The Saint and Mr Teal (Once more The Saint)

The Saint and Mr Teal is a 1933 collection of three Saint novellas by Leslie Charteris. Two of these stories had had previous magazine publication. It was originally published as Once More The Saint. Charteris wrote great novels and short stories but it always seemed to me that the novella was the format that suited him most.

By this stage in the Saint’s evolution he no longer has his little band of followers but he still has his live-in girlfriend Patrica Holm.

The early Saint stories were not always straightforward crime thrillers. There were often hints of espionage and international intrigue. Some are out-and-out spy thrillers. They are also often quite outrageous. There are even occasional hints of science fiction with high-tech gadgets and new scientific inventions driving some of the plots.

The Man from St Louis deals with a subject of some concern in Britain at the time, the fear that American-style gangsterism might take root in the British underworld.

In this novella an American gangster named Tex Goldman has found his home city of St Louis a bit too hot for him. He thinks London would be safer and would also offer more opportunities. In St Louis he was a fairly big fish in a fairly small pond. In London he’s confident he can become a really big fish in a really big pond.

He has acquired a couple of English stick-up men. Ted Orping likes the idea of becoming a proper Chicago-style hoodlum. He’s naturally vicious. Clem is less vicious but he has aspirations to being a tough guy as well. They’ve carried out a series of daring robberies on Tex’s behalf. The robberies have involved quite a few shootings, some of them fatal.

Chief Inspector Teal is aware of this situation but of course he’s hampered by silly annoyances like the need to find evidence. Simon Templar is also aware of this new criminal trend, he is determined to nip it in the bud and he is not the least bit constrained by the need to follow proper procedures. The Saint has already foiled one of the gang’s robberies. The contest between Simon and Tex has begun and each is determined to destroy the other.

Also involved in some way in Tex’s activities is Ronald Nilder. Nilder is mixed up in white slavery. The Saint has already marked Ronald Nilder for destruction.

Tex has decided that Simon Templar has to be eliminated but Ted proves to be over-confident and Simon too devious.

Typically for a Saint story there is a rather neat and very Saintly ending, and Simon Templar displays his taste for methods that are as ruthless as they are devious.

The Man from St Louis was adapted by Paddy Manning O’Brine (and renamed The Set-Up) as episode fifteen of season three of The Saint TV series which screened in January 1965.

The Gold Standard begins with Simon Templar being a witness to a murder in Paris. A dissolute young man named Brian Quell has been shot and before dying mutters something about gold.

Simon has meanwhile returned to London where he is outraged to discover that a burglar has left the Saint’s stick-figure trademark at the scene of the crime. Simon assures Chief Inspector Teal of his innocence and in fact he has an alibi.

Simon then finds that a Mr Jones is taking an interest in him. Not a very friendly interest. Mr Jones is also taking a distinctly unfriendly interest in Patricia Holm. The Saint is slowly starting to piece a picture together. The murder of Brian Quell, the disappearance of Quell’s eminent scientist brother and the unpleasant Mr Jones all fit into this picture somehow. As does poor Brian Quell’s dying statement.

The Saint will encounter both temptation and a moral dilemma and will need all his cunning and ruthlessness this time. The stakes turn out to be much higher than he’d imagined. He also has reason to think he may have dangerously underestimated Chief Inspector Teal.

The Gold Standard was adapted (with a title change to The Abductors) for the TV series by Brian Degas. It went to air in July 1965.

The Death Penalty is set on the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. Simon Templar is drawn into his latest adventure when he saves a pretty girl, Laura Berwick, from drowning. The Saint becomes really interested by the fact that her stepfather, a man named Stride, seems to have an unsavoury history. He is even more interested by the presence of Abdul Osman. He is encountered Osman before. That encounter ended very unpleasantly for Osman. Osman controls a vast criminal empire in the East, based on white slavery and drug trafficking. It appears that Laura’s stepfather is in the same line of work as Osman.

Osman has blackmailed Stride into retiring, thus leaving him in control of an even vaster criminal network. He is prepared to allow Stride to live but only if Stride gives him something he wants. What he wants is Laura. No decent human being would sell his own stepdaughter into white slavery but Stride is happy to do so.

Osman certainly wants Laura but what Osman mostly wants from life is the opportunity to humiliate those against him he has grudges. Men like his secretary Clements. Osman had been unlucky enough to attend one of England’s great public schools. At school Clements taunted him mercilessly for being an Asiatic. Osman has since taken a terrible revenge on Clements.

Templar feels that he ought to do something about this whole situation. Laura is a charming girl who knows nothing of her stepfather’s criminal activities. Simon will have to rescue her, because that’s the sort of thing he does.

The situation comes to a head on board Osman’s yacht. It ends with a man dead from a gunshot wound.

What’s interesting about this novella is that the plot is resolved satisfactorily, and then we discover that what we thought happened was not what happened at all.

The Gold Standard was adapted (with a title change to The Abductors) for the TV series by Brian Degas. It went to air in July 1965.

The Death Penalty was adapted by Ian Stuart Black as the ninth episode in the third season of The Saint TV series. It aired in December 1964.

Al three novellas have the rather devious sting-in-the-tail endings that Charteris did so well. The Saint and Mr Teal is fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the TV adaptations of all three novellas.

The Saint Goes West

The Saint Goes West is a 1942 collection of three Saint novellas by Leslie Charteris. Although he wrote fine novels and short stories I’ve always felt that the novella was the perfect form for Charteris. In this collection he demonstrates his complete mastery of the form.

The three novellas are Arizona, Palm Springs and Hollywood.

Leslie Charteris wrote a huge number of Saint stories from the late 1920s up to the early 1960s. The Saint went through several quite distinct incarnations during this time. For my money the most satisfactory versions of the Saint were the first version and the final version. In his initial incarnation Simon Templar is very young, dashing, reckless, carefree, irresponsible and irrepressible. He’s like an overgrown schoolboy, but a charming schoolboy. His sense of fun is infectious. He’s the leader of a criminal gang but they only steal from other criminals and spend more time fighting crime than committing it. Simon acquires a live-in girlfriend, Patricia Holm, and she is the great love of his life. The original version of the Saint is to be found in books such as The Saint Closes the Case and The Avenging Saint.

In his final incarnation he hasn’t aged much physically (he should be in his sixties in his final adventures but he always apparently remains in his thirties) but he’s grown up. He’s now a loner. He seems quite a bit older. He is wiser, and perhaps just a bit sadder. There’s just the faintest hint of melancholy. He is still recognisably the same man, but he has grown up. He has gained some depth. His thirst for adventure remains unquenched although at times you get the vague feeling that he is not entirely comfortable in the postwar world and the adventures are his way of coping with a duller, greyer, more conformist world. This version of Simon Templar can be seen fully formed in the 1948 story collection Saint Errant.

But in between there were a couple of other versions of the Saint. There is the Saint transplanted to America in the late 30s. And The Saint Goes West gives us another one of these transitional editions of Simon Templar.

Simon has been slightly Americanised (not surprising since Charteris had relocated to America and had become hugely popular there). I don’t think this version of the characters works quite as well as the earlier or later versions. He’s lost some of the over-the-top fun quality of the first version and hasn’t yet acquired the substance of the later Saint. But he’s still the Saint and he’s still entertaining.

