The Saint in New York (1935)

The Saint in New York is a full-length novel, and Charteris’ 15th Saint book. Saint expert Burl Barer indicates that The Saint in New York was the first “bestseller” of the Simon Templar series, and was the book that established Charteris as a literary celebrity in America and Britain. Due to the book’s popularity, it became the first Simon Templar story to be purchased by a film company (RKO Radio Pictures), and it was eventually released as a film in 1938.

First, Charteris neatly deals with the problem of introducing the Saint to a new continent and a new readership by having Chief-Inspector Teal send a dossier of the Saint’s previous activities over to New York detective Inspector John Fernack. This dossier provides the opening of the prologue.

As might be expected, the story is grittier and more down-to-earth than usual, and involves crime lords, gangsters, henchmen, and corrupt high-ranking New York City officials in charge of a legal system that doesn’t always achieve justice for the victim or punishment for the guilty. The situation obviously needs the Saint’s own brand of self-administered justice, which puts him in opposition to the Police Department.

Fernack explains the problem:

“Up at the top of this city,” he said slowly, “there’s a political organization called Tammany Hall. They’re the boys who fill all the public offices, and before you were born they’d made electioneering into such an exact science that they just don’t even think about it any more. They turn out their voters like an army parade, their hired hoodlums guard the polls, and their employees count the votes. The boss of Tammany Hall is a man called Robert Orcread, and the nickname he gave himself is Honest Bob. Outside the City Hall there’s a fine bit of a statue called Civic Virtue, and inside there’s the biggest collection of crooks and grafters that ever ran a city.

“There’s a district attorney named Marcus Yeald who’s so crooked you could use him to pull corks with; and his cases come up before a row of judges like Nather. Things are different here from what they are in your country. Over here our judges get elected; and every time a case comes up before them they have to sit down and figure out what the guy’s political pull is, or maybe somebody higher up just tells ‘em so they won’t make any mistake, because if a judge sends a guy up the river who’s got a big political drag there’s going to be somebody else sittin’ in his chair when the next election comes round.

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The Saint Goes On (1934)

This book is another collection of three action-oriented novellas, the shorter form stories that allowed Charteris to write streamlined plots with a small group of well-drawn characters, yet still indulge himself in flamboyant writing without interrupting the pace of the action. Here’s Charteris doing a literary double-take at a sudden plot twist:

The writer, whose positively Spartan economy of verbiage must often have been noted and admired by every cultured student, recoils instinctively from the temptation to embellish the scene with a well-chosen anthology of those apt descriptive adjectives with which his vocabulary is so richly stocked. The pallor of flabbergasted faces, the glinting of wild eyes, the beading of cold perspirations, the trembling of hands, the tingling of spines, the sinking of stomachs, the coming and going of breath in little short pants—all those facile clichés which might lure less ruggedly disciplined scribes into the pitfall of endeavouring to make every facet of the situation transparent to the most nit-witted reader—none of these things, on this occasion at least, have sufficient enticement to seduce him. His readers, he assures himself, are not nit-wits: they are highly gifted and intelligent citizens, of phenomenal perspicacity and acceleration on the uptake. The situation, he feels, stated even in the baldest terms, could hide none of its facets from them.

In The High Fence, the Saint and his partners Patricia Holm and Hoppy Uniatz pursue a mysterious and deadly purveyor of stolen goods known as The High Fence.

In The Elusive Ellshaw, a woman asks Simon to investigate the sudden reappearance of her husband who has been missing for a year. The Saint and Mr. Teal find themselves embroiled in a case of blackmail and murder.

In The Case of the Frightened Innkeeper, the Saint and Hoppy Uniatz are summoned to a small inn on the English coast to investigate strange nocturnal activity in and around the hotel which has left the owner of the inn and his niece a bundle of nerves.

Hoppy Uniatz, former gangster, provides a counterbalance to the Saint’s virtuoso displays of intelligence and cunning, and adds a random element to even the best-laid planning:

The psychological motivations of Hoppy’s mind remained, as they always had been, shrouded in the unpenetrable darkness of the Styx. Down in the forest of Mr. Uniatz’s fogbound brain, something occasionally stirred; and only God Almighty could predict what would develop from one of those rare bewildering feats of cerebral peristalsis.

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Boodle (The Saint Intervenes) (1934)

Boodle is a collection of short stories, the second short story collection featuring the Saint exposing or out-smarting an assortment of conmen, fraudsters and evil financiers. The ingenious and inventive plotting, and the witty writing are again first rate.

“The secret of success,” said Simon Templar profoundly, “is never to do anything by halves. If you try to touch someone for a tenner, you probably get snubbed; but if you put on a silk hat and a false stomach and go into the City to raise a million-pound loan, people fall over each other in the rush to hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink through a perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magistrates, but the bird who diddles the public of a few hundred thousands by legal methods gets knighthood. A sound buccaneering business has to be run on the same principles.”

