Saint Overboard (The Saint Series)
Page 1
THE ADVENTURES OF THE SAINT
Enter the Saint (1930), The Saint Closes the Case (1930), The Avenging Saint (1930), Featuring the Saint (1931), Alias the Saint (1931), The Saint Meets His Match (1931), The Saint Versus Scotland Yard (1932), The Saint’s Getaway (1932), The Saint and Mr Teal (1933), The Brighter Buccaneer (1933), The Saint in London (1934), The Saint Intervenes (1934), The Saint Goes On (1934), The Saint in New York (1935), Saint Overboard (1936), The Saint in Action (1937), The Saint Bids Diamonds (1937), The Saint Plays with Fire (1938), Follow the Saint (1938), The Happy Highwayman (1939), The Saint in Miami (1940), The Saint Goes West (1942), The Saint Steps In (1943), The Saint on Guard (1944), The Saint Sees It Through (1946), Call for the Saint (1948), Saint Errant (1948), The Saint in Europe (1953), The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955), The Saint Around the World (1956), Thanks to the Saint (1957), Señor Saint (1958), Saint to the Rescue (1959), Trust the Saint (1962), The Saint in the Sun (1963), Vendetta for the Saint (1964), The Saint on TV (1968), The Saint Returns (1968), The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968), The Saint Abroad (1969), The Saint in Pursuit (1970), The Saint and the People Importers (1971), Catch the Saint (1975), The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976), Send for the Saint (1977), The Saint in Trouble (1978), The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978), Count On the Saint (1980), Salvage for the Saint (1983)
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Interfund (London) Ltd.
Foreword © 2014 Michael Hirst
Publication History and Author Biography © 2014 Ian Dickerson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781477842751
ISBN-10: 1477842756
Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com
CONTENTS
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
DEDICATION
FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR’S SLEEP WAS DISTURBED AND LORETTA PAGE MADE AN APPOINTMENT
1
2
3
4
CHAPTER TWO: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO RECEIVED AN INVITATION AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS HOVE UP ON THE HORIZON
1
2
3
4
CHAPTER THREE: HOW KURT VOGEL WAS NOT SO CALM AND OTTO ARNHEIM ACQUIRED A HEADACHE
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2
3
4
CHAPTER FOUR: HOW STEVE MURDOCH REMAINED OBSTINATE AND SIMON TEMPLAR RENDERED FIRST AID
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2
3
4
CHAPTER FIVE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WALKED IN A GARDEN AND ORACE ALSO HAD HIS TURN
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2
3
4
CHAPTER SIX: HOW PROFESSOR YULE TESTED THE BATHYSTOL AND KURT VOGEL MADE A PROPOSITION
1
2
3
4
CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW SIMON AND LORETTA TALKED TOGETHER AND LORETTA CHOSE LIFE
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2
3
4
CHAPTER EIGHT: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR USED HIS KNIFE AND KURT VOGEL WENT DOWN TO HIS TREASURE
1
2
3
4
FINALE
PUBLICATION HISTORY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!
THE SAINT CLUB
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.
To
H. C. Ryland
Who had the nerve,
B. H. Robinson
Who had the money, and
Richard L. Mealand
Who helped from the beginning—this result
Of their widely different encouragement is
Very gratefully dedicated
FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
Let’s face it, every Saint novel is essentially the same. In fact, that’s a large part of their appeal: the same rhythms and verbal tropes, the purple passages, and the inevitable, implausible plot devices. The insouciant, raffish hero—an alter ego if ever there was one—is, of course, always and necessarily the same, and the large cast of his antagonists are in reality a handful of rather stock villains with interchangeable names. The plots creak dreadfully, women are always desirable and shapely but not really attainable, and the Saint, to be frank, wouldn’t last more than five minutes in the dark, violent underworld he is supposed to inhabit.
And yet…
Is it nostalgia or something even more powerful that continues to make these novels not only readable but entertaining and satisfying? Nostalgia, now, there certainly is. Simon Templar’s talk of honour, his romantic gestures, seem more and more old-fashioned, like a fading photograph. And the whole world of the novels—its entire reality—has very obviously disappeared.
But even so, the Saint’s chivalrous code of behaviour, his very reason for being, still manages to resonate. In this wonderful, rickety novel—which I urge you to dive into—Charteris has several stabs at trying to define it. “You’re kind,” she said simply, “and you want so much that you can never have. You have an honour that honest people couldn’t understand. You’re not fighting against laws; you’re fighting against life. You’d tear the world to pieces to find something that’s only in your own mind, and when you’ve got it you’d find it was just a dream…” Elsewhere, the Saint reflects that “He had always been mad, by the Grace of God. He still was.” He believes himself to be among the high elect of “divine lunatics.”