On the plus side Charteris was at his peak when it came to plotting, especially in Palm Springs and Hollywood. And he uses the American settings extremely well.

In Arizona Simon Templar gets to do the whole cowboy routine. He’s set things up so that he can persuade a rancher to take him on as a hand. The rancher is involved in a dispute with a neighbour who wants to buy the ranch and is prepared to use underhand means to force a sale. The neighbour claims to want to buy the ranch because of a dispute over water rights.

Simon is willing to do the right thing and help out his new employer.

It seems like a classic western story but we suspect from the start that there’s some deeper reasons for the Saint’s presence in Arizona. Since this is a wartime story we further suspect that the reason has something to do with espionage or some dastardly German plot. We already know that Simon suspects that the rancher’s brother was murdered.

Simon finds time to strike up a bit of a romance with the rancher’s daughter.

It gradually becomes obvious that there’s a lot more at stake than water rights, and that the situation is likely to get very ugly.

This is the least successful of the three stories.

Palm Springs has an interesting history. Charteris wrote a screenplay for the RKO Saint series, called The Saint in Palm Springs. By the time the movie was shot there was nothing left of Charteris’s story. In 1941 Charteris wrote a photo-story (told with text and photos) for Life magazine. The story was called Palm Springs. Everybody, including Charteris himself, loved it. So he decided to use it as the basis for the novella Palm Springs.

A rich dissolute young man named Freddie Pellman hires Simon as a bodyguard. He thinks that a mobster is intending to have him rubbed out. Freddie lives in a palatial rambling house in Palm Springs with his harem. Yes, he has a harem. It comprises a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. It’s not always the same blonde, brunette and redhead but there’s always one of each. And no, they’re not just house guests or personal assistants or anything like that. It’s a real harem. The three girls all share Freddie’s bed (although not all at the same time). At this moment the harem comprises Esther, Ginny and Lissa.

Sure enough somebody does try to kill Freddie (he has a narrow escape). The Saint thinks it was an inside job. Which means the assassin has to be one of the three girls, or one of the three servants in the house. And for various reasons the servants seem unlikely suspects. So it’s probably one of the girls. All three are at least vaguely possible suspects.

They all have alibis, but the alibis are not too solid. And Simon doesn’t put too much stock in alibis. He’s made use of alibis himself and he knows how slippery they can be. The alibis do however play a part in the story.

It’s a fine little plot. There’s a somewhat decadent atmosphere, with a cast of colourful offbeat characters and as so often Charteris gets the tone just right - not too serious, not too whimsical. An excellent story.

In Hollywood Simon is offered a job by movie producer Byron Ufferlitz (he used to be a racketeer and now he’s in a different racket). He is rather taken aback when he finds out that he is being groomed for movie stardom. He isn’t sure he wants to be a a screen idol but working at a film studio has its compensations. Ufferlitz has a charming pretty secretary, Peggy Warden. And for publicity purposes Simon has to pretend to romance starlet April Quest. Since she’s also very pretty Simon decides Hollywood isn’t too bad a place.

There’s plenty of drama at the studio, provided not just by ex-racketeer producers and glamorous starlets but also by a couple of crazy screenwriters named Lazaroff and Kendricks, a director named Jack Groom and pretty-boy star Orlando Flane. All of whom have reasons to resent all the others.

So when murder occurs there’s no shortage of suspects. What really concerns Simon is that the police think he’s a suspect as well. So the Saint has a very strong motivation to find the real culprit.

There are some nicely planted clues and as with Palm Springs there’s plenty of misdirection. Another nicely constructed plot and another fine story with a nifty little ending.

So overall, The Saint Goes West does not offer my favourite version of the Saint but it does offer one good story and two excellent very clever stories and those two stories are good enough to lift this book into the highly recommended rating.

And, happily, this book is in print.

Leslie Charteris's The Brighter Buccaneer

The Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris is a 1933 short story collection. It features what William Vivian Butler in his excellent 1973 book The Durable Desperadoes (which deals with all the major literary rogues of the interwar years) calls the Mark II Saint. The late Saint, the Saint of the postwar years which Butler describes as the Mark V Saint, is in many ways the most interesting and sophisticated but the Mark II Saint is perhaps more fun. This is Simon Templar at his most carefree, most irresponsible and most sublimely self-confident.

This is also a Simon Templar who is unambiguously and unapologetically a thief and a crook. At this stage he’s a slightly more ethical version of Raffles. Raffles only steals from those who can afford the loss. Simon Templar steals from other crooks and from people who (in his opinion) deserve to be robbed.

This is also a Saint who still works with accomplices including the great love of his life, Patricia Holm. He has not yet become a loner.

All the stories in this collection deal with confidence tricks of some kind, or more specifically they deal with the Saint meting out justice to con-men while enriching himself in a most satisfying way. The confidence tricks are many and varied.

In The Brain Workers Simon rescues a young lady named Ruth Eden who had been attracting unwelcome attentions from her sleazy employer. Ruth has been forced to take on secretarial work after her mother was swindled into buying worthless shares. The Saint has a notion that he may be able to retrieve some of those losses for her. And dealing out justice to swindlers gives him an inordinate amount of pleasure. He may not even have to resort to violence. A very typical but effective Saintly adventure.

In The Export Trade Simon is hired by a solicitor to take a very valuable package to Paris. Simon has every intention of carrying out this commission honestly and faithfully. He is not supposed to open the package but his curiosity tempts him, and he believes one should always succumb to temptation. In this case it turns out to be a profitable decision. A very good story.

The Unblemished Bootlegger is another opportunity for Simon to mete out justice to a swindler (who in this case happens to be a bootlegger as well). Simon disapproves very strongly of swindlers and finds that the best way to deal with is by - swindling them. In this case he takes a different but equally effective approach. It’s unfortunate for this swindler that he doesn’t like the sea. Another good story.

The Owner’s Handicap takes Simon to the races where he becomes extremely interested in a racing scam. Simon knows a few scams of his own, all in a good cause of course. A pretty decent story.

The Tough Egg pits Simon against American gangster Max Kemmler who is making a lot of money from a gambling club in London. The Saint feels that it really would be highly desirable to relieve Max of some of his ill-gotten gains. Max is reputed to be a tough egg, which makes the prospect even more delightful. The Saint could of course simply stage a stick-up but that would be boring and lacking in style and that would deprive the exercise of most of its pleasure. It would be much more fun if Max could be persuaded to take an active part in his own fleecing. Another fine little tale.

The Bad Baron presents Simon with a rival. The Fox has quickly become an even more celebrated thief than the Saint. As for the baron, he owns a fabulously valuable jewel which is going to tempt both the Fox and the Saint. This one has a clever and unexpected, and untypical, ending. It’s a very good story.

The Brass Buddha is a story about a simple con game but with complications. It’s amazing that Charteris was able to write so many stories on this theme while giving each one a slightly different twist. A solid story.

In The Perfect Crime Simon pulls off a remarkably audacious con (with a sleazy money lender as the victim) that even Chief Inspector Teal seems impressed by. Teal knows exactly how Simon did it but there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it. A delightful story.