The British slang term “boodle” means bribery, stolen goods or loot. When first published in the United States, the unfamiliar-sounding title was changed to The Saint Intervenes, and this title was later applied to future UK editions.

Here’s a summary of the stories, from the Wikipedia:

1 The Ingenuous Colonel – Two conmen try to swindle a young man in a horse racing scam, never realising their mark is Simon Templar.

2 The Unfortunate Financier – Templar’s girlfriend, Patricia Holm, goes undercover as she plays secretary for a financier who is manipulating Middle East oil stocks.

3 The Newdick Helicopter – When the Saint hears how his friend Monty Hayward (last seen in The Brighter Buccaneer) was swindled by a man with false claims of inventing a new form of helicopter, he sets out to turn the tables on the “inventor”. Although the word helicopter appears in the title, in the story itself the flying machine is referred to as an autogyro.

4 The Prince of Cherkessia – When a foreign prince orders a jewelled crown to be made for him during his visit to London, it’s up to Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal to make sure the crown doesn’t fall into the hands of The Saint.

5 The Treasure of Turk’s Lane – When a land developer tries some underhanded tactics to get a friend of Simon’s to sell his ancestral home in order that an apartment block can be built on the site, Templar is determined to make sure the developer pays through the nose to get it.

6 The Sleepless Knight – Sir Melvin Flager’s trucking company forces its drivers behind the wheel for hours on end with little sleep. After a cyclist is killed by one of Flager’s sleep-deprived drivers, Templar decides to give Flager a bit of his own medicine.

7 The Uncritical Publisher – When budding author Peter Quentin finds himself in the middle of a scam involving a crooked vanity publisher, the Saint intervenes. In this story, Charteris parodies himself and the British publishing industry. (This was not published in the 1st edition as Hodder and Stoughton were worried about the light it held publishers in.)

8 The Noble Sportsman – Templar and Teal find themselves investigating a murder at the home of a British politician, an event that leaves the Saint unusually remorseful.

9 The Damsel in Distress – An Italian family hires Templar to assist in kidnapping a bond forger from his refuge in Switzerland and returning him to Britain for a shotgun wedding. Soon Templar finds himself in the middle of a blackmail scheme.

10 The Loving Brothers – Two squabbling businessmen, who happen to be brothers, fight over the last will and testament of their late father, with the Saint intervening.

11 The Tall Timber – Templar impersonates a Scotland Yard inspector to bring down a small-time swindler selling a big-time scam involving tree-growing in Brazil.

12 The Art Photographer – Templar impersonates an Australian businessman with a taste for pornography to expose a blackmail scheme involving naughty photographs and scantily clad models.

13 The Man who Liked Toys – Teal and Templar investigate the apparent suicide of a man with a penchant for playing with toys.

14 The Mixture as Before – The Saint turns the tables on a scam artist who claims he can make genuine diamonds in his bathtub.

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The Misfortunes of Mr Teal (1934)

Also published as The Saint in England and The Saint in London, this book is another collection of novellas, featuring the Saint’s ongoing war with Chief-Inspector Teal, who’s determined to put the Saint behind bars:

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal unfolded the paper wrapping from a leaf of chewing gum with slow-moving pudgy fingers, and the sleepy china-blue eyes in his pink chubby face blinked across the table with the bland expressionlessness of a doll.

“Of course I know your point of view,” he said flatly. “I’m not a fool. I know that you’ve never done anything which I could complain about if I were just a spectator. I know that all the men you’ve robbed and”—the somnolent eyes steadied themselves deliberately for a moment—“and killed,” he said—“they’ve all deserved it—in a way. But I also know that, technically, you’re the most dangerous and persistent criminal outside of prison. I’m a police officer, and my job is technicalities.”

In The Simon Templar Foundation, the Saint finds himself in possession of a poisonous gift, a black book from the evil Rayt Marius. The book contains secrets related to war profiteering by several prominent English establishment figures. Templar plans to create a £1,000,000 foundation to aid the victims of war by blackmailing the men detailed in the book.

In The Higher Finance, the Saint impersonates a forger in order to stop the richest man in Europe from generating a cache of fake bond certificates, but soon finds himself in the midst of a bizarre case of impersonation and accidental death.

In The Art of Alibi, the Saint has to clear his name after his signature calling card (a drawing of a stick figure with a halo) is left at the scene of a murder and the theft of an aeroplane. At the heart of the case is a madman who really believes he is The Saint, and plans to liberate 10 tons worth of gold bullion from a government aircraft.

