The Saint Meets his Match (The Saint Series)
Page 24
The oncoming headlights blazed straight into his eyes, hurtling towards them. The driver of the other car swerved, but he could hardly maneuver on that narrow road, and there was no time for him to pull up.
Simon heard the futile scream of brakes violently applied, and thought he would die smiling.
“Here we go,” he thought, and held the wheel round on a reckless lock.
He only just failed. For one horrible instant he saw the offside wing light of the approaching car leaping directly into the off-side wing light of the car in which he rode. Even so, he might have succeeded if Cullis had not got a hand back on the wheel and fought to turn it the other way.
Simon lashed at him with one elbow, but it was too late for that to be any good. The running-board of the other car slashed their front wing like a knife, and there was a grating, tearing, shattering noise of tortured metal.
Simon was shot over the steering-wheel by the impact. The car seemed to heave itself into the air, and for one blinding, numbing second he seemed to hang suspended in space. Then the road hit him a terrible blow across the shoulder-blades; there was a splintering clatter, another and more violent jar, and dead silence…
He did not know how long he lay there on his back with his feet propped up somewhere in the air, bruised and aching in every limb, and only wondering whether he was really dead at last—and if not, why not…A colossal weight seemed to be pressing into his chest…
He opened one eye, and discerned brake and clutch and accelerator pedals mysteriously suspended over his head.
There was something else on his chest. He made this out to be the front seat—and the body of a man.
He tried to raise one hand, and found that it moved in a pool of something warm and sticky, and he wondered whether the blood was Cullis’s or his own.
Then there was a thunder of knocking on the ship-wrecked coachwork beside his ear, and a voice said, rather foolishly: “Are you all right in there?”
“Can’t see how anybody can be alive in this mess,” said another voice. “They must have been doing over fifty.”
But the Saint had recognised the first voice, and a husky croak of a chuckle came from his lips.
“Dear old Claud Eustace,” he said. “Always ten minutes too late!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR PUT ON HIS HAT
1
Chief Inspector Teal reverently unwrapped his fourth wafer of gum. Simon Templar had bought it specially for him, and Teal was doing himself proud.
“Though why you aren’t dead,” said Mr Teal, “is more than anyone will ever know.”
The Saint, with a bandaged head and nothing more, grinned cheerfully.
“You can’t keep a good man down,” he said.
“It was sheer luck you didn’t get me down,” said Teal, “And that would have been a good man lost to the CID, though I say it myself. I shall never be able to make out why none of us was hurt. It may have been because we’d almost stopped when you hit us, but our car was spun round broadside to the road—off-side front wheel knocked off as if it had been cut with a knife, chassis tied in a knot, both axles bust, gear-box all over the road, and a worse shaking for all of us than any of us want to have again.”
“Will you be sending in the bill?” drawled the Saint.
They were at Upper Berkeley Mews, where they had repaired for a very late supper, but it was more like breakfast than anything else.
Then the story of Lord Essenden was told, and also the story of Waldstein, and the Chief Commissioner’s verdict was given. He looked at the girl and smiled.
“I believe you,” he said. “There’s the Saint to back you up in the story of Essenden, and now that I know you a little better I’m not sure that I should question it even without that. As for the rest, outside of our four selves there is no one left alive who knows anything worth knowing. And I don’t think any of us will ask for trouble. We’ve had enough of the Angels of Doom.”
He looked across at Teal for confirmation, and Chief Inspector Teal nodded drowsily. He seemed to be on the point of falling asleep.
“And the ‘Wanted for Murder’ business?” asked the Saint.
“That can be forgotten. Fresh evidence has come to light, and the charge has been withdrawn. That can be arranged without any fuss. And if Miss Trelawney is going back to the States—”
“I want,” said Chief Inspector Teal, with a sudden and startling loudness, “to wash my hands.”
Three pairs of eyes revolved slowly in their sockets and centred on him with an intentness that would have shattered the nerve of a lesser man, but Chief Inspector Teal suffered his blushing honours without visible emotion.
And then the Saint laughed.
“But of course,” he said. “There’s a barrel of very good beer in the kitchen—you might try that, Duodecimo’s out there blowing himself tight with Chianti, but Orace will move him on if you say the word…Will you want any soap?”
“I think,” said Sir Hamilton Dorn mildly, “that we shall be able to find what we want.”
The Saint watched the door close behind them, and then he loafed back to the fireplace, lighted a cigarette, and stood there with his hands in his pockets.
“Only the epilogue is left,” he said.
“And a joke to explain,” said Jill Trelawney.
Simon regarded her with his cigarette in one corner of a smiling mouth and his eyebrows aslant—rather like a blue-eyed and boyish Mephistopheles. Suddenly she understood all his charm.
“Most of it’s explained,” he said. “I was pulled into the Secret Service to keep me good, but the job never meant as much to me as it might have once. And then, when I was on the very point of quitting, your father’s case developed into the Angels of Doom. I remember the night when I was talking it over with Auntie Ethel, and I was shown a photograph of you. And I made myself a promise.”
She stood up and came towards the fireplace.
“What was it?”
“That you were a girl I was going to kiss before I died. And I did it half-way through the story, which spoils the ending, but even now—”
And suddenly, with his quick light laugh, he swept her into his arms and captured her red lips.
In a little while she said, “Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?”
“No,” said the Saint, “I’ve made a friend.”
His arm lay lightly round her shoulders.