In The Appalling Politician the Saint gets to act as detective, working hand-in-glove with none other than Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. A very sensitive trade treaty has been stolen and it was a most puzzling crime. Simon discovers that solving mysteries can be almost as much fun as committing crimes, especially when he’s allowed to use his own distinctive methods. Quite a good story.

The Unpopular Landlord, Major Bellingford Smart, isn’t just unpopular. He’s a ruthless crook who mercilessly exploits his tenants. And he’s a crook for whom the Saint has plans. Those plans also involve the Countess of Albury’s diamonds. It’s always worth killing two birds with one stone. A good story.

The New Swindle concerns two con-men, one of whom is a renowned card sharp. They believe they really have found the Holy Grail - a brand-new swindle. The beauty of it is, if it works properly there’s nothing anybody can do about it. The only thing that could possible go wrong would be if Simon Templar decided to take a hand in things. A decent story.

In The Five-thousand-pound Kiss Simon renews an acquaintanceship with a competitor. She happens to be interested in a certain diamond which has also attracted the Saint’s attention. The end result is not what the Saint expected, but then the unexpected rather appeals to him.

The Green Goods Man deals with another very clever con involving the selling of real banknotes. How do you make a profit from selling real rather than counterfeit banknotes? That’s the beauty of the green goods con. And how do you turn such a con back on the con-man? That requires the peculiar talents of the Saint. A clever story.

The Blind Spot is not exactly about a confidence trick as such. It’s about a shady patents lawyer. Simon saves the life of a penniless inventor who has tried to throw himself under a train. The inventor, a man named Inwood, had finally come up with an invention that might actually make money but the shady patents lawyer stole his invention. Simon might not have taken the matter any further had he not remembered another invention he came across recently. This invention didn’t work, and that’s the beauty of it. Another fine story.

The Unusual Ending pits the Saint against an old foe from one of the earlier stories, man about to head off to South America with his ill-gotten gains. The ending of this story is not what the Saint expected but it’s rather neat.

Personally I love stories about confidence tricks so it was pretty much inevitable that I was going to enjoy this collection. What’s interesting is that it includes stories in which the Saint’s motivations are entirely selfless, others in which he is motivated to a large extent by his lust for loot. There are even stories in which the Saint ends up losing, but he doesn’t really lose since it’s the adventure that matters. A fine collection. Highly recommended.

Leslie Charteris's The Saint in Europe, and on TV

This is another instalment in my ongoing project to compare episodes of classic television series from the 1950s-1970s with their literary sources. In this case I’ve reviewed the 1953 Leslie Charteris collection The Saint in Europe and then I've looked at the adaptations of those stories in the 1960s The Saint TV series.

The Saint in Europe is from the final stage of the Saint's evolution as a character and it's that final incarnation on which the portrayal of the character in the TV series was based so it seems like the comparisons could be interesting.

Here's the link to my review and the comparisons at my Cult TV Lounge blog.

Leslie Charteris's Saint Errant

Saint Errant is a 1948 short story collection by Leslie Charteris and it’s notable for introducing a somewhat different version of the Saint. He is more of a loner, and with just the slightest touch of melancholy although of course combined with his perennial thirst for adventures. These adventures are no longer as outlandish.

The Saint has become somewhat more sophisticated and cosmopolitan. There are fewer jokes. He still has a sense of humour but it’s more sophisticated as well. The Saint has become somewhat more sophisticated and cosmopolitan. There are fewer jokes. He still has a sense of humour but it’s more sophisticated as well. The adventures are on a much smaller scale. The fates of nations are no longer at stake. There are personal dramas in which the Saint becomes involved. The adventures are on a much smaller scale. The fates of nations are no longer at stake. These are often personal dramas in which the Saint becomes involved. They often, in fact usually, involve crimes but they’re everyday crimes like murder, blackmail and robbery rather than espionage and treason and potential mass murder.

The Saint’s moral stance hasn’t changed. He is still the sworn enemy of evil-doers (the ungodly as he calls them) but he still sees no reason why fighting crime can’t be profitable. After all if he can recover stolen money and restore it to its rightful owners how could anyone object to his taking a ten percent commission?

All of the stories in this collection are named after women. And from this point on most of the Saint’s adventures will be set in motion by women. The Saint has an extraordinarily  large number of friends and acquaintances of the female persuasion. Patricia Holm, once his inseparable companion and the love of his life, is no longer a central character in the stories.

In Judith Simon Templar meets the sort of woman he likes most. She’s young and beautiful and she’s just about to commit a burglary. So what else can he do? He offers to commit the burglary himself. After all, it’s all in a good cause. Judith is simply stealing papers which should be hers. It’s a cute little story with a nice twist at the end.

Iris is an actress appearing in a production of Macbeth and she’s driving the director crazy. There’s not much the director, a pompous alcoholic has-been actor, can do since Iris’s husband is mobster Rick the Barber and he’s putting up the money for the production. Rick the Barber is at this very moment being blackmailed by Simon Templar, only Simon Templar knows nothing about it. But he certainly intends to find out. Not a bad story.

Lucia takes Simon to bandit country in Mexico. His arrival in a small coincides with the return of a man Amadeo who had left many years before. Amadeo claims to be a big wheel in the jewellery trade. The innkeeper Salvatore knows Amadeo well, and does not like him. When Amadeo boats of his wealth Salvatore boasts of his as well. Then Salvatore’s daughter Lucia is kidnapped.

The Saint has his own theories as to what Amadeo’s profession might really be, and also a fair idea what’s behind the kidnapping. As usual the twist that Charteris throws in at the end is effective and it’s appropriately Saintly. A fairly decent story.

In Lida Simon Templar and Patricia Holm are supposed to meet Lida Verity at the Quarterdeck Club, a perhaps not entirely honest and straightforward gambling club, in Miami. Lida was apparently in some sort of trouble and had asked the Saint for help. Unfortunately Lida’s visit to the Quarterdeck Club on this might is the last she will ever pay. Simon and Patricia find her dead. She has been shot and she is clutching an automatic.

Strangely enough absolutely everyone jumps to the conclusion that Mrs Verity shot herself although in fact the evidence clearly points to murder. The answer is to be found in the Quarterdeck Club somewhere. No-one at the club is anxious to talk but Simon Templar has a way of persuading people to do so. A solid if low-key story.

In Jeannine Simon is in New Orleans when he is reacquainted with Judith (from the previous story of that name) only now she calls herself Jeannine. She’s as beautiful and charming and captivating as ever but sadly her morals have not improved. Jeannine is again plotting larceny and again the Saint gets mixed up in her scheming. It’s all about pearls. Simon knows some extremely interesting things about pearls, and that knowledge will come in very handy. The twist at the end is typical Charteris and it’s very neatly done.

Teresa takes the Saint back to Mexico. Teresa Alvarez is looking for her husband. The suspicion is that he may have fallen into the hands of the notorious bandit El Rojo. She accepts that her husband is most likely dead but it wold be a comfort to her to know what actually happened to him. The Saint has his own reasons for wanting to meet El Rojo. They find the famous bandit and then a series of clever little plot twists kicks in. A very good story.

