The Saint on the Spanish Main (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 Jack Hayes

  Introduction to “Nassau: The Arrow of God” © 1966 Leslie Charteris

  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: 9781477842898

  ISBN-10: 1477842896

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Audrey, with all my love

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  BIMINI: THE EFFETE ANGLER

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  NASSAU: THE ARROW OF GOD

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  JAMAICA: THE BLACK COMMISSAR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PUERTO RICO: THE UNKIND PHILANTHROPIST

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  THE VIRGIN ISLANDS: THE OLD TREASURE STORY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  HAITI: THE QUESTING TYCOON

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  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

  Before there was Ian Fleming, there was Leslie Charteris; before James Bond, Simon Templar.

  Charteris took the familiar character of Robin Hood and gave him a modern update. The Saint—a loveable thief who gives the proceeds of his exploits to good causes—made his first appearance in Meet—the Tiger! in 1928. He was an instant hit. Nearly one hundred books followed, as well as radio, TV, and movie adaptations.

  The hallmarks of Simon Templar were his debonair style, his well-tailored suits, his mischievous sense of humour and his complex morality.

  He set a gold standard against which future British heroes were measured, and his affectations can be found in characters from The Avengers’ John Steed to Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner to Pierce Brosnan’s Remington Steele. Even Edward Woodward’s The Equalizer was essentially a modern reinterpretation of the Saint, set in New York with American characters.

  Leslie Charteris’s creation has also impacted the lives of each of these British hard men (as well as countless others) more directly. Patrick McGoohan was the original choice to play Simon Templar before producers settled on Roger Moore. Pierce Brosnan was mooted for a revived series that never became more than gossip in tabloid papers in the mid-1980s. And Edward Woodward played the eventual victim in a TV episode called “The Persistent Patriots.”

  A key difference between the Saint and many of his forbears is his dark side; Simon Templar is a man willing to kill if he believes it justified. There is no moral qualm or angst. He even on occasion refers bluntly to his plans to murder a particular person when he feels it will save innocent lives.

  For modern readers, many of these traits will seem less shocking than they may have when the books were first published.

  At the time, heroes were expected to behave with chivalry. The Saint ushered in a new breed—characters who reflected a morality changed by the horrors of world wars and increased acknowledgement of organised crime.

  My own journey with the Saint has also been a long-lasting symbiosis. My first experience, aged barely five, were the repeats of Ian Ogilvy’s portrayal of Simon Templar as he dashed around Europe in his Jaguar XJS.

  At the risk of committing heresy among Saint fans, his image imprinted upon my young mind not only as the physical embodiment of Templar—but also as the archetypal hero.

  It was only in my midtwenties that I realised the extreme power of the effect. Ogilvy’s name had seeped into my consciousness so heavily that as an adult, when the craze for reading books such as Harry Potter was at its height, I was drawn to buy Ogilvy’s series of children’s books simply on the strength of his name.

  Reinvigorated by the memory of swashbuckling heroes, I became interested in honing my skills as an author. Naturally, that meant turning to masters of the trade to understand the progression of the craft.

  For the first time, I set out to read the Charteris books with adult eyes.

  It wasn’t easy.

  The Saint was out of vogue and out of print. I spent an entire summer trawling specialist bookstores around Covent Garden and Charing Cross Road, scouring the secondhand collections for dog-eared paperbacks.

  One had a section specifically for the Saint. It was a tattered cardboard box, just outside the front door on the pavement, with a badly written paper sign sticking out at a jaunty angle: “£1.” No other author in this shop that dealt only in crime novels had suffered such an ignominious fate.

  I eagerly scooped up the books. Their pages were yellow, their covers waxy and faintly smelling of cigarette smoke. Despite their appearance, their patina indicated they had been well read and their contents,
at one time, well loved.

  The hero I read once again worked his magic and became the basis of a new character in my own series of books. His name even bore an obvious connection to his precursor: Simon Ritter.

  Ritter is the German word for “knight.”

  What better moniker could there be for a man who, in spirit, was the progeny of a Templar?

  One of the advantages of Leslie Charteris as an author is that his writing was fuelled by experience. Born in Singapore to an English mother and a Chinese father who was a distant descendant of the Shang dynasty emperors, he showed a buccaneering flair from a young age. Early paperbacks contain a biography that lists his many jobs, including bus driver, barman, gold prospector, pearl diver, and circus roustabout.

