Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  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 Stephen Leather

  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: 9781477842911

  ISBN-10: 1477842918

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE BUNCO ARTISTS

  THE HAPPY SUICIDE

  THE GOOD MEDICINE

  THE UNESCAPABLE WORD

  THE PERFECT SUCKER

  THE CAREFUL TERRORIST

  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

  Like most young readers back in the sixties and seventies, I was introduced to the Saint through TV—in my case the black-and-white show starring the single-eyebrow-raising, pre-Bond Roger Moore and his very cool white Volvo.

  I bought my first second-hand Saint book from Altrincham Market in South Manchester—The Saint Versus Scotland Yard. I was eight, and I think I was simply too young for the Saint. I made several stabs at reading it but couldn’t get beyond a few pages. The books are, after all, for adults. But back then the choice was either the likes of Enid Blyton or full-blown adult books. There were no wizard schools or junior James Bonds, no lovelorn vampires dating high school girls; there were kids books and there were adult books; the so-called YA (young adult) market had yet to be created.

  I went back to Charteris two years later when I was ten and it all clicked into place. I was hooked. Over the next year I went to Altrincham market every weekend and would exchange a handful of Superman and Batman comics from my treasured collection. Now, financially, I almost certainly did swap the family cow for a handful of beans. The second-hand books have long since gone and the comics have probably increased in value a hundredfold, but I’ve never regretted the trade.

  One of the reasons I love Thanks to the Saint is that it was written in 1956—the year that I was born. Whenever I pick up my copy and see that date, I feel a connection—as I came kicking and screaming into the world, Leslie Charteris was celebrating finishing his latest book and planning the next one. And I love the fact that it’s a collection of short stories. It’s an oft-repeated fact in the publishing business that collections of short stories don’t sell as well as novels. But as a youngster I always preferred the short stories because I could read a complete story before bedtime, and yes, it was the cliché of using a torch under the covers so that my parents wouldn’t know that I was still awake.

  Leslie Charteris took me to a world I never knew existed, though, to be honest, it’s a world that probably never did exist. I didn’t just want to read about the Saint or watch the TV show—I wanted to be the Saint. More than anything. Seriously. I wanted to travel the world and have adventures. I remember designing a stickman logo based on my initials and stamping it on all my books. And as I read my way through all the stories, I tried to work out how I could become the Saint.

  And therein lies the problem—the lack of a backstory. I could never work out how Simon Templar became the Saint. Did he go to university? Did he ever have a real job? Where did he acquire his criminal skills that came in so useful when he was being shot at or chased or having to use his fists to defend himself? And—more importantly to the young me in Manchester who rarely had two pennies to rub together—where did Simon Templar get his money? How did he fund his jet-setting lifestyle?

  I never found out, of course. There isn’t much of a backstory in the novels. The only attempt made to explain the Saint’s beginnings came in the awful Val Kilmer movie of the same name, but that can safely be ignored.

  The Saint came from nowhere, which was very frustrating for the preteen me that was trying to map out his own life. The Saint never had a paper route, never stacked shelves in a supermarket, never worked in a garage, or picked potatoes on a farm. Deciding what subject to study at university was a struggle—what would the Saint have studied? Safecracking, fisticuffs, and seducing beautiful women wasn’t an option. I settled for biochemistry.

  Years later, I realized that not only didn’t the Saint exist, he couldn’t exist. He was as fictional as Harry Potter and Hogwarts. Anyone poking fun at the police in the way that Simon Templar does would be fitted up and behind bars quicker than you could say “Police and Criminal Evidence Act.” And you can’t steal from gangsters, or make them look stupid. Gangsters kill people and intimidate witnesses, and often get away with it.

  Most of the Saint books that I read in the sixties and seventies had been written many years earlier—some of them in the thirties. But they didn’t seem dated then and the stories work just as well now.

  Take this from Thanks to the Saint:

  “Don’t ever get one thing wrong,” he said. “I never robbed anyone who wasn’t a thief or a blackguard, although they might have been clever enough to stay within the law. I’ve killed people too, but never anyone that the world wasn’t a better place without. Sometimes people seem to forget it, since I got to be too well known and had to give up some of the simple methods I used to get away with when I was more anonymous, but my name used to stand for a kind of justice, and I haven’t changed.”

  That is such a cool paragraph, a paragraph that could slot in
to the latest Jack Reacher novel—or indeed any of my thrillers—and not look out of place.