Luella begins with a chance encounter in a bar in Los Angeles. A young air force sergeant is set up by a blackmail gang. The bait is a young lady named Luella, of great physical charm but decidedly dubious character. For the Saint it’s too good an opportunity to miss - to put some blackmailers out of business, help a naïve but decent young man and have some fun along the way. He comes up with a neat scheme to fleece the blackmailers. A fairly serviceable tale although not as strong as most of the stories in this collection.

Emily is a very whimsical tale. Simon goes to the rescue of an old lady who has been sold a gold mine which sadly contains no gold whatsoever. Luckily Simon has recently acquired a Doodlebug and he’s pretty sure he can make use of it to right this particular wrong. An enjoyable story.

Dawn is the final story in the collection and to say it’s an oddity in the Charteris oeuvre wold be an understatement. The Saint is enjoying a peaceful time in a cabin in the mountains, fishing mostly, when a rather large man forces his way in. The man explains that he is Big Bill Holbrook but he isn’t real, he’s being dreamed by a bank teller named Andrew Faulks in Glendale California. There are men after Holbrook and it has something to do with the fabulous fire opal he shows Simon, and something to do with the girl named Dawn who has also turned up at the cabin. Of course Holbrook’s story is nonsense and Simon eventually decides that he knows what’s really going on. Or does he?

Right to the end Charteris teases us. Is it just a dream? Whose dream is it? Is it a crazy story that Holbrook has made up?

I’m not sure it entirely works but it’s an interesting experiment and Charteris manages to make it whimsical and slightly unsettling.

All of these stories take place in North America, but mostly in offbeat or remote or exotic North American locales. The tone is definitely quite different compared to the early 30s Saint stories with are the ones with which I was previously familiar. They’re much more low-key and they lack the manic energy of the earlier tales but they do have a charm of their own. And the new version of the Saint revealed in these stories is perhaps more human and more genuinely likeable, perhaps because his insane self-confidence (which is still in evidence) has been tempered a little by maturity. I wouldn’t say these later stories are better or worse than the earlier ones, they’re just very different. Highly recommended.

Judith, Lida, Teresa, Iris, Jeannine and Luella were all adapted for the TV series of The Saint. My thoughts on these adaptations can be found on Cult TV Lounge.

The Saint's Getaway

The Saint's Getaway was originally published in 1932 as Getaway, although two earlier versions of the story appeared in Thriller magazine earlier that year.

Simon Templar, his beloved Patricia Holm and his pal Monty Hayward are enjoying a well-earned holiday in Innsbruck. They are lying low, or at least are supposed to be lying low, after their previous adventure (recounted in The Saint vs Scotland Yard AKA The Holy Terror). Simon has promised Patricia that he won’t get himself into any trouble. Sadly that promise doesn’t last long. But what can a chap do when he sees a scrawny little runt of a fellow being beaten up by three thugs? Simon naturally intervenes. It turns out that the situation is not at all as it appeared to be and Simon has stumbled into a major and very dangerous conspiracy. Which of course absolutely delights him.

He’s up against a fine villain too - the smooth but sinister Prince Rudolf.

There are jewels involved. Extremely valuable jewels. Their value might well be more than merely monetary. The jewels have been stolen of course, but not necessarily for the usual reasons that jewels get stolen.

The police are anxious to recover the jewels. Prince Rudolf is very keen to have the jewels in his possession but he does not wish to become involved with the police. The question of the ownership of the gems might prove slightly troublesome. Since he was known to have the jewels on his person both the police and Prince Rudolf’s crew are now hot on the Saint’s trail and it is by no means certain that there are not other interested parties as well.

The pursuit is so relentless that Simon could be forgiven for focusing on escape for himself and his companions but in fact he is making grandiose plans involving those very valuable pieces of rock.

This is still the early Saint, the devil-may-care adventurer possessed of insane levels of self-confidence and optimism. The more the odds seem stacked against him the more he enjoys himself. His childish but exuberant sense of humour is very much in evidence. Whether the reader appreciates this sense of humour is a matter of taste. I like it and given Charteris’s immense commercial success it’s safe to say that most readers at the time did as well. Charteris’s style is, as it was in all his early work, outrageously over-the-top.

Like just about every fictional crime-fighter Simon Templar is of course a master of disguise. This is a feature that almost entirely disappears from popular fiction in the postwar period but back in 1932 it was more or less obligatory. The Saint’s ability to speak fluent German also comes in handy. Mostly though Templar relies on sheer bravado and bluff and a tendency to do things that are completely crazy but totally unexpected. These are qualities that other fictional heroes also possessed but none took them to quite such extremes as the Saint.

It also needs to be pointed out that the early Saint still had a very flexible approach to the law. He did after all start his career as a criminal. He is now very much on the side of the angels but a man is still entitled to make a living. The Saint would never even consider stealing from decent law-abiding folk but he tends to regard stealing from criminals (the ungodly as he calls them) in a much more favourable light. He considers himself to be basically an honest man but there are irritating individuals in the police forces of several countries who take a different view and some of them are so unreasonable as to to wish to put the Saint behind bars. Which of course as far as the Saint is concerned just adds a bit more fun to life.

Leslie Charteris was especially enamoured of the short story and novella formats but he demonstrates here that he was equally adept at writing novels. He keeps events moving at a blistering pace and he spins a pleasingly intricate plot. There’s as much action as any reasonable person could want.

The Saint's Getaway is a rollicking roller-coaster ride to adventure. Highly recommended.

The Saint vs Scotland Yard

The Saint vs Scotland Yard (originally published as The Holy Terror in 1932) is a collection of three novellas featuring Simon Templar, the Saint. The novella was probably the ideal format for stories about The Saint and Leslie Charteris made use of it frequently.

The Saint stories fall into several very distinct phases and this collection still very much belongs to the first phase. Although Simon Templar no longer has his gang he does still have Patricia as an invaluable partner in his adventures. The partnership with Patricia was a little daring for the early 30s since it is crystal clear that she is his live-in lover and that marriage does not figure in their plans for the future.

First up in this collection is The Inland Revenue and it deals with the battle of wits between Templar and the ruthless criminal mastermind known as the Scorpion. The Scorpion’s speciality is blackmail, on a rather spectacular scale. He is slightly unusual among literary diabolical criminal masterminds in that he is essentially a gifted amateur criminal, albeit a very ambitious one. He is also unusual in being something of a lone wolf.

Simon Templar is certainly not afraid of criminals like the Scorpion but in The Inland Revenue Service he has finally encountered an enemy he cannot defeat. He is going to have to pay the very large tax bill with which they have just presented him. Or rather someone is going to have to pay it and Simon is determined that the money is not actually going to come out of his own pocket.

The Scorpion might be an amateur but he proves to be a dangerous and cold-blooded adversary.

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal has accepted Templar’s assistance many times in the past but generally with reluctance and a deep sense of foreboding. In this story however he is prepared to accept the Saint’s help willingly and with remarkably good grace.

