The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 18

  It was an hour and a half before the telephone rang again, and he heard the voice of his henchman in Biloxi.

  “I think I got all you wanted, Dibs.”

  “What is it?”

  “The dame has a newsstand-shop here in town. Had it five years. She lives with a married sister. But right now she’s away. She went to California to have her eyes operated on, account of she’s blind. Seems someone met her in the shop and offered to pick up the tab, but nobody knows who he was. Nobody else saw him, and she couldn’t tell anything about him, account of being blind. A mystery man.”

  “Do they know where she went in California?”

  “Santa Barbara. I got the name of the doctor. I’ll spell it out for you—”

  Sholto wrote it down, grunted his thanks, and hung up. He took out another cigar, and this time he carefully cut off the end.

  “That’s all we need,” he said, and repeated what his correspondent had told him.

  “Didn’t he get the address where she is?” asked the lieutenant.

  “What’s that matter?” Sholto snarled. “If the doc clams up, we ask all the hospitals. There can’t be so many in Santa Barbara.” He was not to know that the Saint had already foreseen and forestalled this. “Get that crummy pee eye back here.”

  Simon Templar entered with the air of thinly disguised nervous expectancy proper to his part, and Sholto wasted no time crushing him.

  “I thought your proposition over, bub, and it’s no sale.”

  “You mean you don’t want to know what Mr Rood said?”

  “I know what he said. You ain’t dumb enough to think you could get away with a record of him turning this guy Simons down, so I guess he says okay. I don’t pay ten grand to hear that.”

  “But you’d like to find Mrs Yarrow, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’ll find her if I want to, and cheaper than you can do it.”

  “But after all, Dibs,” whined the Saint aggrievedly, “if I hadn’t—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Sholto said. “I do owe you something for the tip-off. And nobody ever said I welshed on nothing reasonable. I don’t have no obligation, but I’ll pay you what I think the tape I hear is worth.”

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of green paper bound with a gold clip. He detached two bills from the top and held them out, and the Saint looked down and saw that the denominations were a thousand dollars each.

  “Take it,” Sholto rasped, “before I change my mind.”

  Simon swallowed and took it.

  Then he turned to the second lieutenant, who had followed him back in, and produced a sheet from a score pad.

  “And you owe me eighty-five dollars and ten cents, Earl,” he said.

  “Pay him,” Sholto said. “And throw him out.”

  He stood at the window and watched the Saint’s car going down the drive, and then turned briskly as the second lieutenant returned.

  “Call the airport, Earl,” he ordered. “Get us on the next plane to New York. We’ll all go.”

  “What about the dame in California?” asked the first lieutenant.

  “We’ll have plenty of time for her. She’s bound to be in the hospital for some time yet. But Rood won’t wait. I could pass the word to the big boys, but I think we’ll take care of him ourselves.” Sholto took out the spool of tape and weighed it meditatively in his hand again. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see ’em coming to us with their hats in their hands when they hear what I’ve done for ’em.”

  With no inkling of the role that had been chosen for him in Dibs Sholto’s pursuit of his ambitions, Mr Carlton Rood returned to his apartment in the East Sixties that night after an excellent dinner, feeling very comfortably contented with the perspective of his life. His literary endeavor had been completed and safely deposited, and that very afternoon he had dropped the first strategically aimed word about it, in a quarter from which he knew the grapevine would rapidly circulate it to all interested ears. He felt a mild glow of gratitude to Mr Simons for the suggestion, and benevolently hoped that something good would come of the business they had discussed.

  As he reached the doorway, two men got out of a car parked nearby and came quickly towards him. Mr Rood saw them out of the corner of his eye, and suddenly realized that what he had glimpsed of one of them was familiar. He turned, and recognized a valued client.

  “Why, Joseph!” he exclaimed. “This is a surprise—”

  “I bet it is, you lousy squealer,” Sholto said, and personally fired the first shot of a fusillade.

  “You see,” said the Saint tranquilly, “the law of the land says that if there’s any reasonable doubt about a man’s guilt, he must be acquitted. The law of the underworld is just the opposite . Or, the other side of the fence, if there’s any serious doubt about a man’s reliability, they make sure he can’t possibly worry them any more. I thought that since Carlton Rood had worked so hard to protect the tribe that lives by that philosophy, he might like to have it tried on himself.”

  “I’m sure he loved it,” said his friend the ophthalmologist. “But what about this sequel?”

  He indicated the newspaper they had been looking at, which reported the finding of a body identified as that of Joseph (“Dibs”) Sholto, fatally laden with lead, in a garbage dump somewhere in Jersey.

  “When the notes that Rood left reached the Department of Justice and various district attorneys, and the heat started, sizzling all over, the big boys naturally blamed Sholto for starting the whole thing. And out of his own bailiwick, too. So they had to teach him a permanent lesson. The ordinary dull due process of Law might have taken care of him anyway, with the help of Rood’s contribution, but they saved it the trouble. I can’t say I was so sure of that, but I was hoping for it. Let’s call it a bonus.”

  “I’d be sorry for Machiavelli,” said the doctor, “if the poor naive man had ever come up against you.”

  Simon Templar grinned gently, and his friend glanced at his watch and stood up.

  “If you can come to the nursing home now,” he said, “Mrs Yarrow was most anxious that if we have succeeded, the first person she sees would be you…”

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  As with many other books from this phase in the career of Leslie Charteris and Simon Templar, the stories within were first published in The Saint Detective Magazine prior to book publication. Though for the sake of clarity it should be noted that “The Water Merchant” was published in June 1959, by which time the magazine had been renamed The Saint Mystery Magazine.

