  CHAPTER SIX: HOW MR FAIRWEATHER OPENED HIS MOUTH AND MR UNIATZ PUT HIS FOOT IN IT

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  CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CONVERSED WITH SUNDRY PERSONS AND PC REGINALD CONGRATULATED HIM

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  CHAPTER EIGHT: HOW KANE LUKER CALLED A CONFERENCE AND SIMON TEMPLAR ANSWERED HIM

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  EPILOGUE

  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

  For many fans of Leslie Charteris’s writing, the 1930s saw the best Saint adventures appear in print. All-time favourites, including the Rayt Marius tales and the collections of short stories in which Simon Templar bamboozled the ungodly, made their debuts. But two full-length novels stand out above all the other pieces: Getaway and The Saint Plays with Fire (originally titled Prelude for War).

  Getaway is a caper piece, adapted as The Saint’s Vacation for the RKO series of movies. The Saint Plays with Fire, right from the start, is far more serious—or as serious as anything can be in the Saint’s world, where there are damsels in distress to be rescued, Inspector Claud Eustace Teal’s tummy to be prodded, and bad guys to threaten everything that Simon holds dear.

  It contains some of Leslie Charteris’s most evocative writing—I defy anyone to read the description of the Sons of France rally in the first few pages, and the picture that it evokes in Simon’s mind, chronicled a little later, without feeling a chill. Remember, this was written in 1938, at a time when appeasement was God, America was isolationist, and very few people were willing to listen to the truth about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi creed. It’s not an Indiana Jones adventure penned fifty years later, in which the Führer can sign the notebook Indy is carrying in Berlin, or a Doctor Who episode, where Hitler is thrown into a cupboard to get him out of the way of a regenerating River Song. This is an author stepping away from the heightened reality in which his character usually dwelt and dealing with a real creed of hatred, which stood for everything that the Saint—and, of course, his creator, Charteris—abhorred.

  In some ways it’s the last Saint novel. From hereon in, at least in the stories that Charteris penned himself, Simon is battling against the Nazis directly, more often than not, working for an unofficial part of the American government. Once he becomes part of the Establishment, no matter how obliquely, the Saint loses something of his edge. Here he is caught up in the madness purely by chance, but the more he learns, the angrier he gets. And, to borrow from a different franchise, you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

  That’s not to say that The Saint Plays with Fire isn’t a fun novel—it’s not the Saintly equivalent of a Bourne film, or Daniel Craig’s oh-so-serious 007 in Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace. Any scene that involves Hoppy Uniatz (oh, if you’ve not met Hoppy yet, you’re in for a treat) is guaranteed to raise a smile. The action sequences are told with Charteris’s typical verve and style, giving no quarter to those who think that the English language should be used in as short sentences with as simple words as possible. The threat is credible, but even at the darkest hour, the “old Saintly smile” isn’t far away
.

  The strength of the story can be gauged by the fact it’s been adapted twice—so far—for other media. The Saint Plays with Fire was used for an early Roger Moore episode, with Simon battling neo- rather than real Nazis, but otherwise hardly changing the basic plot (unlike so many in the Moore series). It was one of three stories adapted for BBC Radio 4 in the mid-1990s. And with the growth of neo-Nazi movements around Europe as the Great Twenty-First-Century Recession bites, it’s as relevant today as it was then if anyone’s looking for a Saintly story on which to base a pilot film…

  That’s because it also makes a great introduction to Simon Templar. If this is your first Saint novel, then I envy you the journey of discovery you’re about to embark upon. The year is 1938. The place: England…

  —Paul Simpson

  CHAPTER ONE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT TO A FIRE AND PATRICIA HOLM HEARD OF A “FINANCIER”

  1

  Perhaps the story really began when Simon Templar switched on the radio. At least, before that everything was peaceful, and afterwards, for many memorable days which were to find an unforgettable place in his saga of hairbreadth adventure, there was no peace at all. But Simon Templar’s life always seemed to run that way: his interludes of peace seemed to have something inescapably transient about them, some inborn predestined seed of dynamite that was foredoomed to blast him back into another of those amazing episodes which to him were the ever-recurrent breath of life.