  Some things date, of course. I’m not sure if I’d get away with using a word like “blackguard.” Cars don’t have running boards any more. The Saint fights like an English gentleman, with his fists and never hitting a man when he was down. Simon Templar beds women with gleeful abandon, with no thought of reaching for a condom. He’s from a time without mobile phones, DNA tests, or CCTV.

  I love the fact that Simon Templar smokes—and enjoys smoking. One of my continuing characters—Jack Nightingale—is a big fan of cigarettes and in many ways that’s an homage to the Saint. I vividly remember how the Saint escaped poisonous gas in a cellar by filling a wine bottle with soil and breathing through it. Would it work? My scientific training says probably not, but I have tucked the information away just in case I ever find myself trapped in a basement full of poisonous gas.

  Looking back at my life so far, I just realized that in many ways I did get to get the Saint’s life. I work when I want to work, and, to be honest, writing thrillers isn’t a hardship. I can pretty much fly into any major city and call up someone I know and take them to dinner. I’ve fought in karate tournaments and crawled through the tunnels used by the VC outside Saigon. I drink with cops and villains and spies and movie stars. I’ve been threatened by the police in five countries and been slammed against a nightclub wall by a major drug dealer who thought I was asking him too many questions. I can sail a boat and fly a plane (and have jumped out of a few). I can scuba dive and I’ve fired guns and thrown the odd hand grenade. I’ve sailed halfway around the world on a cargo ship for no other reason than I wanted to. I’ve climbed into cars with strangers and driven off to bars that I’ve never heard off. I’ve been threatened by gangsters and I’ve had a gun pointed at me and a broken glass thrust at my throat. In many ways I’ve had the life I’ve had because of Leslie Charteris and the books that he wrote. Admittedly I’ve never sat alone in a casino and been approached by a beautiful woman who needed my help, but hey, there’s still time.

  —Stephen Leather

  THE BUNCO ARTISTS

  At this point it may be worth reviewing just once more a field of felony in which Simon Templar won quite a few interesting tourneys in his early years, and in which he exploited most effectively the gift of assuming a pose of fabulous and even fatuous innocence (when a situation called for such a disguise) which was once partly responsible for getting him nicknamed “The Saint.”

  I make my excuses to anyone to whom these routines are already old stuff, but the Saint never lost a connoisseur’s and collector’s appreciation of them, and the recapitulation I have in mind may not be entirely dull.

  In the simplest basic version of the “confidence” game, the sucker or mark sees a stranger drop a wallet, and naturally picks it up and restores it to its owner. The owner thanks him and keeps on talking to reveal that he is burdened with the job of distributing a huge charitable fund, or some similar sinecure involving the handling of large sums of money: his problem is to find an absolutely trustworthy assistant, and by a happy coincidence the boob who returned the wallet has just given unsolicited proof of unusual honesty. However, the operator has associates who will demand more substantial evidence that the dupe is a man of means who can be trusted with the virtually blank checks they will be handing him, so it is suggested that he bring to a meeting the largest amount of cash he can raise, to exhibit to them to win their confidence—from which theme the racket derives its name. The fool does so, his money is examined and returned to him, his candidacy is unanimously approved with handshakes, and the session rapidly adjourns on promises that formal agreements will be signed with him in a few days. It is not until after the crooks have departed that the victim discovers that the wad of currency which he got back contains only one bill of large denomination, on the outside, while the bulk of it has been dextrously transformed into single dollars or even rectangles of blank paper of the same size.

  In one of the commonest variations of this plot, the con men pretend to be making fast fortunes from inside information on horse-racing or the stock market. They allow the dimwit to join in their gambles, and before long he has won, on paper, a small fortune. But when settling time comes, another member of the gang, masquerading as a bookie or a broker, refuses to pay off until the mark shows proof that he could have met his losses if the results had gone the opposite way. Again the fathead digs up all the cash he can raise, with the identical consequence.

  Although these tricks have been exposed innumerable times in articles and stories, it is a staggering fact that practitioners of such hoary devices, or closely related mutations of them, are extracting pay dirt with them to this very day.

  Often erroneously referred to as forms of the confidence racket, but actually only its kissing cousins, are what the professionals call bunco jobs. In these the ultimate larceny is hardly less barefaced, but the technical difference is that the “confidence” gimmick is not employed. Nevertheless, they also have one distinguishing trait in common, which is the psychology behind the manipulation of the bait which hooks and lands the poor fish who provides the sharper with his dinner.