  The book was first published in December 1959 by the Doubleday Crime Club and almost two years later, on 12 October 1961 by his regular UK publisher, Hodder & Stoughton.

  Despite the phenomenal popularity of the Roger Moore series of The Saint, this book has only ever been translated into two additional languages; a French edition, Le Saint à la rescousse appeared in 1963 and the following year saw a Dutch translation, Gered door de Saint.

  “The Element of Doubt” was the eighth episode adapted for Roger Moore’s version of The Saint, first airing on Sunday, 18 November 1962. “The Gentle Ladies” was the fifteenth episode and was first broadcast on Sunday, 10 February 1963, whilst “The Ever-Loving Spouse” made it on screen the following week.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”

  —Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview

  Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.

  He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years ear
lier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.

  “I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1

  One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.

  When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.

  He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.

  He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.

  When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3

  X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.

  These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4

  Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?

  “I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5

  However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6

  The paper launched in early 1929, and Leslie’s first work, “The Story of a Dead Man,” featuring Jimmy Traill, appeared in issue 4 (published on 2 March 1929). That was followed just over a month later with “The Secret of Beacon Inn,” starring Rameses “Pip” Smith. At the same time, Leslie finished writing another non-Saint novel, Daredevil, which would be published in late 1929. Storm Arden was the hero; more notably, the book saw the first introduction of a Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Claud Eustace Teal.

  The Saint returned in the thirteenth issue of The Thriller. The byline proclaimed that the tale was “A Thrilling Complete Story of the Underworld”; the title was “The Five Kings,” and it actually featured Four Kings and a Joker. Simon Templar, of course, was the Joker.

  Charteris spent the rest of 1929 telling the adventures of the Five Kings in five subsequent The Thriller stories. “It was very hard work, for the pay was lousy, but Monty Haydon was a brilliant and stimulating editor, full of ideas. While he didn’t actually help shape the Saint as a character, he did suggest story lines. He would take me out to lunch and say, ‘What are you going to write about next?’ I’d often say I was damned if I knew. And Monty would say, ‘Well, I was reading something the other day…’ He had a fund of ideas and we would talk them over, and then I would go away and write a story. He was a great creative editor.”7

  Charteris would have one more attempt at writing about a hero other than Simon Templar, in three novelettes published in The Thriller in early 1930, but he swiftly returned to the Saint. This was partly due to his self-confessed laziness—he wanted to write more stories for The Thriller and other magazines, and creating a new hero for every story was hard work—but mainly due to feedback from Monty Haydon. It seemed people wanted to read more adventures of the Saint…

  Charteris would contribute over forty stories to The Thriller throughout the 1930s. Shortly after their debut, he persuaded publisher Hodder & Stoughton that if he collected some of these stories and rewrote them a little, they could publish them as a Saint book. Enter the Saint was first published in August 1930, and the reaction was good enough for the publishers to bring out another collection. And another…

  Of the twenty Saint books published in the 1930s, almost all have their origins in those magazine stories.

  Why was the Saint so popular throughout the decade? Aside from the charm and ability of Charteris’s storytelling, the stories, particularly those published in the first half of the ’30s, are full of energy and joie de vivre. With economic depression rampant throughout the period, the public at large seemed to want some escapism.

  And Simon Templar’s appeal was wide-ranging: he wasn’t an upper-class hero like so many of the period. With no obvious background and no attachment to the Old School Tie, no friends in high places who could provide a get-out-of-jail-free card, the Saint was uniquely classless. Not unlike his creator.

  Throughout Leslie’s formative years, his heritage had been an issue. In his early days in Singapore, during his time at school, at Cambridge University or even just in everyday life, he couldn’t avoid the fact that for many people his mixed parentage was a problem. He would later tell a story of how he was chased up the road by a stick-waving typical English gent who took offence to his daughter being escorted around town by a foreigner.

>   Like the Saint, he was an outsider. And although he had spent a significant portion of his formative years in England, he couldn’t settle.

  As a young boy he had read of an America “peopled largely by Indians, and characters in fringed buckskin jackets who fought nobly against them. I spent a great deal of time day-dreaming about a visit to this prodigious and exciting country.”8

  It was time to realise this wish. Charteris and his first wife, Pauline, whom he’d met in London when they were both teenagers and married in 1931, set sail for the States in late 1932; the Saint had already made his debut in America courtesy of the publisher Doubleday. Charteris and his wife found a New York still experiencing the tail end of Prohibition, and times were tough at first. Despite sales to The American Magazine and others, it wasn’t until a chance meeting with writer turned Hollywood executive Bartlett McCormack in their favourite speakeasy that Charteris’s career stepped up a gear.

  Soon Charteris was in Hollywood, working on what would become the 1933 movie Midnight Club. However, Hollywood’s treatment of writers wasn’t to Charteris’s taste, and he began to yearn for home. Within a few months, he returned to the UK and began writing more Saint stories for Monty Haydon and Bill McElroy.

  He also rewrote a story he’d sketched out whilst in the States, a version of which had been published in The American Magazine in September 1934. This new novel, The Saint in New York, published in 1935, was a significant advance for the Saint and Leslie Charteris. Gone were the high jinks and the badinage. The youthful exuberance evident in the Saint’s early adventures had evolved into something a little darker, a little more hard-boiled. It was the next stage in development for the author and his creation, and readers loved it. It became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.