“May I write a short note?”
“I remind you,” said the Prince, “that you remain here as a guarantee of the good behaviour of your friends.”
“I agree to that,” said Norman. “Give me a pen and paper, Roger.”
And once again Marius tried to intervene.
“Highness, you are trusting them too far! This can only be a treachery. If they meant what they said, why should there be any need for all this—”
“It is their way, Marius,” said the Prince calmly. “I admit that it is strange. But no matter. You should be a more thorough psychologist, my friend. After what you have seen of them can you believe that two of them would leave the third to face his fate alone while they themselves escaped? It is absurd!”
Norman Kent had scribbled one line. He blotted it carefully, and folded the sheet.
“And an envelope, Roger.”
He placed the sheet inside and stuck down the flap.
Then he held out his hand to Roger Conway.
“Good luck, Roger,” he said. “Be good.”
“All the best, Norman, old man.”
They gripped.
And Simon was speaking to the Prince.
“It seems,” said Simon, “that this is au revoir, Your Highness!”
The Prince made one of his exquisitely courteous gestures.
“I trust,” he replied, “that it is not adieu. I hope to meet you again in better days.”
Then the Saint looked at Marius, and for a long time he held the giant’s eyes. And he gave Marius a different good-bye.
“You, also,” said the Saint slowly, “I shall meet again.”
But, behind the Saint, Norman Kent laughed, and the Saint turned.
Norman stretched out one hand, and the Saint took it in a firm grasp. And Norman’s other hand offered the letter.
“Put this in your pocket, Simon, and give me your word not to open it for four hours. When you’ve read it, you’ll know where you’ll see me again. I’ll be waiting for you. And don’t worry. Everything is safe with me. Good hunting, Saint!”
“Very good hunting to you, Norman.”
Norman Kent smiled.
“I think it will be a good run,” he said.
So Simon Templar went to his lady.
Norman saw Roger and Simon pass through the window and turn to look back at him as they reached the garden, and he smiled again, and waved them a gay good-bye. A moment afterwards he heard the rising drone of the Hirondel and the soft crunching of tyres down the drive.
He caught one last glimpse of them as the car turned into the road—the Saint at the wheel, with one arm about Patricia’s shoulders, and Roger Conway in the back, with one of the Prince’s men riding on the running-board beside him. That, of course, would be to give them a passage through the guards at the cross-road…
And then they were gone.
Norman sat down on the sofa, feeling curiously weak. His leg was numb with pain. He indicated decanter, siphon, glasses, and cigarette-box with a wave of his automatic.
“Make yourselves at home, gentlemen,” he invited. “And pass me something on your way. I’m afraid I can’t move. You ought to stop your men using soft-nosed bullets, Marius—they’re dirty things.”
It was the Prince who officiated with the whisky and lighted Norman a cigarette.
“War is a ruthless thing,” said the Prince. “As a man I like and admire you. But as what I am, because you are against my country and myself, if I thought you were attempting to trick me I should kill you without compunction—like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Even the fact you once helped to save my life could not extenuate your offence.”
“Do you think I’m a fool?” asked Norman, rather tiredly.
He sipped his drink, and the hands of the clock crawled round.
Five minutes.
Ten.
Fifteen.
The Prince sat in an armchair, his legs elegantly crossed with a proper regard for the knife-edge crease in his trousers. In one hand he held a glass; with the other he placidly smoked a cigarette through a long holder.
Marius paced the room like a caged lion. From time to time he glanced at Norman with venom and suspicion in his slitted gaze, and seemed about to say something, but each time he checked himself and resumed his impatient promenade—until the Prince stopped him with a languid wave of his cigarette-holder.
“My dear Marius, your restlessness disturbs me. For Heaven’s sake practise some self-control.”
“But, Highness—”
“Marius, you repeat yourself. Repetition is a tedious vice.”
Then Marius sat down.
The Prince delicately stifled a yawn.
Harding, on the floor, groaned, and roused as if from a deep sleep. Norman leaned over and helped him to come to a sitting position. The youngster opened his eyes slowly, rubbing a tender jaw muzzily. He would never know how the Saint had hated having to strike that blow.
Norman allowed him to take in the situation as best he could. And he gave him a good look at the automatic.
“Where are the others?” asked Harding hazily.
“They’ve gone,” said Norman.
In short, compact sentences he explained what had happened.
Then he addressed a question to the Prince.
“What is Captain Harding’s position in this affair?”
“If he does not allow his sense of duty to override his discretion,” answered the Prince carelessly, “we are no longer interested in him.”
Harding scrambled unsteadily to his feet.