  He was not thinking of trouble or adventure or anything else exciting. He lounged back comfortably in the long-nosed rakish Hirondel, his fingertips barely seeming to caress the wheel as he nursed it over the dark winding roads at a mere whispering sixty, for he was in no hurry. Overhead a bright moon was shining, casting long shadows over the fields and silvering the leaves of passing trees and hedges. His blue eyes probed lazily the white reach of the headlights, and the unruffled calm of his brown face of a mocking buccaneer might have helped anyone to understand why in many places he was better known as “The Saint” than he was by his own name—without giving any clue to the disturbing fact that a mere mention of the Saint in initiated quarters was capable of reducing detectives and convicted criminals alike to a practically indistinguishable state of unprintable incoherence. None of the adventures that had left that almost incredible legend in their trail had left a mark on his face or in his mind: he was simply and serenely enjoying his interlude—even though he must have known, even then, that it could only be an interlude until the next adventure began, because Fate had ordained him for adventure…

  “You know,” he remarked idly, “much as I’ve cursed them in my time, there’s something to be said for these kindergarten English licensing laws. Just think—if it wasn’t for the way our professional grandmothers smack our bottoms and pack us off to bed when the clock strikes, we might still be swilling inferior champagne and deafening ourselves with saxophones in that revolting roadhouse, instead of doing our souls a bit of good with all this.”

  “When you start getting tolerant I’m always afraid you’re sickening for something,” said Patricia Holm sleepily.

  He turned his head to smile at her. She looked very lovely leaning back at his side, with her blue eyes half-closed and her lips softly shaped with humour: he was always discovering her loveliness again with an exciting sense of surprise, as if it had so many facets that it was never twice the same. She was something that was always changing and yet never changed; as much a part of him as his oldest memory, and yet always new; wherever he went and whatever other adventures he found, she was the one unending and exquisite adventure.

  He touched the spun gold of her hair.

  “All right,” he said. “You can have the saxophones.”

  And that was when he switched on the radio.

  The little dial on the dashboard glowed alight out of the darkness, and for a few seconds there was silence while the set warmed up. And then, with an eerie suddenness, there were no saxophones, but a loud brassy voice speaking in French. The set picked it out of the air in the middle of a sentence, flung it gratingly at them as it rose in a snarling crescendo.

  “…to crush them like vermin, to destroy them like rats who would carry their plague germs through our fair land! The blood of a million Frenchmen, dead on the fields of glory, cries out to you to show yourselves worthy of their sacrifice. Rise up and arm yourselves against this peril that threatens you from within; stamp out these cowardly Pacifists, these skulking traitors, these godless anarchists, these alien Jews who are betraying our country for a handful of gold…Sons of France, I call you to arms. Fling yourselves into the fight with a song on your lips and glory in your hearts, for only in the blood and fire of battle will our nation be purified and find once more her true soul!”

  The brassy voice stopped speaking, and there was an instant’s stillness. And then, like a thunderclap another sound burst in—a hoarse frenzied howl, shrill and hideous as the clamour of ten thousand hungry wolves maddened by the smell of blood, an inarticulate animal roar that scarcely seemed as if it could have come from human throats. Wild, savage, throbbing with a horrible bloodlust, it fouled the peaceful night with visions of flame and carnage, of mad mindless mobs, of torture and the crash of guns, of shattered broken buildings and the shattered broken bodies of men and women and children. For a full minute it swelled and pulsed on their ears. And then came the music.

