The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “It is, perhaps, an American secret weapon?”

  “Yes,” Simon said, and the truth awakened in him like a light. “It is. In a way you’ll never understand.”

  “Pah!” Netchideff spat. “You are too stupid to know how stupid you are, like any democratic bourgeois. We are symbols, you and I. I with the gun which I have taken from you, which will kill you—you with nothing but your stupid toy, and your talk of what you call sport.”

  The boat was drifting away with surprising speed. The Saint had to raise his voice to be sure that he would be heard.

  “And we’ll still lick you,” he said, “because you don’t know what that means.”

  “You think I do not understand a sporting chance?”

  How symptomatic, Simon thought, of the psychosis that is Communism to insist on pounding ideological dialectic even at that impossible moment. And yet his own compulsion forced him to fling defiance back. You went down with your colors flying, or some such traditional gesture.

  “Who could interpret it for you?” he retorted. “Karl Marx, or Groucho?”

  “I will give you a sporting chance,” Netchideff shouted. “Cast your feathers, catch a fish—at once—and I will not shoot you!”

  The boat by then was about fifty-five feet away—little more than the minimum range for any class of pistol marksman. But the fly on the Saint’s line traveled half that distance as he raised and lowered his rod and set the fly floating lazily back and forth.

  “And your Uncle Joe Stalin’s mustache,” said the Saint, with the most passionate sincerity he could put into it.

  And his rod swept forward once more like a long graceful extension of his arm, and as the line reached forward ahead of it he released the reserve coils in his left hand and let them shoot out through the guides in pursuit of the sailing leader, and the whole line stretched out and straightened like a long living tongue until at the exact extremity of the cast the fly flicked Netchideff’s face.

  It did not hit the pilot squarely in the left eye, the improbably miniscule target that Simon Templar had extravagantly chosen to aim for. But less than an inch below it, in the soft skin under the lower lid, the little hook stuck and pricked and then as Netchideff involuntarily flinched dug its barb deep and firm into the tender flesh.

  Exquisite agony needled the pilot’s face as the hook set, and lanced blindingly through his vision as the Saint put pressure on the rod. A reflex spasm contracted Netchideff’s forefinger on the trigger of the automatic, but he had already lost sight of its mark in the sharp bright flash of pain, and even as the shot exploded another reflex was jerking both his hands up to clutch at the focal center of his anguish.

  There was a remorseless pulling in the pain, a thin pitiless traction that redoubled his torture at the least resistance and offered surcease only from yielding to the pull and leaning in its direction so as to reduce the agonizing tension. He leaned into the pull until his feet had to follow his tottering balance and he stumbled against something with his shins and the boat rocked and he was suddenly weightless and then the water struck him and closed over him. Somewhere in that flurry he let go the gun.

  But even when he came up again, choking and spluttering, the pain was still under his eye, drawing him steadily towards itself. His clawing hands touched a thread too frail to grasp, yet their own pressure on it only increased the agonizing drag on the embedded hook. But the line would not break: the limberness of the rod was a spring that refused to allow a solid resistance against which the line could have been snapped. There was still no relief except in following that fragile but inexorable pull, half swimming and half floundering in the direction it dictated.

  With a heart-stopping delicacy that no angler has probably been called upon to match before or since, the Saint played him like a fish, until he was close enough to the dock to be knocked cold with an oar.

  9

  In Johnny Kan’s restaurant in San Francisco, Simon Templar said, “You’ll meet her. She should be here in a few minutes. But the Mounties still wanted her for a lot of dull routine work, digging out the roots of Pavan’s distributing organization as far as possible, and that kind of mopping-up bores me. Is everything ready? The gai yung yee chee—”

  “Yes, we have your shark’s fin soup. And gum buoy ngun jon, and the chicken with wing nien sauce. What about the Russian pilot?”

  “I think they’re still trying to decide what sort of protocol to apply to him. When the politicians and diplomats get into the act, I’d rather be included out. So we made a date to celebrate here as soon as she could get away.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “Besides, I had to find out how much you really knew when you let out a hint about fishing that was what finally put me on the track—when I got the point.”

  “You can hear a lot of things through the Chinese grapevine,” Johnny Kan said. “For God’s sake don’t tell anyone, or I’ll never be left alone. It was just a rumor that I hoped might do you some good. When I was a kid there were so many lousy stories written about opium dens run by sinister Orientals that it gives me a special kick to think I did something personally to help smash a dope racket.”

  “Well, we dented it anyhow,” Simon said. “Although I don’t suppose it’ll be long before the ungodly are trying again.”

  “If they ever gave up, what would you do for excitement? Go fishing?”

  The Saint grinned, and lighted a cigarette.

  “I’ve been wondering if I could claim some sort of record. He must have been damn nearly the biggest thing ever landed with a fly rod. He was about seventy inches long and would have weighed easily two hundred and twenty pounds. I was using HCH line with a four-pound-test leader, and by the happiest coincidence I hooked him with a fly called a Red Ant.”

  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 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. Gon
e 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.

  Having spent his formative years in places as far apart as Singapore and England, with substantial travel in between, it should be no surprise that Leslie had a serious case of wanderlust. With a bestseller under his belt, he now had the means to see more of the world.

  Nineteen thirty-six found him in Tenerife, researching another Saint adventure alongside translating the biography of Juan Belmonte, a well-known Spanish matador. Estranged for several months, Leslie and Pauline divorced in 1937. The following year, Leslie married an American, Barbara Meyer, who’d accompanied him to Tenerife. In early 1938, Charteris and his new bride set off in a trailer of his own design and spent eighteen months travelling round America and Canada.

  The Saint in New York had reminded Hollywood of Charteris’s talents, and film rights to the novel were sold prior to publication in 1935. Although the proposed 1935 film production was rejected by the Hays Office for its violent content, RKO’s eventual 1938 production persuaded Charteris to try his luck once more in Hollywood.

  New opportunities had opened up, and throughout the 1940s the Saint appeared not only in books and movies but in a newspaper strip, a comic-book series, and on radio.

  Anyone wishing to adapt the character in any medium found a stern taskmaster in Charteris. He was never completely satisfied, nor was he shy of showing his displeasure. He did, however, ensure that copyright in any Saint adventure belonged to him, even if scripted by another writer—a contractual obligation that he was to insist on throughout his career.

  Charteris was soon spread thin, overseeing movies, comics, newspapers, and radio versions of his creation, and this, along with his self-proclaimed laziness, meant that Saint books were becoming fewer and further between. However, he still enjoyed his creation: in 1941 he indulged himself in a spot of fun by playing the Saint—complete with monocle and moustache—in a photo story in Life magazine.