  He travelled to the United States in 1932, once he’d saved enough money to relocate to a land he saw as filled with promise for the adventurous. Here, his brushes with history continued. He worked as a scriptwriter for Paramount. In 1936, he travelled on the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg airship (the zeppelin’s destruction occurred a year later). He also became one of the earliest members of the high-IQ society Mensa.

  Even his naturalisation as an American was a tale worthy of the Saint. Charteris was denied citizenship because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred those with more than 50 per cent Chinese ancestry from undertaking the process. An act of Congress was passed to personally grant him citizenship.

  We live in an era where Hollywood reboots franchises every decade to bring them “up to date.” Through all of these, the Saint remains the same: gritty, wise, and ever vigilant.

  Every generation needs a hero—and Simon Templar has once again picked up the mantle.

  —Jack Hayes

  BIMINI: THE EFFETE ANGLER

  1

  It has been said by certain skeptics that there are already more than enough stories of Simon Templar, and that each new one added to his saga only adds to the incredibility of the rest, because it is clearly impossible that any one man in a finite lifetime should have been able to find so many adventures.

  Such persons only reveal their own failure to have grasped one of the first laws of adventure, which can only be stated quite platitudinously: adventures happen to the adventurous.

  In the beginning, of course, Simon Templar had sought for it far and wide, and luck or his destiny had lent a generous hand to the finding of it. But as the tally of his adventures added up, and the name of the Saint, as he called himself, became better known, and the legends about him were swollen by extravagant newspaper headlines and even more fantastic whisperings in the underworld, and finally his real name and likeness became familiar to inevitably widening circles, so the clues to adventure that came his way multiplied. For not only were there those in trouble who sought him out for help that the Law could not give, but there were evildoers with no fear of the Law who feared the day when some mischance might bring the Saint across their path. So that he might be anywhere, quite innocently and unsuspectingly, in a vicinity where some well-hidden wickedness was being hatched, but no guilty conscience could possibly believe that the Saint’s appearance on the scene could be an accident, and therefore the ungodly, upon merely hearing his name or glimpsing a tanned piratical profile which was not hard to identify with photographs that had been published several times in eye-catching conjunction with stories not easily forgotten, would credit him with knowledge which he did not have, and would be jolted into indiscretions that they would never have committed at the name of Smith or the sight of any ordinary face. In their anxiety to redouble their camouflage or to destroy him, they actually brought themselves to his attention. Thus the proliferation of his adventures tended to perpetuate itself in a kind of chain reaction. By the time of which I am now writing, he no longer had to seek adventure: it found him.

  This story is as good an example as I can think of.

  Don Mucklow met him in Florida at the Miami airport because they had shared more than one adventure in the Caribbean in years gone by.

  “Well, what brings you here this time, Saint?”

  “Nothing in particular. I just felt in the mood for some winter sunshine, so I thought I’d go island-hopping and see what cooked.”

  “God, you have a tough life.”

  Don was now married, a father, and the overworked manager of a boatyard and yacht basin.

  “So it’s back to the old Spanish Main again, eh?” Don said. “There must be something in that pirate tradition that you can’t get away from. Which of the islands are you planning to raise hell on first?”

  “I haven’t even decided that yet. I may end up throwing darts at a map. Anyway, we’ve got to spend at least one night out on this town before I take off.”

  “You want to go to the Rod and Reel with me tonight?”

  “What’s on?”

  “The usual Wednesday night dinner. And on this distinguished occasion, the presentation to Don Mucklow of his badge for catching the world’s record dolphin for three-thread line—thirty-seven and a half beautiful pounds of it, even on the official certified scale.”

  Simon turned and beamed at him.

  “Why, you cagey old son of a gun,” he said affectionately. “Congratulations! How did you ever manage to stuff all those sinkers down its throat without anyone seeing you?”

  “I just live right. But I certainly had my fingers crossed till the IGFA approved it.”

  “Now who has the tough life? What I wouldn’t give to tie into a really important fish!”

  “Why don’t you stick around and try? I’ll fix you up with a good skipper.”

  “Don’t tempt me. What other entertainment is the Rod and Reel offering, besides the privilege of seeing Mucklow look smug, like an Eagle Scout with his new badge?”