The Million Pound Day begins with a scream and a terrified man being pursued by a figure who seems to have stepped straight out of the steamy jungles of Darkest Africa. It’s nothing to do with Simon but of course he intervenes and he discovers that he has stumbled upon a gigantic international currency racket. This racket is going to cause untold economic devastation so this is one adventure in which the Saint’s motives are almost entirely pure.

This time he’s up against a much more profession type of villain, one whose methods are so thorough and so devious, and so murderous, that one false step will mean instant death. To Simon Templar of course this makes the whole affair even more appealing.

These first two stories are fairly standard Saint tales, with Simon cheerfully hoodwinking other thieves. The third novella, The Melancholy Journey of Mr Teal, is rather different.

In this story Simon Templar is after some diamonds. A rather considerable quantity of them. They don’t belong to Simon, but then technically they don’t belong to the man who is currently in possession of them either. Since they’re already stolen they might as well be benefiting Simon’s bank account rather than someone else’s. Fortunately Simon’s ethics are somewhat flexible on matters such as this.

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal would like to find the diamonds as well, and the man who stole them. But mostly he would like, at long last, to find a way to lay the blame for a crime at Simon’s feet and make the charges stick. It has become an obsession.

In this story the long duel between the Saint and Chief Inspector Teal takes a turn that neither the Saint nor Teal could have anticipated and both men are going to be forced to deal with a dramatic change in their relations. The Saint’s life will also reach a crossroads. He will have to think seriously about the future and this is not something he finds easy to do.

Most successful thriller writers find a formula that works and more or less stick to it, and when they create a successful hero that hero tends not to change very much. Leslie Charteris was a bit different in this respect. Over the course of his lengthy literary career the Saint did change. The circumstances of his life changed, and his character evolved somewhat as well. The Saint did something that few thriller heroes do - he got older and wiser, and perhaps just a little sadder. The Melancholy Journey of Mr Teal is the first indication that the Saint’s personality might not be set in stone. He always remained recognisably the same character but gradually he became a slightly more mature version of that character. In this story Simon Templar has the first intimations that his life may not continue forever in the exact same manner. It is fascinating to see hints of this in what is still a very early Saint story. Charteris was the master of the light-hearted thriller but there was a touch of subtlety in his writing that one doesn’t quite expect. It’s typical of Charteris that these hints of subtlety never interfere with the fun.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with Charteris’s ability to construct a plot the real attraction is, as always, the sheer joy and reckless bravado with which Simon Templar enters into the battle of wits and the superb lightness of touch of the author. In the early Saint books Charteris would push the jokiness about as far as it could be pushed and then some and while this is a risky approach (which in the hands of a lesser writer could easily become irritating) somehow he always gets away with it. Which is appropriate since the Saint’s own approach to life is one of cheerfully accepting insane risks.

The Saint vs Scotland Yard is splendid entertainment. Highly recommended.

The Giant Book of Short Crime Stories

I’ve been in the mood for short stories recently, so herewith a miscellany of short crime fiction taken from the Bill Pronzini and Martin Greenberg edited anthology The Giant Book of Short Crime Stories. The twelve stories included are really novellas rather short stories. Some I’ve read before so I’ll mainly concentrate here on those that were new to me.

The twelve novellas are an odd assortment. There’s a definite bias towards the hard-boiled  style but there are a few stories that are rather surprising inclusions. I’ve written at length elsewhere about my enthusiasm for Leslie Charteris’s early Saint stories so I won’t say much about The Lawless Lady other than noting that it’s a great story although perhaps more a thriller than what would normally be considered a crime story (it's included in the collection Enter the Saint). Erle Stanley Gardner’s Death Rides a Boxcar is a spy story although it’s moderately hard-boiled. And the Mignon Eberhart story is a very surprising inclusion indeed - Eberhart was about as far removed from the hard-boiled ethos as could possibly be imagined. Nightmare is a typically twisted Cornell Woolrich tale.

Rex Stout’s 1953 novella The Zero Clue includes a fine and clever use of the dying clue trope. A mathematical wizard named Leo Heller has realised that he can use probability theory to go into business predicting things for clients. Not the usual things that probability theory would be used for, but predicting things of relevance to individuals in either their personal or business lives. Nero Wolfe has had some dealings with this mathematical wizard and he does not entirely approve him although his disapproval may be based on the fact that Heller managed to beat Wolfe to the solution of a previous case. Now Heller is convinced that one of his clients is about to commit a serious crime. He is not certain of this but considers it to be mathematically very probable.

There is indeed a crime. And a dying clue that even Nero Wolfe has trouble unravelling. 

Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are in fine form, Wolfe drinks lots of beer, there’s a scene in the orchid room and Wolfe as usual gets the better of the NYPD Homicide cops. So there are all the regular ingredients of a fine Nero Wolfe story with the added bonus of a mathematical puzzle and that clever dying clue. I happen to be inordinately fond of the Nero Wolfe stories and I found this one to be pretty satisfying.

Ross Macdonald’s The Bearded Lady is a 1955 story featuring his private eye Lew Archer. It’s a fairly routine private eye tale obviously owing a great deal to Chandler although Lew Archer seems to be more prosperous and a good deal less seedy than Philip Marlowe. 

Archer stumbles into a case involving an old army buddy who has become an impecunious  painter in a sort of artists’ colony in California. There’s a murder and a valuable Old Master  painting gets stolen plus there’s a complicated romantic entanglement. Chandler was often accused (not always entirely justly) of being less than sure-footed in his plotting. Chandler however was never as incoherent as this. There are several strands to Macdonald’s plot and for the life of me I can’t figure out how they are supposed to be connected. It also lacks Chandler’s gift for sparkling dialogue. I have to admit up front that I have some reservations about the hard-boiled style although to be honest The Bearded Lady is at best medium-boiled. This is my first encounter with Macdonald’s writing so I don’t want to be too dismissive - I have no idea if this story is considered to be one of his better efforts or not.

Death’s Eye View is a 1953 story by John D. MacDonald. An explosion at sea, a rich old man who values power over all else, a dynastic struggle and a man caught up in a drama that is really none of his business - these are the ingredients for an intriguing tale although there’s no mystery here and not really a great deal of suspense. Not a bad story and certainly well-written but it doesn’t quite convince us the protagonist is in mortal danger.

Mignon Eberhart (1899-1996) was a representative of the Had I But Known school of detective fiction. Thankfully the short story format gives her less scope than usual for indulging in this sort of thing. Eberhart was also very much a believer in adding lots of love and romance to the detective story genre. One of her series detectives was Susan Dare, yet another fictional detective who writes detective stories. Her 1934 story Introducing Susan Dare has her heroine plunged into a world of romantic intrigues and murder in an isolated house in the Carolinas. While Susan dare manages to solve the case she does so mostly by accident although at least she has to be given credit for being observant. The vital clue is clever enough but this cannot reasonably be called a fair-play mystery since that clue depends on specialised knowledge that the reader is unlikely to have. 

Eberhart was immensely popular in her day and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years. She wrote a type of detective fiction that is definitely not to my taste. Those who enjoy the Had I But Known school with added romance may get more enjoyment from her work. Her heroines also had a habit of getting themselves into dangerous situations, usually for no good reason.