“But I’m damned well interested in you!” he retorted. And he turned to Norman with a dazed and desperate entreaty. “Kent—as an Englishman—you’re not going to let these swabs—”
“You’ll see in seven minutes,” said Norman calmly.
Harding wavered before the level automatic in Norman’s hand. He cursed, raved impotently, almost sobbed.
“You fool! You fool! Oh, damn you!…Haven’t you any decency? Can’t you see—”
Norman never moved, but his face was very white. Those few minutes were the worst he had ever spent. His leg was throbbing dreadfully. And Harding swore and implored, argued, pleaded, fumed, begged almost on his knees, lashed Norman Kent with words of searing scorn…
Five minutes to go.
Four…three…two…
One minute to go.
The Prince glanced at the gold watch on his wrist, and extracted the stub of a cigarette from his long holder with fastidious fingers.
“The time is nearly up,” he murmured gently.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” groaned Harding. “Think, Kent, you worm! You miserable—abject—crawling—coward! Give me a gun and let me fight—”
“There’s no need to fight,” said Norman Kent.
He put one hand to his pocket, and for a second he thought that Harding would chance the automatic and leap at his throat. He held up the crumpled sheets, and both the Prince and Marius rose—the Prince with polished and unhurried elegance, and Marius like an unleashed fiend.
Somehow Norman Kent was struggling to his feet again. He was very pale, and the fire in his eyes burned with a feverish fierceness. His wounded leg was simply the deadened source of a thousand twinges of torment that shot up the whole of his side at the least movement, like long, jagged needles. But he had a detached stubborn determination to face the end on his feet.
“The papers I promised you!”
He pushed them towards Marius, and the giant grabbed them with enormous, greedy hands.
And then Norman was holding out his gun, butt foremost, towards Harding. He spoke in tense, swift command.
“Through the window and down the garden, Harding! Take the Saint’s motor-boat. It’s moored at the end of the lawn. The two men on the river shouldn’t stop you—”
“Highness!”
It was Marius’s voice, shrill and savage. The giant’s face was hideously contorted.
Norm
an thrust Harding behind him, covering his retreat to the window.
“Get out!” he snarled. “There’s nothing for you to wait for now…Well, Marius?”
The Prince’s voice slashed in with a deadly smoothness: “Those are not Vargan’s papers, Marius?”
“An absurd letter—to this man himself—from one of his friends!”
“So!”
The word fell into the room with the sleek crispness of a drop of white-hot metal. Yet the Prince could never have been posed more gracefully, nor could his face have ever been more serene.
“You tricked me, after all!”
“Those are the papers I promised you,” said Norman coolly.
“He must have the real papers still, Highness!” babbled Marius. “I was watching him—he had no chance to give them to his friends…”
“That’s where you’re wrong!”
Norman spoke very, very quietly, almost in a whisper, but the whisper held a ring of triumph like a trumpet call. The blaze in his dark eyes was not of this world.
“When Harding grabbed Templar’s gun—you remember, Marius?—I had the papers in my hands. I put them in Templar’s pocket. He never knew what I did. I hardly knew myself. I did it almost without thinking. It was a sheer blind inspiration—the only way to spoof the lot of you and get my friends away. And it worked! I beat you…”
He heard a sound behind him, and looked round. Harding had started—he was racing down the lawn, bent low to the ground like a greyhound. Perhaps there were silenced guns plopping at him from all round the house, but they could not be heard, and he must have been untouched, for he ran on without a false step, swerving and zigzagging like a snipe.
A smile touched Norman’s lips. He didn’t mind being left alone now that his work was done. And he knew that Harding could not have stayed. Harding also had work to do. He had to find help—to deal with Marius and intercept Simon Templar and the precious papers. But Norman smiled, because he was sure the Saint wouldn’t be intercepted. Still, he liked the mettle of that fair-haired youngster…
His leg hurt like blazes.
But the Saint had never guessed the impossible thing. That had been Norman Kent’s one fear, that the Saint would suspect and refuse to leave him. But Norman’s first success, when he had tricked Harding with the offer of the papers, had won the Saint’s faith, as it had to win it. And Simon had gone, and Patricia with him. It was enough.
And in the fullness of time Simon would find the papers, and he would open the letter and read the one line that was written there. And that line Norman had already spoken, but no one had understood.
“Nothing is won without sacrifice.”
Norman turned again, and saw the automatic in Marius’s hand. There was something in the way the gun was held, something in the face behind it, that told him that this man did not miss. And the gun was not aimed at Norman, but beyond him, at the flying figure that was nearing the motor-boat at the end of the lawn.
