Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 24

  The automatic in his hand cracked once, a sudden sharp splash of sound in the persuasive flow of his words, and Otto Arnheim, with his hand halfway to his pocket, lurched like a drunken man. A stupid blankness spread across his face, and his knees folded. He went down limply on to the deck, rolled over, and lay still, with his staring eyes turned to the winking stars.

  “—this gun is liable to go off,” said the Saint.

  None of the men moved. They looked down at the motionless body of Otto Arnheim, and kept their hands stretched well above their heads. And the Saint smiled with his lips.

  “I think we shall have to put you away for a while,” he said. “Calvieri, you take some of that life-line and tie your playmates together. Lash ’em by the waists about a yard apart, and then add yourself to the string. Then we’ll all go below, with you leading the way and me holding the other end of the line, and see about rounding up the rest of the herd.”

  “That’s already been done, old boy,” murmured Roger Conway, stepping out on to the deck from the after companion, with a gun in each hand and Steve Murdoch following him.

  FINALE

  “It was quite easy really,” said Roger Conway patronisingly. “When we got Loretta’s radiogram we set off at once, straight for here. We nearly piled your boat up on several rocks on the way, but Orace managed to see us through. Took us about three hours. The Falkenberg passed us about halfway, somewhere in the distance, and we just managed to keep her in sight. Luckily it was getting dark, so we turned out our lights after a bit and crept up as close as we dared. We dropped our hook about a quarter of a mile away, and as soon as we’d given the Falkenberg time to get well settled in we manned the dinghy and paddled over to reconnoitre. Everybody on deck seemed to be pretty busy with the diving business, so we came aboard on the other side and went below. We collected seven specimens altogether on the round-up, including a bloke who seems to have got a broken jaw. Anyway he’s still asleep. The rest of ’em we gagged and tied up and left for inspection. We made a pretty thorough job of it, if I may say so.”

  With which modest summary of his activities, Roger helped himself to one of Vogel’s cigars, threw another to Peter Quentin, and subsided exhausted into the most comfortable armchair.

  Simon Templar regarded them disparagingly.

  “You always were frightfully efficient at clearing up the battlefield after all the troops had gone home,” he remarked appreciatively. “And where did you collect the American Tragedy?”

  “Oh, him? He crashed on to the Corsair while we were having a drink with Orace, earlier in the afternoon,” Peter explained. “Seemed to be all steamed up about something, and flashed a lot of badges and things at us, so we brought him along. He seemed to be very excited about Loretta batting off on this party, so I suppose he’s her husband or something. Are you the co-respondent?”

  Steve Murdoch dug his fists into his coat pockets and glowered round with his square jaw thrust out. His rugged hard-boiled face made the luxurious furnishings of the wheelhouse seem faintly effeminate.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he stated truculently. “And this time I’m stayin’. I guess I owe you something for helpin’ me clean up this job, Saint, an’ maybe it’s good enough to account for those two punches you hung on me. But that’s as far as it goes. I’ll see that Ingerbeck’s hear about what you’ve done, and probably they’ll offer you a share of the reward. If they do, you can go up an’ claim it honest. But for the time being I’ll look after things myself.”

  Simon looked at the ceiling.

  “What a lot of modest violets there are around here,” he sighed. “Of course I wouldn’t dream of trying to steal your curtain, Steve, after all the brilliant work you’ve put in. But what exactly are you going to do?”

  “I’m goin’ to ask one of you boys to go ashore an’ see if you can knock up the gendarmerie. If you can find a telegraph office, you can send one or two cables for me as well. The gendarmes can grab this guy Baudier before he skips, an’ come on down to post a guard on board here. That’ll do till I can start things movin’ from the top. But until I’ve got that guard posted I’m going to sit over the diving gear myself, in case one of you thought he might go down an’ see what he could pick up. I guess you’ve done enough diving for one day, Saint, an’ you’re not goin’ down again while I can stop you. An’ just in case you’re thinkin’ you can put me to sleep again like you did before, let me tell you that if you did get away with anything like that you’d have to shoot me to stop me puttin’ every police organisation in the world on your trail as soon as I woke up. Do you get it?”

  “Oh, I get you, Steve,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “And I did tell Loretta I was tempted to come in for a share of the commission. Although it does sort of go against the grain to earn money honestly. It’s such an anti-climax…”

  He slid off the edge of the table and stood up, stroking his chin meditatively for a moment. And then, with a rueful shrug, he turned and grinned cheerfully at the detective.

  “Still, it’s always a new experience, and I suppose you’ve got to earn your living the same as I have,” he drawled. “We’ll let you have your fun. Peter, be a good boy and toddle along and do what Mr Murdoch asks you to.”

  “Right-ho,” said Peter doubtfully.

  “Roger, you can keep Steve company on his vigil. You’ll have lots of fun telling each other how clever you are, but I’d much rather not listen to you.”

  The ineradicable suspicion darkened again in Murdoch’s eyes.

  “If you think you’re goin’ to talk Loretta round again,” he began growlingly, “let me tell you—”

  “Write it all down and post it to me in the morning, dear old bird,” said the Saint affably and opened the door for them.

  They filed out, Murdoch going last and most reluctantly, as if even then he couldn’t believe that it was safe to let the Saint out of his sight. But Simon pushed him on, and closed the door after them.

  Then he turned round and came towards Loretta.

  She sat in her chair, rather quiet and still, with her lips slightly parted and the hint of mischief hushed for the moment into the changing shadows of her grey eyes. The lines of her slim body fell into a pattern of unconscious grace that made him almost hold his breath in case she moved, although he knew that in moving she would only take on a new beauty. He knew that, when all was said and done, in the last reckoning it was only the queer hunger which she could give a man that had tempted Kurt Vogel into his first and fatal mistake. She had so much that a man dreams about sometimes in the hard lonely trails of outlawry. She had so much that he himself had desired. In the few overcrowded hours since they had been thrown together, they had met in an understanding which no words could cover. They had walked in a garden, and talked together before the doors of death. He had known fear, and peace.