  “There’s a talk by Walton Smith on some new discoveries they’ve made about the migration of tuna.”

  “That should be most educational.”

  “And then, just to please people like you, we’re having a girl called Lorelei, who takes her clothes off in a fish bowl.”

  “Now you’re starting to sell it,” said the Saint.

  So by seven o’clock that evening they were part of a convivial mob of members and guests at the bar of the exclusive Rod and Reel Club on Hibiscus Island. Don, who knew everybody, contrived to elude conversational ambushes until he had attained the prime objective of getting their first drink order filled; then, when they each had a tall Peter Dawson in hand, he reached into the milling crowd and pulled out a short broad-shouldered man with ginger hair surrounding a bald spot like a tonsure.

  “Patsy, who let you in here?”

  “I was brought by a member an’ a foine gentleman,” said the other with dignity. “Although judgin’ by yourself as a member, that might sound like two different people.”

  “I’ve a friend here who’s looking for you, Patsy.”

  “Indade?”

  “This is Captain O’Kevin,” Don said to the Saint. “Patsy, meet Simon Templar.”

  O’Kevin shook hands with a strong bony grip. His pug-nosed face was a mosaic of freckles and red sunburn that would never blend into an even brown, out of which his faded green eyes twinkled up from a mass of creases.

  “That sounds like a name I should be knowin’. Wait—this couldn’t be the fellow they call the Saint?”

  “That’s him,” Don said. “And I just hope you haven’t got any skeletons in your locker.”

  “Fortunately, I earn an honest livin’ instid of operatin’ a thievin’ boatyard.” O’Kevin’s bright little eyes searched Simon’s face more interestedly. “Now why would the Saint be trailin’ a poor hard-workin’ charter-boat captain, for the Lard’s sake?”

  “Because he wants to go fishing,” Don said. “He isn’t satisfied with being the most successful buccaneer since Captain Kidd, he wants to try and take my only record away from me. So I said I’d put him on to a good skipper. Naturally I picked you, because your customers never catch any
thing. You can give him a nice boat ride, and I won’t have a thing to worry about.”

  “Sure, an’ ’twould be a pleasure to foind him something bigger than that overgrown mullet ye’re boastin’ about. How long would ye be stayin’ down here, Mr Templar?”

  “Not more than a day or two,” said the Saint.

  “That’s too bad. I’ve a party waitin’ for me in Bimini right now, an’ I’m leavin’ first thing in the marnin’. I’ll be gone three or four days.”

  “What’s your hurry, Simon?” Don protested. “Those islands have been out there in the Caribbean a long time. They won’t run away.”

  “Where are ye makin’ for, Mr Templar?” O’Kevin asked.

  Simon grinned. Only a few hours ago he had talked about throwing darts at a map. Now a dart had been thrown for him. It was one of those utterly random choices that appealed to his gambling instinct.

  “I’ve just this minute decided,” he said. “I’m going to Bimini too.”

  “Then I’ll most likely run into ye over there. It’s been nice ’meetin’ ye, sorr, even though somebody should o’ warned ye about the company ye’re keepin’.”

  He shook hands again, winked amiably at Don, and was swept aside by an eddy of thirsty newcomers.

  “No kidding,” Don told the Saint. “Patsy’s one of the best fishing captains around here.”

  “And you knew very well he was booked before you introduced me.”

  “I did not. Any more than I knew you were going to Bimini. What on earth made you suddenly decide that?”

  “It was the first island I’d heard mentioned since I got here,” said the Saint cheerfully. “So I let that be an omen. I had to pick one of ’em eventually, anyway. A dear old aunt of mine ruined a lot of bookies picking racehorses by a similar system.”

  “Well, Patsy isn’t the only good skipper. Let’s see who else is here tonight.”

  They met several dozens of other men, in an accelerating kaleidoscope whose successive patterns soon overtaxed even Simon Templar’s remarkable memory, in the good-humoured turmoil of a typical stag party. But at the end of the meeting, after the dinner and the presentation of badges and the lecture and the artistic performance of the girl called Lorelei (who, I regret to inform those readers who were only staying with us for that bit, has nothing further to do with this story), the face which had impressed itself on him most sharply perhaps only because it was the first introduction of the evening sorted itself out of the dispersing crowd and approached him again.