The Avenging Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  And he let go.

  The train seemed to tear away from under him; his left hand crashed into a projection, and went numb, and the roof became red-hot and scorched his legs. He felt himself slithering towards the side, and flung out his sound right hand blindly…He caught something like a handle…held on…and the slipping stopped with a jar that sent a twinge of agony stabbing through his shoulder.

  He lay there gasping, dumbly bewildered that he should still be alive. For a full minute…

  And then the meaning of it filtered into his understanding, and he laughed softly, absurdly, a laughter queerly close to tears.

  For the work was done.

  Slowly, in a breathless wonder, he turned his head. The aeroplane was turning, coming back towards him, alongside the train, low down. And a face looked out, helmeted, with its big round goggles masking all expression and giving it the appearance of some macabre gargoyle, but all that could be seen of the face was as white as the morning sky.

  Simon waved his injured hand, and, as the aeroplane swept by in a droning thunder of noise, the snowy flutter of a handkerchief broke out against its silver and gold. And so the aeroplane passed, rising slowly as it went towards the north, with the sunrise striking it like a banner unfurled.

  And five minutes later, in a strange and monstrous contrast to the flamboyant plumage of the great metal bird that was swinging smoothly round into the dawn, a strained and tatterdemalion figure came reeling over the tender of the swaying locomotive, and the two men in the cab, who had been watching him from the beginning, were there to catch him as he fell into their arms.

  “You come outta that airypline?” blurted one of them dazedly, and Simon Templar nodded.

  He put up a filthy hand and smeared the blood out of his eyes.

  “I came to tell you to stop the train,” he said. “There are two bombs on the line.”

  4

  The Saint rested where they had laid him down. He had never known what it was to be so utterly weary. All his strength seemed to have ebbed out of him, now that it had served for the supreme effort. He felt that he had not slept for a thousand years…

  All round him there was noise. He heard the hoarse roar of escaping steam, the whine of brakes, the fading clatter of movement, the jolt and hiss of the stop. In the sudden silence he heard the far, steady drone of the aeroplane filling the sky. Then there were voices, running feet, questions and answers mingling in an indecipherable murmur. Someone shook him by the shoulder, but at that moment he felt too tired to rouse, and the man moved away.

  And then, presently, he was shaken again, more insistently. A cool wet cloth wiped his face, and he heard a startled exclamation. The aeroplane seemed to have gone, though he had not heard its humming die away: he must have passed out altogether for a few seconds. Then a glass was pressed to his lips; he gulped and spluttered as the neat spirit rawed his throat. And he opened his eyes.

  “I’m all right,” he muttered.

  All he saw at first was a pair of boots. Large boots. And his lips twisted with a rueful humour. Then he looked up and saw the square face and the bowler hat of the man whose arm was around his shoulders.

  “Bombs, old dear,” said the Saint. “They’ve got the niftiest little electric firing device attached—you lay it over the line, and it blows up the balloon when the front wheels of the train go over it. That’s my dying speech. Now it’s your turn.”

  The man in the bowler hat nodded.

  “We’ve already found them. You only stopped us with about a hundred yards to spare.” He was looking at the Saint with a kind of wry regret. “And I know you,” he said.

  Simon smiled crookedly.

  “What a thing is fame!” he sighed. “I know you, too, Detective-Inspector Carn. How’s trade? I shall come quietly this time, anyway—I couldn’t run a yard.”

  The detective’s lips twitched a trifle grimly. He glanced over his shoulder. “I think the King is waiting to speak to you,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR PUT DOWN A BOOK

  1

  It was late in a fair September afternoon when Roger Conway turned into Upper Berkeley Mews and admitted himself with his own key.

  He found the Saint sitting in an armchair by the open window with a book on his knee, and was somehow surprised.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded, and Simon rose with a smile.

  “I have slept,” he murmured. “And so have you, from all accounts.”

  Roger spun his peaked cap across the room.

  “I have,” he said. “I believe the order for my release came through about lunch-time, but they thought it would be a shame to wake me.”

  The Saint inspected him critically. Roger’s livery covered him uncomfortably. It looked as if it had shrunk. It had shrunk.

  “Jolly looking clothes, those are,” Simon remarked. “Is it the new fashion? I’d be afraid of catching cold in the elbows, you know. Besides, the pants don’t look safe to sit down in.”

  Roger returned the survey insultingly.

  “How much are you expecting to get on that face in part exchange?” he inquired, and suddenly the Saint laughed.

  “Well, you knock-kneed bit of moth-eaten gorgonzola!”

  “Well, you cross-eyed son of a flea-bitten hobo!”

  And all at once their hands met in an iron grasp.

  “Still,” said the Saint presently, “you don’t look your best in that outfit, and I guess you’ll feel better when you’ve had a shave. Some kind soul gave me a ring to say you were on your way, and I’ve turned the bath on for you and laid out your other suit. Push on, old bacillus, and I’ll sing to you when you come back.”

  “I shall not come back for years,” said Roger delicately.

  The Saint grinned.

  He sat down again as Roger departed and took up his book again, and traced a complicated arabesque in the corner of a page thoughtfully. Then he wrote a few more lines, and put away his fountain pen. He lighted a cigarette, and gazed at a picture on the other side of the room: he was still there when Roger returned.

  And Roger said what he had meant to say before.

  “I was thinking,” Roger said, “you’d have gone after Angel Face.” Simon turned the pages of his book.