Ed McBain’s Storm represents my introduction to the world of the homicide cops of the 87th Precinct. McBain wrote countless novels and stories featuring various detectives from   the 87th Precinct of the police force in a fictional city clearly based closely on New York City. 

In this story one of these cops, Cotton Hawes, is spending his vacation in a skiing resort, accompanied by an actress friend with whom he is hoping to become better acquainted. What he doesn’t expect is to find himself in the middle of a double murder. Hawes decides to help out the local police in their investigation even though the Sheriff has made it plain that he doesn’t want any help from a big city cop. This is a pretty decent police procedural and the fact that Hawes is acting unofficially makes it a bit more interesting. The murders are brutal and difficult to explain but the key to the case is Hawes’ use of his powers of observation.

Hugh Pentecost’s The Murder Machine appeared in 1950. It’s one of several stories he wrote featuring New York detective Lieutenant Pascal. Pascal is also on vacation, visiting his Uncle Ben who is the sheriff of a mining town. Pascal has been expounding his views on crime including his belief that the police should do more to prevent crime rather than reacting after the event. Pascal however may not be able to prevent the crime that is about  to rock the town. This is an impossible crime story. Accidents can happen in a mining operation but some accidents are simply not possible and that’s the case here. The apparent cause of the accident could not have caused it. There’s a good scientific puzzle plot here with an unexpected hard-boiled twist. A good story by a writer I’d never even heard of.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s 1944 story Death Rides a Boxcar is an espionage story involving freight cars, a disappearing body, a purse containing a very large sum of money, a series of railroad switching instructions, two girls who may or may not be innocent bystanders and a nefarious plot by enemy agents to sabotage the war effort. The railroading stuff is quite fascinating. For Gardner this is something of a return to the pulpy hard-boiled style of his early work for Black Mask and there’s plenty of action. It’s understandable that in 1944 Gardner wanted to try his hand at a patriotic story about evil enemy spies and it at least has some originality. And it’s entertaining (but then Gardner alway is entertaining).

An odd but interesting assortment of stories in this anthology. Recommended.

best non-crime books read in 2015

These were my favourite non-crime reads of 2015 (I’ll do a separate post for my favourite crime books of the year).

Stanley J. Weyman, Under the Red Robe (1894) - intelligent swashbuckling.

Leslie Charteris, Enter the Saint (1930) - three very entertaining novellas.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jungle Girl (1933), not a lady Tarzan but a fine lost civilisation tale.

Perley Poore Sheehan, The Red Road to Shamballah (1933), a great pulpy adventure story.

Edison Marshall, Dian of the Lost Land (1935), a fine lost world tale.

John P. Marquand, Thank You, Mr Moto (1936), an unusual spy thriller

Berkeley Gray, Miss Dynamite (1939), an outrageous and immensely enjoyable thriller.

Manning Coles, Drink to Yesterday (1940), a thoughtful and rather dark Great War spy tale.

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), chiling alien invasion story.

Alistair MacLean, The Dark Crusader (1961), a superbly crafted adrenaline-rush thriller.

And of these ten which would be my pick as the best book I read in 2015? I think I'd have to go for Berkeley Gray's Miss Dynamite - so much fun in one book.

Enter the Saint

Enter the Saint is a collection of three very early novellas (The Man Who Was Clever, The Policeman with Wings and The Lawless Lady) recounting the adventures of Simon Templar, alias The Saint. It appeared in book form in 1930.

Leslie Charteris (1907-1993) was a writer who achieved success remarkably quickly. He was nineteen when his first novel was published. The Saint was one of his very early creations although it took him a while to realise that this character was so perfect for his purposes that there was little point in bothering with any others. By 1930 he certainly was aware of this. 

While Charteris wrote some fine Saint novels and short stories it was the novella that became his preferred format. It offered enough scope for reasonably complex plots while remaining fast-paced and exciting. As he himself put it it also has one great advantage for a writer - it can be finished before its author grows tired of it.

The three novellas in this collection are perhaps not quite as polished as some of his later efforts but they more than make up for this in sheer energy and vitality. 

Both the character of Simon Templar and the tone of the books evolved over time, going through several well-defined and very distinctive phases. In these three novellas we see the very earliest incarnation of The Saint. He is young, reckless and insanely self-confident. He is also exceptionally ruthless - far more ruthless than any of the TV or movie versions of the character. This Simon Templar is a killer. He only kills people who thoroughly deserve it, and only does so when he feels that he has to, but when he considers it to be necessary he does so without hesitation and without being troubled by any sense of guilt. 

This early Simon Templar is also a crook. He only steals from other criminals and he gives most of the proceeds to charity but he does take a healthy “commission” for himself and his gang. And he also feels no qualms of conscience about the illegality of his actions. His code of ethics might be unconventional in the extreme but it is also in its own way quite rigid and so long as he remains within his self-imposed moral code he is entirely untroubled by guilt.

While Simon Templar’s nickname The Saint and his habit of referring to wrongdoers as the ungodly are part of his carefully contrived image, intended to strike fear into his underworld enemies, there is perhaps just a hint of an actual quasi-religious element here. The Saint has no respect for the laws of the land but he has a very great respect for what could be described as a higher moral law. He is in some ways truly an avenging angel, punishing the wicked in a manner that would not be out of place in the Old Testament. Whether Templar has any actual religious belief is never stated but he does rather behave as if his campaign against crime is motivated by at least some kind of abstract belief in divine retribution.

The Saint’s relationship with his would-be nemesis Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard (who makes his first appearance in these tales) is established. They are sometimes adversaries and sometimes allies. Teal has high hopes of arresting The Saint although it’s clear that these hopes are unlikely ever to be fulfilled. There’s a certain respect between the two men and even a grudging degree of affection. Teal strongly disapproves of Templar’s methods but he has to admit that they are effective and that they do often serve the cause of justice, if not the cause of law. These stories also introduce some of the members of The Saint’s gang, such as Dicky Tremayne. Others would gradually make their appearance in subsequent stories. In fact Dicky Tremayne is the central character in The Lawless Lady with The Saint playing a somewhat subordinate role.

In The Man Who Was Clever Simon pits his wits against a drug smuggler while The Policeman with Wings involves kidnapping and jewel theft. They’re both fine stories but The Lawless Lady is perhaps even better, a tale of an ambitious seagoing jewel robbery complicated by the fact that Simon’s pal Dicky Tremayne is in love with the glamorous and very dangerous lady gangster masterminding the whole nefarious conspiracy.

Charteris’s style is both energetic and whimsical, just like his hero. It’s a style that was attempted by a number of the great thriller writers of the interwar years but no other writer ever pulled off with quite the same breath-taking bravado and sense of style.

Simon Templar first appeared in the 1928 novel Meet the Tiger. Enter the Saint was the second of the Saint books, followed in the same year by the splendid The Saint Closes the Case (also published as The Last Hero).

For anyone who has not yet sampled the delights of Leslie Charteris’s superb thrillers Enter the Saint is a good starting point. It is highly desirable to read the Saint books in chronological order and Enter the Saint offers the opportunity to see The Saint in action at the beginning of his illustrious career. Highly recommended.

