And then he laughed.
“There’s nothing much for you to know, old dear,” he drawled. “It’s only that the Professor has arranged to lift that little flock of ingots on the way.”
Duncarry revolved his long-nosed face towards the Saint, and inhaled sibilantly.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“Exactly what I told you,” murmured Simon, and passed on what he had seen and what he had overheard.
Now that he had all the threads in his hands, this did not take him long.
Mysteries are long and complicated, but facts are always plain and to the point.
“The Professor has a few million cubic feet of compressed poison gas in his heavy luggage for the benefit of the strong-room guards. I’ll bet any money he also has a cabin in a good strategic position for conferring the same benefit. There is also a quantity of tear-gas to deal with minor disturbances. That’s what they were manufacturing when I butted in—I got a whiff of it, and the mystery literally made me burst into tears. Crantor will come up in the ship we saw to take off the boodle. I can guess that, though I can’t tell you how it’s going to be arranged.”
“And what do we do about it?” asked Duncarry, and the Saint grimaced.
“That depends upon the efficacy of your prayers,” he said.
If anything can be deduced from subsequent events, Duncarry was no mean intercessor. Or perhaps the Saint’s magnificent luck was working overtime. At least it is a simple fact that they covered the eighty-five miles to Gloucester without a mishap, though it took them nearly five hours.
It was three o’clock on the Wednesday morning when the Saint entered the police station in Gloucester, and by some means best known to himself succeeded in so startling the sleepy night shift that they allowed him to use the official telephone for a call to Chief Inspector Teal’s private address.
And the means by which he convinced Chief Inspector Teal that he was not trying to be funny may also never be known. But he passed on Teal’s parting words to Duncarry verbatim.
“Leave this end to me,” Teal had said, and for once in his life his voice was not at all drowsy. “I’ll get through to the police at Portsmouth and tell them to be looking out for you; and after that I’ll get on to the Admiralty, and make sure that they’ll have everything ready for you when you arrive. You’ll see the thing through yourself—it’s hopelessly illegal, but I’m afraid you’ve earned the job.”
“Does that mean that we’re temporary policemen?” inquired Duncarry, when the speech had been reported and Simon Templar nodded.
“I guess it does.”
A constable had already been sent round to knock up the biggest garage and commandeer the fastest car in stock, and at that moment a huge Bentley roared up and stopped outside the station. Simon took the wheel, and Duncarry settled in beside him.
They were well on their way before the American voiced his opinion of the whole affair.
“This is a great day for a couple of outlaws,” he remarked, and the Saint, remembering the almost grovelling farewell of the Gloucester police-station personnel, could not find it in him to disagree.
11
Passengers on the Megantic who were up early for breakfast that morning were interested to see the low, lean shape of a destroyer speeding towards them. As the destroyer came nearer, a string of flags broke out from the mast, and then the passengers were amazed and fluttered, for the Megantic suddenly began to slow up.
The destroyer also hove to, and a boat put out from its side and rowed towards the
Megantic.
Betty Tregarth was one of the early risers who crowded to the side to watch the two men from the destroyer’s boat climbing up the rope ladder which had been lowered for them. She saw the first man who clambered over the rail quite clearly, and the colour left her face suddenly, for it was the man whom she knew as Rameses Smith.
The Megantic had got under way again, and the destroyer was rapidly dropping astern, when she received the expected summons to the captain’s cabin.
Besides the captain, Rameses Smith was there, and another man with an official bearing whose face seemed vaguely familiar. Marring was also there, an unsavoury and dishevelled sight in his dressing-gown, and she saw that there were handcuffs on his wrists.
“This is the other one,” said the Saint. “Miss Tregarth, I don’t think I need to put you in irons, but I must ask you to consider yourself under arrest.”
She nodded dumbly.
Simon Templar turned to his companion.
“Dun, you can take Marring below. Don’t let him out of your sight. I’ll arrange for you to be relieved later.” Then he turned to the captain. “Captain Davis, may I ask you to allow me a few words alone with Miss Tregarth?”
“Certainly, Mr Templar.”
The captain followed Duncarry and Marring out of the room, and Simon Templar closed the door behind them, and faced the girl.
“Sit down,” he said, and she obeyed. She had never imagined that he could look so stern.
Simon took a chair on the other side of the table.
“Betty,” he said, “I’m giving you your last chance. Spill all the beans you know, and you mayn’t do so badly. Stay in with the rest of ’em, and you’re booked for a certain ten years. Which is it going to be?”
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter much now, anyway.”
She told him the story from the beginning, and he listened with rapt attention. She expected incredulity, but he showed none. At the end of the recital he was actually smiling.
“That’s fine!” said the Saint, almost with a sigh. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard for a long time!”
“What do you mean?” she asked dazedly.
“Only this,” answered the Saint. “I guessed you were framed, but the police never knew anything about it. Raxel never bothered to try and deceive them. He just wanted to make sure of you. I don’t know every single idea that waddles through the so-called brains of the police, but if you’re wanted for murdering Inspector Henley you may call me Tiglath-Pileser for short.”
She stared.
“But you’re a detective yourself. Your name isn’t Smith of course, but—”
Simon smiled cherubically.
“The captain called me by my right name,” he said. “I am Simon Templar.”
She stared.
“Not—the Saint?”
“None other,” said Simon; and it is the chronicler’s painful duty to record that he said it as if he was very pleased about it. Which he was.