  “And so was I,” he said. “But the reason why I haven’t is recorded here. This is the tome in which I dutifully make notes of our efforts for the benefit of an author bloke I know, who has sworn to make a blood-and-thunder classic out of us one day. This entry is very tabloid.”

  “What is it?”

  “It just says—‘Hermann.’”

  And the Saint, looking up, saw Roger’s face, and laughed softly.

  “In the general excitement,” he said gently, “we forgot dear Hermann. And Hermann was ordered to go straight back as soon as he’d parked his bombs. I expect he has. Anyway, I haven’t heard that he’s been caught. There’s still a chance, of course…Roger, you may wonder what’s happened to me, but I rang up our old friend Chief Inspector Teal and told him all about Saltham, and he went off as fast as a police car could take him. It remains to be seen whether he arrived in time…The Crown Prince left England last night, but they’ve collected Heinrich. I’m afraid Ike will have to get a new staff of servants, though. His old ones are dead beyond repair…I think that’s all the dope.”

  “It doesn’t seem to worry you,” said Roger.

  “Why should it?” said the Saint a little tiredly. “We’ve done our job. Angel Face is smashed, whatever happens. He’ll never be a danger to the world again. And if he’s caught he’ll be hanged, which will do him a lot of good. On the other hand, if he gets away, and we’re destined to have another round—that is as the Lord may provide.”

  “And Norman?”

  The Saint smiled, a quiet little smile.

  “There was a letter from Pat this morning,” he said. “Posted at Suez. They’re going on down the East Coast of Africa, and the
y expect to get round to Madeira in the spring. And I’m going to do something that I think Norman would have wanted far more than vengeance. I’m going adventuring across Europe, and at the end of it I shall find my lady.”

  Roger moved away, and glanced at the telephone. “Have you heard from Sonia?” he asked.

  “She called up,” said the Saint. “I told her to come right round and bring papa. They should be here any minute now.”

  Conway picked up the Bystander and put it down again.

  He said, “Did you mean everything you said last night—this morning?”

  Simon stared out of the window.

  “Every word,” he said.

  He said, “You see, old Roger, some queer things happen in this life of ours. You cut adrift from all ordinary rules, and then, sometimes, when you’d sell your soul for a rule, you’re all at sea. And when that happens to a man he’s surely damned, bar the grace of Heaven, because I only know one thing worse than swallowing every commandment that other people lay down for you, and that’s having no commandments but those you lay down for yourself. None of which abstruse philosophy you will understand…But I’ll tell you, Roger, by way of a fact, that everything life gives you has to be paid for; also that where your life leads you, there will your heart be also. Selah. Autographed copies of that speech, on vellum, may be obtained on the instalment plan at all public houses and speakeasies—one pound down, and the rest up a gum-tree…”

  A car drove down the mews and stopped by the door. But Roger Conway was still looking at the Saint, and Roger was understanding, with a strange wild certainty, that perhaps after all he had never known the Saint, and perhaps he would never know him.

  The Saint closed his book. He laid it down on the table beside him, and turned to meet Roger’s eyes.

  “‘For all the Saints who from their labours rest,’” he said. “Sonia has arrived, my Roger.”

  And he stood up, with the swift careless laugh that Roger knew, and his hand fell on Roger’s shoulder, and so they went out together into the sunlight.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  The Avenging Saint was the fourth Saint book to be published and the second, after Meet—the Tiger!, to be written as an original novel rather than being based on short stories already seen in the paper The Thriller. It was first published by Hodder & Stoughton in October 1930 with an American hardback appearing a year later from the Doubleday Crime Club. By 1941 Hodder was on a sixteenth impression, suggesting either that they were quite poor at forecasting sales figures or that the Saint books were selling substantially beyond their expectations. Since publishers who can’t predict sales tend not to stay in business for too long, we’d have to suggest it’s the latter.

  Charteris dedicated the book to his agent at the time, Raymond Savage. Savage was his first literary agent, and their association dated back to Charteris’s contract with Ward Lock, when Charteris was no doubt happy to be sharing an agent with T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame). However, within a year or so of the publication of The Avenging Saint, Charteris would move on to AP Watt & Son. The precise reasons for this remain hidden in the mists of time, though there was talk later about Savage’s loyalty and honesty towards his young client. Savage passed away in 1964.

  Opening the book with your hero singing Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard is an interesting technique and not something you’d associate with other more modern heroes. But then the Saint and Leslie Charteris were never one for convention, and the song seems a suitable fit alongside their poetic talents.

  As with the previous Saint adventures, foreign editions soon appeared: Kulturelle Verlagsgesellschaft christened the book Braut Wider Willen (the literal translation of which is the rather splendid “Bride Aversion”) and published the first German version in 1934, while a Hungarian translation, A szoke bosszu, appeared in 1935. Norwegians had to wait until 1939 to read St. Simon spiller höit spill (which translates literally as “St Simon Playing Loud Games”) when it was published by Gylendal Norsk Forlag; their Finnish cousins had to wait until 1970 to read Pyhimys pitaa sanansa. A Swedish edition, Helgonet hejdar världskrig, was published by Skoglunds in 1936 and reprinted several times over the years. A Swedish audio book, read by Leif Liljeroth, was released in 2003. The most recent reprint was the July 1989 American paperback published by International Polygonics.

  This novel is one of the few Saint stories that has never been adapted for any other medium.

  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 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