Leslie Charteris’s Featuring the Saint

Featuring the Saint, published in 1931, was one of Leslie Charteris’s early books about his famous hero Simon Templar, the Saint. It is a collection of three novellas. Charteris could write short stories and novels quite successfully but he was particularly fond of the novella, a form that suited his talents to perfection.

The first of the novellas is The Logical Adventure, in which the Saint takes on impresario and crook Mr Francis Lemuel. His first step is to secure employment as Lemuel’s private pilot, an occupation which will afford the Saint ample opportunities to display his daredevil qualities. He has discovered that Lemuel is involved in large-scale cocaine smuggling. The Saint has no particular problems with bending the law a little himself but drugs and destroying people’s lives are another matter. Even in the days when he was on the wrong side of the law he had always been a very moral sort of outlaw. This adventure promises the opportunity to bring an evil man to justice and quite likely enrich himself somewhat as well, and that’s the kind of adventure he’s most fond of.

This affair ends up being rather more serious than he’d anticipated and it appears that murder may be the only way to resolve it. Well, there are times when murder can be a public service. The trick of course is not to end up getting murdered oneself. There may also be some difficulties with his old friend Chief Inspector Teal, but those difficulties are unlikely to be insurmountable.

The Wonderful War sees Simon Templar in a different role, as a revolutionary in Central America. These were, as he explains, the happy pre-Castro days when revolution was more of a sport than anything else. The Republic of Pasala has, oddly enough, never had a revolution. And Simon has never actually organised a revolution. But really, how difficult can such things be? He only has a few weeks to spare but that should be ample time. The army of Pasala, comprising 500 enlisted men commanded by no fewer than seventeen generals, is unlikely to be a major problem. Simon will discover that organising a revolution is every bit as much fun as he’d expected it to be, and only slightly more difficult. And it’s not as if he has to do it all himself. He has his old friend Archibald Sheridan to help him and they can also rely on invaluable assistance from a drunken Irishman named Kelly.

Simon is not fomenting revolution for his own entertainment (although he will derive a great deal of amusement from the undertaking) - there is a lady whose fortune has been stolen from her and Simon Templar is not the man to ignore a lady in distress.

The Man Who Could Not Die pits the Saint against Miles Hallin, a sportsman, adventurer and entrepreneur (of the shady variety of course). Hallin is famous as The Man Who Can Not Die and indeed he does seem to have cheated death with remarkable success and with equally remarkable frequency. Simon has a theory about this, that a man who cannot die is likely to be a man who is in reality inordinately afraid of death. He tries to explain the details of his theory to Patricia Holm (his lady love at this stage of his career). It’s somewhat obscure to her but she has no doubt that somehow or other it does make sense to Simon.

Simon has also come to suspect that a man who cheats death so often may in fact have done so at the expense of others. Perhaps Miles Hallin cannot die but people around him seem to do so with unusual frequency.

This is the very early Saint, when Charteris’s hero was simultaneously both more carefree and rather darker than his later incarnations. Certainly rather more ruthless. The early Saint’s methods for dealing with the ungodly were frequently quite extreme and often very final.

As you would expect the Saint still finds time to improvise verses and sing or song or two. It’s all part of the fun of getting mixed up in adventures.

All three novellas are tremendous fun and The Man Who Could Not Die in particular is vintage early Charteris. Highly recommended.

The Saint on the Spanish Main

In his excellent critical study of the thriller genres, The Durable Desperadoes, William Vivian Butler points out there are five quite distinct phases in the career of Leslie Charteris’s The Saint. The first three phases occurred during the 1930s, the fourth was the wartime Saint, and the final phase began in the late 40s. The Mark V Saint was a very different character to any of the earlier versions.

So far I’ve been confining my attentions to the early incarnations of Simon Templar. The 1955  short story collection The Saint on the Spanish Main represents my first exposure to this Mark V Saint, and it’s rather startling. For one thing, The Saint is now very much a loner. In his earlier versions Templar was always the leader of a gang. Not a gang of criminals, although Simon’s activities were often borderline illegal, and in some cases quite blatantly illegal. The Saint’s followers in the first books, from the early 1930s, are more like Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, and he even had his very own Maid Marian in the form of Patricia Holm. This early Saint was very much a team player, and given the scale of his operations he needed to be.

The Mark V Saint not only works alone, he lives alone. He lives mostly in hotel rooms. His lifestyle is glamorous and lavish and he is never short of feminine company for very long but at the same time there is a subtly air of melancholy about him. This is no longer the outrageously exuberant larger-than-life Simon Templar who seemed possessed of inexhaustible energy and an equally inexhaustible capacity for irrepressible schoolboy humour. There is no question that this is a slightly older Simon Templar and that he is a sadder but wiser man.

As Butler also pointed out in his book Leslie Charteris made a conscious decision to scale down The Saint. He is no longer battling diabolical criminal masterminds and the fate of civilisation itself no longer hangs in the balance. Simon Templar’s life is as adventurous as ever but the adventures are on a smaller scale. To have even as redoubtable a hero as The Saint battling evil on an epic scale entirely alone would hardly have been convincing. His adventures are now of the sort that a solitary world-traveller can easily cope with.

The whimsicality is still there, but it’s a gentle whimsicality. Simon Templar still finds that the world provides a great deal of amusement but it’s no longer the amusement that an overgrown schoolboy would find. It is the amusement of a sophisticated, intelligent and rather thoughtful man. He is still a youthful figure but he is clearly now much closer to middle age, although we can be sure it will be a vigorous and lively middle age.

Simon Templar has certainly not turned over a new leaf. He still dabbles in crime, although as always his victims are villains who thoroughly deserve to be fleeced. 

Charteris has not lost any of his old skill. He has merely adapted his skills to changing times. He has created a Saint who is as much at home in the world of the 1950s as his earlier incarnation was in the world of the early 1930s. Thriller writers are not renowned for character development but that is what Charteris has attempted, and rather successfully. The Simon Templar of the 1950s is the sort of man that the Simon Templar of the 1930s might well have grown into, more reflective and slightly less reckless, but with the benefit of age and experience.

Having The Saint island-hopping through the Caribbean provides perfect settings for adventures, and the adventures come thick and fast. Simon Templar finds himself searching for sunken treasure (The Old Treasure Story), foiling a revolution in Jamaica (The Black Commissar), solving an ingenious murder (The Arrow of God) and getting the better of some rather nasty villains (The Unkind Philanthropist and The Effete Angler). In The Questing Tycoon he discovers that there’s rather more to voodoo than he’d thought.

Charteris uses the settings with skill and as more than just colourful backgrounds.

The 1960s TV series The Saint is very similar in tone to this short story collection.

On the whole I think I prefer the Mark II Saint of the early 1930s but The Saint on the Spanish Main is an intriguing collection. Charteris was a master of the short story form, a form which he always preferred. Highly recommended.

The Avenging Saint (AKA Knight Templar)

The Avenging Saint (originally published in 1930 as Knight Templar) is one of Leslie Charteris’s early Saint novels. The character was already well-established and Charteris was on a roll by then.

Leslie Charteris (1907-1993) was born in Singapore. His mother was English while his father was Chinese. He was brought up and educated in England. He moved to the US in 1932 and later became an American citizen.

