“Don’t worry, Sue,” he said. “Don’t think about it, ever. I just hope everything works out all right for you.”
“I’ll take care of her myself, personally,” Unciello said, and only then, for the first time, Simon felt ice in his heart.
The door from the living room opened abruptly, and Inspector Buono came in.
He looked very cool and elegant, and if he had any nervousness, it might only have been found in his eyes. They merely glanced at the girl and Simon, and went quickly back to Unciello.
“Eccomi arrato,” he said obsequiously. “Cosa desidera?”
“Talk English,” Unciello growled. “The Saint wants to know what’s going on. It’s his funeral we’re talking about. I sent for you because you’re just the boy to take charge of it. You got the perfect set-up. You make it look like he was shot resisting arrest. You do it yourself, and maybe get yourself a medal.”
“But—”
“I’m sending a couple of the boys along to watch you.” Unciello poured another glass of wine, and his broad face was malevolently bland. “I hear some of our people are worried that one of these days you might get too interested in a reward, if it was big enough. Now, if they see you do something like this, so they can feel they’ve got something on you, it’ll give ’em a lot more confidence.”
“Sì, Signor,” Buono said whitely.
Then the door behind him burst open again and the room suddenly filled with armed police.
Through their midst stepped a large elderly perspiring man with a superb black handlebar moustache, who surveyed the scene with somewhat pompous satisfaction.
“Everyone here,” he said, not without a trace of awe, “is under arrest.”
The stooped scholarly figure of the Secretary of State followed him in, and Sue Inverest flung herself into her father’s arms.
Simon Templar prudently reached for the Chianti bottle and refilled his glass.
7
Most of what Sue Inverest did not know had been told her while the official limousine was still on its way to the Embassy.
“But I still don’t know how you got there,” she said, “like…like the posse coming over the hill in the last reel of a western.”
“My dear,” Mr Inverest said mildly, “surely even you learned enough Latin in school to know that homo sequendum means ‘man who must be followed’?”
She gave a shaky half-laugh.
“I might have thought of that, but the Saint was so convincing with his translation…And anyway, how did you know who to follow?”
“Whom,” said Mr Inverest.
“You remember that tag about for the public good?” Simon said. “I told your father he’d like it better in Latin. That’s pro bono publico. I could only hope he’d be fast enough to turn the bono into Buono.”
“Fortunately I’m not quite the imbecile that I’m sometimes called,” Inverest said. “Once I had that clue, I went straight to the top. That was the Minister of the Interior himself who was in charge of the raid.”
“And you remember,” Simon added, “how I threw in that bit about Buono’s unseemly interest in a reward which he hadn’t reported—for the simple reason that it was never offered. I was banking on that to bother Tony enough so that he’d send for Buono, which would lead the posse straight to the right place.”
The girl cuddled her father’s arm, but her gray eyes were on the Saint.
“I know you’re not really rich, Daddy,” she said. “But he ought to have some reward.”
Simon grinned.
“I’ll settle for the privilege of buying you a real dinner. And then maybe dancing with you till dawn. And then if there’s anything still owing, I’d better leave it on deposit. I’m liable to need it one of these days,” said the Saint.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The first two stories in this book, “The Covetous Headsman” and “The Angel’s Eye,” are perhaps the most prestigious of this collection, as they were written by Charteris specifically for the first two editions of The Saint Detective Magazine, which was launched in spring 1953, and for many of the early issues would include a Saint adventure alongside stories by other authors. “The Rhine Maiden” first appeared in the February 1936 edition of The American Magazine under the title of “All Aboard for Shanghai!” As Charteris mentioned in his introduction, “The Golden Journey” first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1934 and was also published in the British publication Nash’s Magazine that same year before being revived twenty years later for this book. “The Spanish Cow,” which suffered a similar fate, first appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in July 1936 before being lost and found. “The Loaded Tourist,” however, was written to round off this collection, although it was published in the March 1953 edition of Manhunt Detective Story Monthly in the US, prior to book publication.
This book is significant, for although it was first published in 1953, some five years after the previous Saint book, it marks a moment of evolution for the Saint and Leslie Charteris. Charteris married his fourth wife, the actress Audrey Long, in 1952, and it was a union that would last over forty years. It filled him with a new joie de vivre, and he and his new wife set off travelling around the world; naturally, wherever they went the Saint would follow.
The book itself was first published by Doubleday in December 1953, and it had a dustjacket designed by Andy Warhol. A British edition followed on 15 April 1954.
Charteris spent a lot of time throughout the 1950s trying to get the Saint on TV. In the early part of the decade, he penned eight TV scripts featuring the Saint designed to show how a half-hour Saint TV show would run. Amongst those eight stories were “The Rhine Maiden,” “The Covetous Headsman,” “The Latin Touch,” “The Angel’s Eye,” and “The Loaded Tourist.” Sadly, he could not persuade any network to back him as writer and producer, and his efforts came to nothing.
But by the time the Saint did get to television, it’s clear that The Saint in Europe was one of the first Saint books that producer Robert S Baker and story editor Harry Junkin came across, for The Latin Touch aired as the second episode of the Roger Moore series on 7 October 1962, whilst The Covetous Headsman was the fourth episode, first airing on 21 October 1962, and The Loaded Tourist aired the week after. The Golden Journey—a fan favourite—was episode number ten, directed by Robert S Baker, and airing on 6 December 1962, whilst The Rhine Maiden was the fifty-fifth episode and first aired on 21 January 1965. The Spanish Cow was the penultimate black-and-white episode, first airing on 14 August 1965, whilst The Angel’s Eye was one of the colour episodes, first airing on 6 November 1966.
As befitting a volume that was perhaps the first step in a rebirth for the Saint, this book seemed to have a wider appeal internationally than some other volumes. The Dutch were first off, with De Saint doet Europa, in 1954, whilst the French and the Swedes went for the similarly linguistically untaxing Le Saint en Europe, and Helgonet i Europe respectively. A Czech edition, Svatý opět přichází, appeared in 1982.
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 g
ood 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 a
gainst 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. Gone 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.
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