Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The detective was suitably impressed.

  “Moreover,” said the Saint, “it was christened Simon. Now I call that real handsome.”

  “What does Perry call it?” inquired Teal, and the Saint was shocked.

  They walked a little way together in silence, and then Teal said, “The Commissioner’s been waiting for an answer to his letter.”

  “I have meditated the idea,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact, I thought of heading down to see him this afternoon.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  Simon’s umbrella swung elegantly in his hand. He sighed.

  “The idea is amusing,” he murmured. “And yet I can’t quite see myself running on the side of Law and Order. As you’ve so kindly pointed out on several occasions, dear old horseradish, my free-lance style is rather cramped now that you all know so much about me, but I’m afraid—oh, Teal, my bonny, I’m terribly afraid that yours is not the only way. I should become so hideously respectable before you finished with me. And there is another objection.”

  “What’s that?”

  The Saint removed his shining headpiece and dusted it lovingly with a large silk handkerchief.

  “I could not wear a bowler hat,” he said.

  Teal stopped, and turned.

  “Are you really going to refuse?” he asked, and Simon nodded.

  “I am,” he said sadly. “It would have been a hopeless failure. I should have been fired in a week anyway. Scotland House would become a bear-garden. The most weird and wonderful stories would be told in the Old Bailey. Gentlemen would write to The Times—Teal, I don’t want to become a wet blanket. But I might want that arm again…”

  “Templar,” said the detective glumly, “that’s the worst news I’ve heard for a long time.”

  “Is it?” drawled the Saint, appearing slightly puzzled. “I thought everyone knew. It’s the hand I drink with.”

  “I mean, if you really are going on in the same old way…”

  “Oh, that!”

  The Saint smiled beatifically. He glanced at his watch.

  “Let us go and have lunch,” he said, “and weep over my wickedness. I’m such a picturesque villain, too.” He sighed again. “Tell me, Teal, where can a policeman and a pirate lunch together in safety?”

  “Anywhere you like,” said Teal unhappily. Simon Templar gazed across Piccadilly Circus.

  “I seem to remember a very good restaurant in the Law Courts themselves,” he remarked. “I lunched there one day just after I’d murdered someone or other. It gave me a great sensation. And this, I think, is my cue to repeat the performance. Come, Algibald, and I will tell you the true story about the Bishop and the Actress.”

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Like in the previous Saint books, the stories in Featuring the Saint originated in The Thriller magazine. “The Logical Adventure” appeared in issue 68, dated 24 May 1930 under the title of “Without Warning”; “The Wonderful War” was published in issue 17, dated 1 June 1929 as “The Judgement of the Joker”; and “The Man Who Could Not Die” appeared in issue 88, dated 11 October 1930, and was then called “Treachery.”

  The book was first published by Hodder & Stoughton in February 1931. An American edition, of sorts, appeared in November 1931 when Doubleday Crime Club published an edition 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 volume.

  Just to muddy the American bibliographic waters, when A. L. Burt and Co. published a hardback of Wanted for Murder in 1936, they added the stories from The Saint and Mr Teal and The Saint in London. Still with me? Good, because it gets worse.

  In 1945, Jacobs Publishing brought out a volume called Paging the Saint, which comprised one story from Featuring the Saint (“The Man Who Could Not Die”) and one story from Alias the Saint (“The Story of a Dead Man,” since you ask). And in 1956, when Avon published an edition of Wanted for Murder, they included two stories from Alias the Saint (“The Story of a Dead Man” and “The Impossible Crime”) and none from Featuring the Saint!

  But let’s get back to the subject…

  Two of the three stories in this book have been used elsewhere: “The Wonderful War” was adapted for the second season of the Roger Moore series of The Saint (and aired as episode 33 on 2 January 1964). The episode was directed by the show’s producer, Robert S. Baker, and followed the original’s plot fairly closely, though the setting changed to a fictional Middle Eastern country called Saveda (you’ll find it just between Iraq and Kuwait). “The Man Who Could Not Die” was adapted by Terry Nation for the fourth season of the show and aired as episode 68 on 31 July 1965.

  Foreign editions of Featuring the Saint weren’t as plentiful as other Saint books; it seems to have been overlooked in favour of other more memorable adventures. A Czech edition entitled A opět Svatý was published by Volesky in 1937; a Spanish version, Protagonista el Santo, was published by Ediciones G.P. in 1961; and Garzanti brought out an Italian translation, Protagonista il Santo, in 1970.

  French publisher Fayard also opted to pick and choose from the stories available, including “The Wonderful War” in the 1945 volume Le Saint s’en va t-en guerre and “The Logical Adventure” and “The Man Who Could Not Die” in the 1947 collection La marque du Saint.

  The most recent reprint was an April 1980 paperback edition published by Charter, which neglected to include “The Man Who Could Not Die.”

  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 hi
s 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. 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 A
tlantic.

  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.