That gentle far-away smile was still on Norman Kent’s lips as he took two quick hops backwards and to one side, so that his body was between Marius and the window.
He knew that Marius, blind, raging mad with fury, would not relax his pressure on the trigger because Norman Kent was standing directly in his line of fire, but Norman didn’t care. It made no difference to him. Marius, or the Prince, would certainly have shot him sooner or later. Probably he deserved it. He had deliberately cheated, knowing the price of the revoke. He thought no more of himself. But an extra second or two ought to give Harding time to reach comparative safety in the motor-boat.
Norman Kent wasn’t afraid. He was smiling.
It was a strange way to come to the end of everything, like that, in that quiet bungalow by the peaceful Thames, with the first mists of the evening coming up from the river like tired clouds drifted down from Heaven, and the light softening over the cool, quiet garden. That place had seen so much of their enjoyment, so much comradeship and careless laughter. They had been lovely and pleasant in their lives…He wished his leg wasn’t giving him such hell. But that would be over soon. And there must be many worse ways of saying farewell to so full a life. It was something to have heard the sound of the trumpet. And the game would go on. It seemed as if the shadows of the peaceful evening outside were the foreshadowings of a great peace over all the world.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The Saint Closes the Case occupies a peculiar position in the Saint canon. The novel evolved from two stories first published in The Thriller, a weekly magazine that Leslie Charteris wrote for very early on in his career. These two adventures were “The Creeping Death,” from issue 23, which was first published on 13 July 1929, and “Sudden Death,” which appeared in issue 40, published on 9 November 1929. The novel itself came out in May 1930 as The Last Hero. It was the first Saint adventure published by Hodder & Stoughton, and they declared on the cover, “Hodder & Stoughton present Leslie Charteris for the first time in their lists. His work is in fact most uncommon and most uncommonly good…”
The novel sold well, so they followed it up just a couple of months later with another Saint book, Enter the Saint. It has a similar heritage to The Saint Closes the Case, for it was based on work that first appeared in The Thriller magazine, but in this case they were kept as short stories rather than being adapted into a novel.
With the benefit of over eighty years of hindsight, you have to question the wisdom of calling the third book in the series Enter the Saint, for over the years many publishers and readers have assumed it is the first Saint book. There is a case to be made for that assumption, given that Charteris prefaced many early editions with this introduction:
Since The Last Hero, many people have asked me how the Saint came by the reputation that he already had at the beginning of that story, and what cause there was for so many to fear him and some few to love him as they did. It is in the hope of pleasing these people that I have put together these tales of some of his earlier exploits…
Regardless, although The Saint Closes the Case was chronologically the first Saint book published by Hodder, in terms of the canon it makes more sense to consider it as the third book in the series. It is also the first of the trilogy of stories featuring Rayt Marius, with The Avenging Saint and The Saint’s Getaway completing the set. Even Charteris would later acknowledge this logic and encourage readers to start with Enter the Saint.
When he came to adapt the magazine stories into a novel, Charteris made some significant changes. Since Norman Kent was originally killed at the end of the first story in The Thriller, Charteris rewrote the ending and used the second original story as filler for the middle of the novel. He made a few other minor changes and took out one slightly larger section from the first story. In this expunged section the Saint is shot outside his Brook Street dwelling by the villains. The bullet went “slap through the right lung,” and he had “one rib chipped.” Treated by his neighbour Dr Terry Mannering (hero of Charteris’s first novel, X Esquire) “for four days the Saint hovered between life and death,” but in “an almost miraculously swift convalescence,” was cured in three weeks.
Much like Enter the Saint, this novel was almost continuously in print through the first half of the Saint’s career. Hodder printed on average one hardback edition a year until the early 1950s. The novel was serialized in the March 1931 edition of the American magazine Detective Classics, and then published shortly afterwards by the Doubleday Crime Club.
A Danish edition appeared in 1936 under the title Sankt Jørgen og dragen, published as part of a small series of Saint adventures by Berglingske Forlag. The title literally translates as “St George and the dragon.” In early translations the Saint, for reasons unknown, was called St George. By the time of mass Danish translations in the 1960s, he’d been rechristened Helgenen. In Sweden it was called Helgonet i härnad, published by Aktiebolaget Skoglunds Bokförlag in 1938.
A German edition (Der letzte Held) appeared in 1933, whilst the Spani
sh got to read about El último héroe in November 1934. Editions have also appeared in other languages; Poland and Hungary became the most recent converts in the 1990s.
Unusually for the adventures of the Saint, this novel has only been adapted once, as part of a short run of radio plays, starring Paul Rhys as Simon Templar. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1995.
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.
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