The Simon Templar of the novels is rather different from any of his incarnations on either the big screen or the small. He is tougher and much more ruthless and has considerable less respect for the law. The very earliest Saint stories certainly imply that Simon Templar had been an out-and-out criminal, albeit one with his own quirky code of morality. If he was going to steal he preferred stealing from other crooks.

By 1930 he is established as one of the good guys, but one who prefers to take the law into his own hands, and his kind of justice is somewhat rougher than the kind handed down at the Old Bailey.

Charteris’s debt to Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond stories is very obvious in this novel. Like Captain Drummond he has his band of followers although by this time it has been reduced to a single side-kick, Roger Conway. The Saint even has the same rather childish sense of humour as Drummond (this was one of the elements toned down in the TV and movie versions and that is perhaps a good thing). Like Drummond the Saint doesn’t bother with ordinary run-of-the-mill criminals - he likes to go after diabolical criminal masterminds, and fortunately England was apparently awash with such types in the interwar years.

In The Avenging Saint there is once again a criminal conspiracy so ambitious that it threatens the very survival of western civilisation. If it succeeds it will plunge Europe and probably the world into war. It’s the kind of conspiracy that the authorities would almost certainly regard with scepticism so Simon and Roger will have to save Europe on their own. Which suits Simon down to the ground, he being the type who would find it impossible to work with any kind of professional law-enforcement agency.

As well as saving the world Simon Templar also has to save a millionaire’s daughter who has been caught up in the machinations of the diabolical criminal mastermind Rayt Marius.

The Avenging Saint is a sequel to an earlier novel, The Last Hero (which in common with many of the early Saint books was also published under a bewildering array of alternative titles). It shares the same diabolical criminal mastermind, the delightfully evil and unhinged Rayt Marius. In The Last Hero Charteris explains the villain’s plot in considerable detail but in The Avenging Saint he keeps it rather vague. He had presumably realised by this time that whatever the details of the conspiracy it was essentially a McGuffin, serving merely to put in train the series of adventures. It was the action that counted and Charteris supplies that in prodigious quantities, culminating with Simon Templar boarding a train from an aircraft while the aircraft is airborne.

The first Saint stories were essentially crime stories but The Last Hero saw Charteris moving into the thriller arena with international intrigue and with much more extravagant plotting and even a hint of science fiction.

Most of the Saint stories were short stories or novellas but Charteris has no particular problem coping with the longer format of the novel.

The Avenging Saint displays the Charteris formula to perfection - basically an insanely unlikely romp of a plot done very much tongue-in-cheek and with a great deal of flair. It’s immense fun and is highly recommended.

Alias the Saint

Leslie Charteris is now all but forgotten, but for much of the 20th century he was an immensely popular author, and the adventures of his fictional hero Simon Templar, known as The Saint, could be followed in radio serials, a succession of B-movies in the 1940s (initially starring the delightful George Sanders, and later Sanders’ brother Tom Conway), a 1960s TV series, another TV series in the 1970s, and several 1960s movies.

Charteris, who was born in Singapore, was in fact half-Chinese and half-English. He later an American citizen (although this involved a considerable struggle on his part because of the racist immigration laws of the time).

Alias the Saint is one of the earlier books featuring Simon Templar, and came out in 1931. It actually comprises three novellas. It differs from most English crime fiction of that time in that the hero is (despite his name) morally somewhat dubious. He was at one time an out-and-out criminal, and although he’s now on the side of the angels (mostly) his methods are often only marginally legal, and at times clearly illegal. In some ways the stories are a cross between detective fiction and adventure stories. They’re fun in their own way, and Templar is a charming and rather likeable rogue.

The Saint Closes the Case

The Saint Closes the Case was one of the fairly early novels of Leslie Charteris featuring Simon Templar, The Saint. It originally appeared in 1930 under the title The Last Hero.

It provides a rather good illustration of the crucial difference between Charteris’s novels and the various movies and television series based on them. The tone is equally jokey but in the books the jokiness alternates with some fairly dark and even grim moments. In this case Simon Templar and his friends face a very major moral dilemma and solve it in a manner far more ruthless than would ever have been allowed in the movies or the TV series.

The Saint stumbles upon a plan by a brilliant but not especially sane scientist to build a secret weapon of immense destructive potential. It’s a weapon that will make the carnage of the First World War seem like a Sunday School picnic. And it’s more than a mere plan. The scientist has built a working prototype.

Simon Templar soon realises that there is a link between this invention and an incident in which he was involved a short time before, when he saved the life of a Central European prince. He also discovers that there are several parties that are anxious to obtain the secret weapon in question and Templar is not at all sure he’s happy with the idea of any of them getting their hands on it.

This adventure will bring him into conflict once more with his old nemesis, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal. It will also force up Simon Templar the disturbing revelation that he has fallen in love in a rather serious way indeed.

The Saint has always had an ambiguous relationship with the forces of law and order. He might be on the side of the angels but he spends a good deal of time on the wrong side of the law. He has a very strong moral code but it doesn’t require him to be overly fastidious about breaking laws that happen to be inconvenient.

The Saint Closes the Case has enough plot twists and double-crosses to keep any thriller fan happy. Charteris’s books are masterful entertainment and this one is certainly highly recommended.

The Saint Meets his Match

The Saint Meets his Match (originally published in 1931 as She Was a Lady) is fairly typical of Leslie Charteris’s early Saint novels. In other words it’s a great deal of fun.

Simon Templar gets mixed up with the Angels of Doom, a criminal gang whose activities are mostly concentrated on making the police look foolish. The gang is led by a beautiful, glamorous, ruthless and deadly young woman named Jill Trelawny. She has a major grudge against the police - her father as an Assistant Commissioner who was dismissed for corruption but she has always believed in his innocence.

This time Simon Templar, one-time notorious criminal, is not just working with the police, He’s actually joined the police force. At least on a temporary basis. His old nemesis Chief Inspector Teal is not entirely convinced that The Saint is not still playing some underhand game of his own. And in fact Templar is soon involved far more closely with the leader of the Angels of Doom than is perhaps quite proper for a member of the Metropolitan Police. Chief Inspector Teal is both right and wrong about his old enemy’s motives, but he is right in his assumption that The Saint is not going to fit comfortably into his new job.

Of course many things turn out not to have been what they seemed, and there are plenty of entertaining plot twists.

The Saint of Charteris’s books is more morally ambiguous and more interesting than the various TV and movie versions of the character. The charm and the endless succession of witticisms are still there though. Templar is so heroic and so clever that he’s in danger of becoming annoying but that never happen. There’s enough self-mockery in the character to avoid that anger, and Charteris’s touch is light enough that we don’t really mind. And there’s an edge of ruthlessness and opportunism to the character that is missing from the TV and movie incarnations that nicely counter-balances his virtues.

The tone of this novel is extremely playful, with Templar constantly drawing attention to his role as a story-book hero, and pointing out the ways in which his behaviour differs from what you’d expect from a hero of fiction.

A polished and sophisticated crime thriller with a nicely tongue-in-cheek approach, not to be taken seriously but perfect escapist entertainment.