“Then—is all this—”
Simon shook his head.
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” he said, almost lugubriously. “This enterprise is catastrophically respectable. You may take it that the full power and majesty of the Law is concentrated in these lily-white hands. Is there anyone else you’d like arrested?”
“Do you mean that I’m free?” she asked, with a wild hope springing up in her voice.
“Well, that’s a matter for Claud Eustace Teal. You’re too deeply involved to be set free without a considerable flourishing of red tape, but within a week or so, say…Here, have a handkerchief.”
The Saint pushed a gaudy square yard or two of silk into her hands, and went in search of Duncarry.
“Betty Tregarth is drenching the skipper’s carpet,” he said. “Would you like to go and lend a shoulder?”
The destroyer returned some hours later from the task of rounding up and capturing the co-operating vessel that was Crantor’s charge; and it was Duncarry who escorted the girl on board and supervised the transhipment of Gregory Marring and the two expert safe-smashers who were discovered among the passengers. The Saint himself seemed to have lost interest, and his interview with Professor Raxel was very brief.
“I have just learnt your real name, Mr—er—Smith,” Raxel said. “If I had known it earlier, I should not have made the mistake of underestimating your dangerousness. You s
hould have been killed the first night you arrived at the inn.”
“You should have been strangled at birth,” said the Saint unpleasantly.
It was evening when Duncarry found him hanging over the rail and gazing at the approaching coast of England with the same moody countenance.
“What’s wrong?” asked the American, and Simon turned and chucked his cigarette-end over the side.
“We’ve crashed, Dun,” said the Saint, as if he were announcing the end of the world.
Duncarry frowned.
“What are you getting at, Saint?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Here we’ve spent weeks of sleuthing and spadework, and seen our share of the rough stuff as well, and we’re never going to see a cent out of it. Have you forgotten that I’m a business organisation?”
Duncarry shrugged.
“If the authorities see it the way I do, they’ll say we paid an instalment of your National Debt all by ourselves. Isn’t that enough for you?”
Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, and resumed his disparaging inspection of the horizon.
“I cannot live by paying National Debts,” he said. “We shall have to find some other bunch of tough babies, and soak ’em good and proper to make up for this. I was trying to think of some sheep who are ripe for the slaughter. There’s a couple of muttons in Vienna I was thinking of shearing one time—”
“Maybe I’ll be taking a holiday,” said Duncarry.
He had taken a place at the rail beside the Saint, and Simon looked at him suddenly.
“Why?” demanded the Saint. “Wouldn’t you like a trip to Vienna?”
“I’d love one—for my honeymoon,” answered the American dreamily, and the Saint groaned.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
Whilst the three stories in this book, like many previous Saint stories, have their origins in the work Leslie Charteris did for The Thriller, two thirds of this trio differ slightly for they originate from a time when Charteris was still experimenting with heroes.
“The Story of a Dead Man” was his first story for the magazine and was published in issue no. 4, published on 2 March, 1929. The hero was Jimmy Traill, who perhaps unsurprisingly is the Saint in all but name. Not long after this story appeared a reader wrote in to the magazine suggesting that a serial by Leslie Charteris be run so that this popular writer could be read every week. The Editor prudently replied that “too much of a good thing was not good for anyone” so such a serial never materialized, but Charteris went on to have a long and successful career in the magazine.
“The Impossible Crime” appeared under the title of “Bumped Off” in issue no. 109, published on 7 March, 1931, so was a relatively young story when collected into this book, by which time Charteris was focused on the adventures of the Saint.
“The National Debt” appeared under the title “The Secret of Beacon Inn” in issue no. 9, published on 6 April, 1929. It was the second story Charteris sold to the magazine and the hero was Rameses Smith who was also very similar to the Saint.
The book itself was first published in April 1931 by Hodder & Stoughton with an American edition, of sorts, appearing in November that year. This was a book entitled Wanted for Murder (later republished as The Saint: Wanted for Murder in March 1943). It collected the stories from Featuring the Saint and Alias the Saint in one publication.
By June 1951 Hodder & Stoughton were on their twentieth impression of the hardback, suggesting the title to have been a good, reliable seller.
Two out of the three stories have been adapted for television; “The Impossible Crime” was adapted by Terry Nation (creator of Dr Who’s most ardent foe, the Daleks) and retitled “The Contract.” It was first broadcast on Thursday 7 January, 1965 as part of the third season of The Saint with Roger Moore. “The National Debt” was retitled “The Crime of the Century” and was also adapted by Terry Nation. It first aired on Thursday 4 March, 1965.
Foreign editions were relatively quick off the mark with a German translation, ST Rechnet Ab, appearing in 1934 and a Czech edition in 1938, published by Volesky, under the mouthful of Nemožný Zločin: Nová Dobrodružství Svatého. The French titled the book Le Saint et les Mauvais Garcons (“The Saint and the Bad Boys”) and opted for a straightforward translation which was published by Charteris’s regular French publishers, Fayard & Co. in 1939. An Italian edition, translated by Mario Lamberti, was published by Garzanti in 1971 under the simple title of Alias il Santo. Whilst the Spanish, unsurprisingly, opted for Alias el Santo which was published in 1965. An English language audiobook edition appeared in 1991, read by David Case and published by Books on Tape in America.
The most recent edition was a paperback published in May 1994 by Carroll & Graf.
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 re
call 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
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