  Simon pointed this out to Mrs Sophie Yarmouth with privileged severity.

  “If only respectable people like you weren’t so fundamentally dishonest,” he said, “most of these swindlers would be starved into trying to earn an honest living themselves. But when you’re offered an outrageous bargain, you’re too greedy to stop and think that anything that looks so much like what you’d lightly call a steal is most probably exactly that. You’re so excited by the idea of making a fast buck that you don’t care if the deal involves you in something that’s frankly a little shady. That only makes you feel extra clever, and you’re so fascinated by your own newly discovered business genius that you don’t even have time for the rudimentary precautions that a schoolgirl would take before lending a pal the price of an ice-cream cone.”

  “That isn’t true,” Mrs Yarmouth sniffed. “I was thinking of Howard, and how much it might do for him. And if he hadn’t gone off to play some ridiculous cowboy part on location in Wyoming, and left me alone in Palm Springs, I wouldn’t have been exposed to these crooks and made to suffer for only trying to help his career.”

  Howard Mayne heroically stifled the temptation to take issue with this gem of feminine logic. He could not really help looking heroic about it, for he was blessed with all the facial qualifications of the rugged type of movie star, and his only trouble was that no Hollywood producer had yet been persuaded to give him a leading role.

  “Don’t argue with the man, Aunt Sophie,” he said. “Tell him the whole story, and he may be able to tell you what you can do about it.”

  Mr Copplestone Eade (to give him only one of a variety of fine-sounding names which he used) had made Mrs Yarmouth’s acquaintance without difficulty beside a Palm Springs hotel swimming pool and cemented it with a few chats in the lobby, a casual cocktail, an after-dinner coffee and Benedictine in a restaurant where they had found each other eating alone, and one no less apparently spontaneous lunch together beside the same pool where they had met. It was more than enough for Mr Eade to learn that she had a nephew who was a hopeful but not yet very successful actor, and for him to establish that he had been an executive at a couple of major studios and was now embarking on the independent production of films for television.

  Mr Eade was then in his fifties, with a fairly well preserved figure, gray hair which he wore just enough beyond ordinary length to seem vaguely artistic without being arty, and the kind of strongly lined face that suggests a man of force and experience, either in business or boudoir, or perhaps both. But there was no hint of romance in his approach, for that was not one of Mr Eade’s habitual methods, and besides he had an extremely jealous wife who had too much on him to take chances with.

  Mrs Yarmouth brightly mentioned that he could do worse than consider her nephew for an important
part in his projected series, and Mr Eade said courteously but very non-committally that he would be happy to interview him. He had already ascertained that it would be at least two weeks before Howard Mayne would be through with the small part for which he had suddenly been sent off to Wyoming, while Mrs Yarmouth, who was only a visitor from Vermont, had still never seen the inside of a movie studio and would be returning to Hollywood within a week, so that when Mr Eade, before he left the next Monday, insisted that she must call him directly when she got in town and have lunch at the studio and let him show her how movies were made, it was with a comfortable certainty that she would take him up on it, and that he had a few invaluable days ahead in which to arrange the scenery and props which would be essential to the dénouement of the tabloid drama that he had just nursed through a neat and fertile first act.

  The studio which Mr Eade used for a setting was entirely legitimate, being merely an incorporated agglomeration of real estate and architecture which was in business solely to rent space and facilities to all comers, without interest in their projects or product, so long as they had the requisite credit rating or better still the cash. Mr Copplestone Eade’s credit might have evoked no raves from Dun & Bradstreet, but he always had a working reserve of cash, since bunco is one of the most capitalistic kinds of crime, and his requirements were relatively modest, consisting at this point mainly of office space in an enclave where movies were in fact busily and evidently being made.

  With this entrée he was able to guide Mrs Yarmouth authoritatively around the lot, dispensing interesting lore about the processes which brought a cinematographic masterpiece from the script to the screen—much of which, thanks to some far-off days when he had worked as an extra, was reasonably authentic. He was able to take her on a stage where scenes were being shot, introduce her to a director with whom he had previously scraped an acquaintance with talk of a possible job, present her to a famous star who did not know him from Adam but gave a friendly performance from force of habit, and show her an elaborate set under construction on another stage which he said was being built for his own forthcoming series, all with such casual aplomb that by the end of the tour it would not even have entered her head to doubt that he was exactly what he had said he was.