“I’m the fool who never grows old,” he said. “But the manner of folly changes. Yesterday it was battle, murder, and sudden death; tomorrow—who knows? But while there’s a boy you love waiting for you, and a song and a story for me—who cares?…”
One moment he held her eyes, and then he swung round and picked up a newspaper that lay on a side table. One swift glance down the page, and he was looking at the clock.
“The Aquitania sails in seven hours,” he said. “I can get you to Southampton with hours to spare, and then I can work a pull with the company. I’ll guarantee you a berth—”
He read his answer in her face, and flung open the door.
“Orace!” he shouted, and his man came running. “Some sandwiches—a flask—coffee in the thermos. At the double! Is the Hirondel full up?”
“Yessir.”
“Good enough.”
He went through into the garage, and in another moment the mighty car was roaring round to pull up snorting at the front door…And the Saint returned, as Mr Teal, roused by the commotion, emerged from the back of the hall.
“Going away?” asked Teal.
“Just for a drive…Jill, you’d better have a leather coat—take this one…That’s the idea…I’ll take those things, Orace.”
He saw the girl into the car, and came back to fetch another coat from the stand. Teal button-holed him.
“Is this an elopement, Saint?”
“Now that’s just what it isn’t, Claud…No, the Old Penton-villains choker, Orace…Anything I can do
for you on the way, Claud Eustace?”
“If it is an elopement,” said Teal lusciously, “you fixed it up quick enough.”
Simon twisted the scarf round his neck and canted his most piratical hat at its most piratical angle over his right eye. And then he tapped the detective gently on the shoulder.
“Has it never occurred to you,” he said, “that one day a story might be written in which the heroine didn’t fall in love with the hero, and the hero didn’t fall in love with the heroine—and they were both perfectly happy in spite of that? Because this is that story. I am the most superlative story-book hero that ever lived, but the rules were not made for me.”
And he took down Teal’s bowler from the rack, and clapped it rakishly on the detective’s head, and pulled Teal’s ear, and punched him in the stomach, and was gone, and an echo of saintly laughter seemed still to hang in the little hall long after the clamour of the Hirondel had died away.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
Like the large majority of previous Saint books, this one also has its origins in the stories Charteris wrote for The Thriller. This book, his fourth full-length novel, started life as three separate stories that were published in February, March, and April 1930. They were entitled “Number One!,” “The Second Victim,” and “The Third Victim,” but there were two different heroes and neither of them, initially at least, were Simon Templar.
“Number One!” features Captain Lyn Peveril, who works for Special Branch and is brought in by the Commissioner to catch the Angels of Doom. However, Peveril’s future is limited as at the end of this episode he is shot and killed by Stephen Weald.
“The Second Victim” introduces the reader to Septimus Dale. Dale is a “suspected person” whose introduction sees him being led into Marlborough Street Police Station to be formally searched and interrogated. If Peveril is the more respectable side of what would become the Saint’s character, then Dale is the antithesis, well at least until it’s revealed that Dale is really Septimus Dorn, the son of Chief Commissioner Hamilton Dorn, who’s been working for Special Branch.
A version of the rewritten story, now featuring the Saint, appeared under the title “Angels of Doom” in the December 1930 edition of All Star Detective Stories, an American publication devoted to crime fiction.
It was subsequently rewritten again as a full-length Saint novel with Hodder & Stoughton publishing the first edition under the title She Was a Lady in November 1931. An American hardcover titled Angels of Doom appeared in April the following year, published by the Doubleday Crime Club. The book is dedicated to Hugh Clevely, a writer and friend of Charteris’s. They’d met through Monty Haydon, editor of The Thriller, and, according to Charteris, “played a lot of tennis together, at which I think we were fairly well matched. I saw less of him after he got married and drifted out of touch completely after I moved to America.”*
By 1954 Hodder & Stoughton were on their twenty-second edition, suggesting yet another solid seller for Charteris and the Saint. The most recent edition was a June 1994 hardcover by American publisher Buccaneer Books, under the regular American title Angels of Doom.
The novel was filmed by RKO and released on 10 March 1939, as The Saint Strikes Back. It was written by John Twist, directed by John Farrow, and starred George Sanders as Simon Templar. The film made several changes to the novel; it was set in San Francisco and not England, Teal is replaced by Inspector Fernack, Jill Trelawney has been renamed Val Travers, and the Saint/Trelawney/Travers team-up has been eliminated.
With the Saint and Leslie Charteris firmly established, the translations started to come thick and fast; a 1936 Danish translation, Sankt Jørgen i Scotland Yard (Saint George in Scotland Yard), published by Berlingske Forlag, muddied the bibliographic waters, for it was later and often confused with The Saint Versus Scotland Yard.
The Dutch also made life complicated, publishing the first translation in 1937 as part of the “Balkenserie” under the title Jill als vrouw (literally “Jill as wife”); but by 1951 it seemed there had been a divorce, for the book was renamed De Saint en de vlinder (The Saint and the Butterfly) and has remained under that title ever since.
The German translation started life as Die Schicksalsengel (which translates rather poetically as “The Fate of Angels”) in 1934, before the publisher opted for the more pedestrian Der Heilige und die Dame Jill to tie in with the first TV series.
The Italians opted for Il Santo fa società in the 1960s whilst the Finns christened the book Pyhimys kohtaa kaunottaren in 1964. The Norwegian translation appeared as Hun var en dame in 1935 with the Spanish opting for Era una dama in September 1933.
An American audio book, titled The Saint Meets His Match and read by David Case, was released by Books on Tape in 1991.
* * *
* Letter from Charteris to his first biographer, W. O. G. Lofts, 1989
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.
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