  It was not saxophones. It was brass and drums. Brass like the voice that had been speaking, blasting its brazen rhythm of ecstatic sacrifice in rasping fanfares that lashed clean through the filmy gloss of civilisation to clog the blood with intolerable tension. Drums thudding the maddening pulse-beats of a modern but more potent voodoo, hammering their insensate strum into the brain until the mind was stunned and battered with their merciless insistence. Brass shouting and shrieking its melodic echo of the clash of steel and the scream of human torment. Drums pattering their glib mutter of the rattle of firearms and the rumble of rolling iron. Brass blaring its hypnotic hymn of heroic death. Drums thumping like giant hearts. Brass and drums. Brass and drums. Brass and drums…

  “Turn it off,” said Patricia sharply, abruptly. “Stop it, Simon. It’s horrible!”

  He could feel her shiver.

  “No,” he said. “Listen.”

  He was tense himself, his nerves drawn to threads of quivering steel. The music had done that to him. The music went on, drowning out the incoherent voices until there were no more voices but only the crystallised blare and beat that was one voice for all. Brass and drums. And now into it, in time with it, growing with it, swelling above it, came a new sound—the unmistakable monotonous crunch of booted feet. Left, right, left, right, left. The terrible juggernaut tramp of masses of marching men. Legs swinging like synchronised machinery. Heels falling together steadily, heavily, irresistibly, like leaden pile-drivers pounding the bruised earth…

  The Saint was in one of his queer moments of vision. He went on speaking, his voice curiously low against the background clamour of brass and drums and marching feet.

  “Yes, it’s horrible, but you ought to listen. We ought to remember what hangs over our peace…I’ve heard just the same thing before—one night when I was fiddling with the radio and I caught some Nazi anniversary jamboree in Nuremburg…This is the noise of a world gone mad. This is the climax of two thousand years of progress. This is why philosophers have searched for wisdom, and poets have revealed beauty, and martyrs have died for freedom—so that whole nations that call themselves intelligent human beings can exchange their brains for a brass band, and tax themselves to starvation to buy bombs and battleships, and live in a mental slavery that no physical slave in the old days was ever condemned to. And be so carried away by it that most of them really and honestly believe that they’re proud crusaders building a new and glorious world…I know you can wipe out two thousand years of education with one generation of censorship and propaganda. But what is this sickness that makes one nation a
fter another in Europe want to wipe them out?”

  The bugles blared again and the feet marched against the tapping of the drums, in mocking denial of an answer. And then he touched the switch and the noise ceased.

  Peace came back into the night with a strange softness, as if on tiptoe, fearful of a fresh intrusion. Once more there was only the murmuring hiss of the smooth-running engine and the rustle of the passing air, not even loud enough to blanket the hoot of an indignant owl scared from its perch on an overhanging bough, but it was a peace like waking from an ugly dream, with their ears still haunted by what they had heard before. It was some time before Patricia spoke, though Simon knew she was wide awake now.

  “What was it?” she asked at last, in a voice too even to be wholly natural.

  “That was the Sons of France—Colonel Marteau’s blueshirt gang. You remember, they grew out of the break-up of the old Croix de Feu, only about ten times worse. They’ve been holding a midnight jamboree outside Paris, with torches and bonfires and flags and bands and everything. What we cut in on must have been the grand finale—Colonel Marteau’s pep talk to the assembled cannon fodder.”

  He paused.

  “First Russia, then Italy, then Germany, then Spain,” he said soberly. “And now France is next. There, but for the grace of God, goes the next tin-pot dictator, on his way to make the world a little less fit to live in…There are almost enough of them now—marching mobs of idiots backwards and forwards and building guns and armies because they can’t build anything else, and because it’s the perfect solution to all economic problems so long as it lasts. How can you have peace and progress when fighting is the only gospel they’ve got to preach?…If you wanted to be pessimistic, you could feel that Nature had got the whole idea of progress licked from the start; because as soon as even the dumbest mass of people had just got educated to the futility of modern warfare and the stupidity of nationalism, she could turn round and come back with some strutting monomaniac to sell the old stock all over again under a new trademark and put the whole show back where it started from.”