  He stood looking down at her, half smiling. And then, with, a sudden soft breath of laughter, she took both his hands and came up into his arms. “So you don’t like your dotted line?” she said.

  “Maybe it grows on one.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not on you.”

  He thought for a moment. Between them, who had lived so much, a lie had no place. “This job is finished,” he said. “Steve Murdoch’s mounting guard over the diving gear, and I promise I won’t touch him. We can start again. Wash out the dotted line.”

  “And then?”

  “For the future?” he said carelessly. “I shall still have the fun of being chivvied by every policeman in the world. I shall steal and fight, win and lose, go on—didn’t you say it?—wanting so much that I can never have, fighting against life. But I shall live. I shall get into more trouble. I may even fall in love again. I shall end up by being hanged, or shot, or stabbed in the back, or something—if I don’t find a safe berth in prison first. But that’s my life. If I tried to live any other way, I’d feel like a caged eagle.”

  “But tomorrow?”

  He laughed. />
  “I suppose I’ll have to dump Peter and Roger somewhere. But the Corsair’s still ready to go anywhere. She’s not so luxurious as this, but she’s pretty comfortable. And about a hundred years ago I was in the middle of a vacation.”

  His hands were on her shoulders, and she smiled into his eyes.

  “What do either of us know about the day after tomorrow?” she said.

  Nearly an hour later he came out on deck, as half a dozen palpitating gendarmes were scrambling up the gangway. Murdoch had met the leader of them and was struggling to converse with him in a microscopical vocabulary of French delivered in a threatening voice with an atrocious accent. Simon left him to perspire alone, and drew Peter and Roger to one side.

  “We’re going back to the Corsair,” he said.

  “Without the heroine?” protested Peter. “Why, I was only just getting to know her.” The Saint took him by the arm.

  “You’ll be able to improve the acquaintance tomorrow,” he said kindly. “For as long as it takes us to sail back to St Peter Port and get rid of you. On your way.”

  They dropped into the dinghy, and Simon settled himself lazily in the stern, leaving the others to take the oars. He lighted a cigarette and gazed up at the star-dusted sky.

  The lights of the Falkenberg drifted away behind them, and the cool quietness of the night took them in. The voices died away, and there was only the creak of the rowlocks and the gentle plash of the water. The Saint watched his smoke floating in gossamer veils across the stars, and let his mind stray through the lanes of memory. There was the only real knowledge, and all other doubt and disbelief could steal nothing from it. What did either of them know about the day after tomorrow?…

  Roger’s voice broke into his thoughts.

  “Well, that’s goodbye to those millions you promised us,” he remarked glumly, and Simon sat up with the old buccaneering glint wakening in his eyes.

  “Who said goodbye? My dear Roger, we’re not going to bed yet! We’re going to bring the Corsair up closer and unpack those nice new diving suits we’ve got on board. And then one of you drawing-room heroes is coming down with me on a little treasure-hunt. Steve and his gendarmes can mount guard over Vogel’s diving gear all night for all I care. But they don’t know how much boodle is stowed away down there, and what they don’t know about they’ll never miss. We’re going to make sure of our share of the reward tonight,” said the Saint.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Like so many previous Saint adventures the origins of this novel can be found in a magazine, but unlike so many it was not in The Thriller but an American magazine called, surprisingly enough, The American Magazine. Charteris had met the editor, Sumner Blossom, in a New York speakeasy on one of his first trips to the United States. By the mid-1930s Blossom, who as Charteris would later say “had conceived the even more reckless notion that I might bring a new breath of something to American crime fiction with a British approach,” had placed the writer under contract and this was one of several stories he would ultimately write for the magazine. It first appeared in the November 1935 edition under the title The Pirate Saint.

  British readers had to wait until the New Year to get their first opportunity to read the story when it was serialized—under the title Saint Overboard—in the Daily Mirror from January 6 to February 15. This coincided with the first hardback edition, which Hodders published in January with the Doubleday Crime Club publishing an American edition shortly afterwards. By May that year, Hodders were already on their fourth printing of the hardback.

  Sales of the book were good, and continued in subsequent years. By 1952 Hodders were on their nineteenth printing of this title—an average of more than one a year. But it didn’t hit the mark for some reviewers with The Observer’s anonymous contributor suggesting, “If Mr Charteris would allow his Saga hero to join all those other Saints in the hymn, I think his own great energy and undoubted skill might give us something better.”* With sixteen books in eight years though, the Saint and Leslie Charteris had reached the ranks of assured success with new Saint books guaranteed to find a big audience.

  Well, at least in his home bases of England and America. Foreign translations took a while; the French were quick off the mark with La Justice du Saint in 1938 and the Swedes followed in 1942 with Helgonet härjar i havet (though as of a 1957 reprint changed it to Helgonet överbord). A Turkish edition, Kaplan gülüyor, appeared in 1946 whilst Germany and Italy—both countries which had banned Charteris’s books during the war—finally discovered the novel in 1957 and the late 1970s, respectively.

  Adaptations of the book are few and far between; in the early 1940s RKO studios bought the film rights to the novel, however any possible production fell foul of Charteris’s developing displeasure with the studio and consequently no film was ever made. In 1995 BBC Radio adapted the novel for their short series of dramatizations which starred Paul Rhys as the Saint and were first aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1995.

  * * *

  *The Observer, 8 March 1936

  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 earlier. 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 i
nspired 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?