Placing the Saint within a literary and romantic tradition that goes back to medieval prototypes (Simon, after all, is a Knight Templar) is not only clever of Charteris—who I had the great pleasure of meeting—but also helps to ensure his character’s immortality. Despite the fact that his near-contemporary James Bond has gone on to greater fame and fortune, the fact is that Bond is a much shallower, more vulgar, less realized character. Bond also displays too many of his author’s unpleasant psychological traits: he is a misogynist for whom women must be brutally possessed before being gratuitously and often deviantly dispensed with.
The Saint, as his name suggests, doesn’t have a deviant bone in his body. Charteris would love to think of him as a dangerous, edgy, and lawless “outlaw,” but he’s as much—and as little—a real outlaw as Robin Hood. And like Robin Hood, he is surely a national treasure.
We need to go on embracing and reading about him, or lose whatever platonic ideal he still seems to represent.
—Michael Hirst
PREFACE
When this book was first published, it appeared with the following preface:
For the diving sequences in this story I am deeply indebted to Messrs. Siebe Gorman & Co., of Westminster Bridge Road, London, the well-known subma
rine engineers, who most kindly made it possible for me to obtain the first-hand experience of diving without which the latter part of this book could not possibly have been written.
For the idea of the story I am indebted solely to history. I have become so used to seeing the adjective “incredible” regularly used even in the most flattering reviews of the Saint’s adventures, even when I have taken my plots from actual incidents which may be found in the files of any modern newspaper, that I almost hesitate to deprive the critics of their favourite word. But I have decided, after some profound searchings of heart, that in this case it is only fair to give them warning. For their benefit, therefore, and also for that of any other reader who may be interested, I should like to say that the facts mentioned on pages 23–25 may be verified by anyone who cares to take the trouble, and I submit that my solution of one of the most baffling mysteries of the sea is as plausible as any.
Obviously, this was long before the invention of the Aqualung brought “skin diving” to replace many of the cumbersome procedures described in some sequences in this story, to say nothing of special kinds of miniature submarine which can now cruise, observe, and perform certain sampling and pick-up operations at depths which seemed fantastic when Professor Yule invented his “bathystol.”
That seems to be the trouble with writing any story that hinges on some fabulous invention, in the days we live in. Once upon a time, as with the imaginative predictions of Jules Verne, progress moved with enough dignity and deliberation to allow the book to become a quaint old classic, and the author to pass on to his immortality, before making his incredible creations merely commonplace. Today the most preposterous contraption a fictioneer can dream up is liable to be on sale in the neighbourhood drug store or supermarket while he is still trying to flog his paperback rights.
This is a trap I have fallen into a number of times, and I think I must now resolve to write no more stories of that type. I shall attempt no more adventurous predictions of what some mad (or even sane) scientist will come out with next.
But I am certainly not going to withdraw this story, or any other, simply because technology has outstripped many of the premises and limitations that it was based on. I think it still stands up as a rattling good adventure, and that should be enough for anybody’s money. Including my own.
—Leslie Charteris
CHAPTER ONE:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR’S SLEEP WAS DISTURBED AND LORETTA PAGE MADE AN APPOINTMENT
1
Simon Templar woke at the shout, when most men would probably have stirred uneasily in their sleep and gone on sleeping. It was distant enough for that, muffled by the multiple veils of white summer fog that laid their fine prints of mist on the portholes and filled the night with a cool dampness. The habit of years woke him, rather than the actual volume of sound—years in which that lightning assessment and responses to any chance sound, that almost animal awareness of events even in sleep, that instantaneous leap to full consciousness of every razor-edged faculty, might draw the thin precarious hair-line between life and death.
He woke in a flash, without any sudden movement or alteration in his rate of breathing. The only difference between sleep and wakefulness was that his eyes were open and his brain searching back over his memory of that half-heard shout for a more precise definition of its meaning. Fear, anger, and surprise were there, without any articulate expression…And then he heard the sharp voice of a gun, its echoes drumming in a crisp clatter through the humid dark; another fainter yell, and a splash…
He slid from between the blankets and swung his long legs over the side of the bunk with the effortless natural stealth of a great cat. The moist chill of the fog went into his lungs and goosefleshed his skin momentarily through the thin silk of his pyjamas as he hauled himself up the narrow companion, but he had the other animal gift of adapting himself immediately to temperature. That one reflex shiver nicked over him as his bare feet touched the dew-damp deck, and then he was nervelessly relaxed, leaning a little forward with his hands resting on the weatherboard of the after cockpit, listening for anything that might explain that queer interruption of his rest.
Overhead, according to the calendar, there was a full moon, but the banks of sea-mist which had rolled up towards midnight, in one of those freakish fits of temperament that sometimes strike the north coast of France in early summer, had blanketed its light down to a mere ghostly glimmer that did no more than lend a tinge of grey luminance to the cloudy dark. Over on the other side of the estuary St Malo was lost without trace: even the riding lights of the yacht nearest to his own struggled to achieve more than a phosphorescent blur in the baffling obscurity. His own lights shed a thin diffused aurora over the sleek seaworthy lines of the Corsair, and reached no further beyond than he could have spun a match. He could see nothing that would give him his explanation, but he could listen, and his ears shared in that uncanny keenness of all his senses.
He stood motionless, nostrils slightly dilated almost as if he would have brought scent to his aid against the fog and sniffed information out of the dank saltiness of the dark. He heard the whisper of ripples against the hull and the faint chatter of the anchor-chain dipping a link or two as the Corsair worked with the tide. He heard the sibilant creak of a rope as the dinghy strained against the side of a craft moored two berths away, and the clanking rumble of a train rolling over the steel ways somewhere behind the dull strip of almost imperceptible luminousness that was Dinard. The mournful hooting of a ship groping towards harbour, way-out over the Channel towards Cherbourg, hardly more than a quiver of vibration in the clammy stillness, told him its own clear story. The murmur of indistinguishable voices somewhere across the water where the shout had come from he heard also, and could build up his own picture from the plunk of shoe-heels against timber and the grate of an oar slipping into its rowlock. All these things delineated themselves on his mind like shadings of background detail on a photographic plate, but none of them had the exact pitch of what he was listening for.
He heard it, presently—an ethereal swish of water, a tiny pitter of stray drops from an incautiously lifted head tinking back into the oily tide, a rustle of swift movement in the grey gloom that was scarcely audible above the hiss and lap of the sea under his own keel. But he heard it, and knew that it was the sound he had been waiting for.
He listened, turning his head slightly, ears pricked for a more precise definition of the sound. Over in the fog where the voices had been muttering he heard the whirr of a lanyard whipped from its coiling, and the sudden splutter and drone of an outboard motor taking life jarred into the fine tuning of his attention. Then he cut it out again, as one tunes out an interfering station on a sensitive radio receiver, and touched on that silent dragging cleave of the water once more, that sluicing ripple of an expert swimmer striving to pass through the water quickly but without noise. Nearer, too. Coming directly towards him.
Still Simon Templar did not move, but his immobility had an electric tension about it, like that of a leopard about to spring. Whatever might be happening out in that steamy darkness was not strictly any concern of his, except in the role of public-spirited citizen—which he was not. But it was for just that blithe willingness to meddle in affairs which did not concern him that he had come by the Corsair herself and all his other outward tokens of unlimited wealth, and which made certain persons think it so epically absurd that he should go about with the nickname of the Saint. Only for that sublimely lawless curiosity, a variegated assortment of people whose habitats ranged from the gutters of Paris to the high spots of Broadway, from the beaches of the South Pacific to the most sanctified offices of Scotland Yard, could see no just reason why he should be taking a millionaire’s holiday at Dinard instead of sewing mail-bags in Larkstone Prison or resting in a nice quiet cemetery with a stomachful of lead to digest. But the roots of that outlaw vigilance were too deep for cure, even if he had wished to cure them;, and out there in the vaporous twilight something odd was happ
ening of which he had to know more. Wherefore he listened, and heard the outboard chuffing around in the murk, and the swimmer coming closer.
And then he saw her. A shift of the air moved the mist-curtains capriciously at the very limit of his vision, and he saw her suddenly in the down-seeping nimbus of his riding lights.
Her.
It was that realisation of sex, guessed rather than positively asserted by the dimly-seen contour of her features and the glistening curve of a green bathing cap, which sent a skin-deep tingle of intuition plunging into profound and utter certainty. If it had been a man, he would not have lost interest, but he could have produced half a dozen commonplace theories to assimilate that final fact, with a regretful premonition that the adventure would not be likely to run for long. But a girl swimming stealthily through a fogbound sea at three o’clock in the morning could not be associated with yells and shooting in the dark by any prosaic theory, and his pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster at the knowledge. Somewhere out there in the leaden haze big medicine was seething up, and inevitably it was ordained that he must dip his spoon in the brew.
He was standing so motionless, half cloaked by the deep shadow of the deckhouse, that she had taken three more long strokes towards the ketch before she saw him. She stopped swimming abruptly, and stared up—he could almost read the wild thought tearing through her mind that she was caught in a trap, that in such a situation he could not help challenging her. And then, as the monotonous chugging of the outboard circled round and came closer, he caught in her upturned eyes a frantic forlorn-hope appeal, a desperate voiceless entreaty that placed the ultimate seal on his destiny in that adventure.
He leaned over the side and grasped her wrist, and her first revelation of his steel-wire strength was the amazing ease with which he lifted her inboard with one hand. Without a word he pushed her down on the floor of the cockpit and unhitched a fender, dipping it in the water to repeat the faint splash she had made as she came out.