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The Brighter Buccaneer (1933)

“The secret of contentment,” said Simon Templar oratorically, “is to take things as they come. As is the daily office-work of the City hog in his top hat to the moments when he signs his supreme mergers, so are the bread-and-butter exploits of a pirate to his great adventures. After all, one can’t always be ploughing through thrilling escapes and captures with guns popping in all directions; but there are always people who’ll give you money. You don’t even have to look for them. You just put on a monocle and the right expression of half-wittedness, and they come up and tip their purses into your lap.”

This book sees Leslie Charteris’ developing interest in the short story form, rather than the novella or novel. There are fifteen stories, and the ingenious plots involve a motley bunch of swindlers, scammers, evil landlords, and jewel thieves, rather than the warmongering political masterminds of recent books. The writing is sophisticated and elegant, and always entertaining. Believe it or not, when this book was published, the 11th book about the Saint published by Charteris since 1928, he was still just 25.

From Wikipedia, here’s a list of stories:

1 The Brain Workers: Templar engages in a minor bit of stock swindling.

2 The Export Trade: Templar is hired to transport a valuable necklace to Paris, but the Saint has other ideas.

3 The Unblemished Bootlegger: Melford Croon is a con artist who specialises in swindling people in the name of non-existent benevolent causes. Templar decides it is time for Croon to make a donation to his own benevolent cause.

4 The Owner’s Handicap: Simon and Patricia go to the horse races to turn the tables on a notorious loan shark.

5 The Tough Egg: Max Kemmler runs the busiest illegal gambling den in London, and after making his mint has decided to get out of town. But The Saint has a surprise going-away present.

6 The Bad Baron: Templar discovers that he has competition—a jewel thief known as “The Fox”—and it becomes a matter of pride for him to steal a priceless bracelet from an uncouth baron before the Fox does.

7 The Brass Buddha: Simon encounters an unpleasant landlord who has a brass Buddha that he has to sell for £2,000 as a condition of receiving an inheritance. The Saint decides to take him up on that offer and finds himself at the centre of a near-perfect con game.

8 The Perfect Crime: The Saint targets a crooked moneylender, but in order for his scheme to work, he has to go to jail first.

9 The Appalling Politician: Inspector Claud Eustace Teal recruits the Saint to help him solve a mystery involving stolen trade treaty documents.

10 The Unpopular Landlord: While looking for a new flat, Templar learns that a crooked landlord is making life miserable for little old ladies across London, and sets in motion a plan to ruin the man.

11 The New Swindle: In this sequel to The Brain Workers, Templar foils a jewellery insurance scam run by a man he conned in that earlier story.

12 The Five Thousand Pound Kiss: The Saint sets his sights on stealing The Star of Mandalay, a huge diamond, during a private party, but he doesn’t bank on encountering the female jewel thief from The Export Trade.

13 The Green Goods Man: Templar goes undercover as an accountant to draw out a swindler from America who specialises in making his victims believe they are purchasing small fortunes in counterfeit currency.

14 The Blind Spot: After saving a down-on-his-luck inventor from killing himself, Templar takes on a crooked patent agent.

15 The Unusual Ending: This followup to both The Five Thousand Pound Kiss and The Brain Workers sees Templar attempting to stop an investment swindler from leaving the country with his victim’s money, only to find things complicated by the unexpected arrival of Chief Inspector Teal.

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Once more the Saint (The Saint and Mr Teal) (1933)

This book consists of three related novellas. Charters is now on top form, producing intricate plots combined with confident writing and intriguing character studies. The Saint is increasingly taking the law into his own hands, deciding whether or not murdererous gangsters should be handed over to the police or simply executed on the spot.

In The Gold Standard, Templar, now back in England, is on the trail of the man who murdered a modern-day alchemist.

In The Man from St. Louis, Tex Goldman, a small-time crime boss from the U.S., comes to London and sets up his own American-style gang, the Green Cross Gang. He soon finds himself in a pitched battle against The Saint, who (with unofficial encouragement from Mr. Teal) sets out to prevent London from becoming another Chicago, along the way dodging assassination attempts, including a bomb that destroys part of Simon and Patricia’s new home in London.

In The Death Penalty, soon after the events of the above story (with interior decorators still repairing the bomb damage), Templar gives up the lease on his new flat and he and Patricia move into a swank London hotel. But an unusual heat wave drives the two out of the city to the remote Isles of Scilly, to confront a drug-smuggler, who, true to all the 1930s stereotypes, is a splendidly evil Arab gentleman with evil designs on beautiful young Laura Berwick.

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Getaway (1932)

Getaway was the fifth full-length Saint novel, and is the third and final part of the Rayt Marius/Crown Prince trilogy (preceded by The Last Hero and Knight Templar). The Saint, Patricia Holm, and the reluctant Monty Hayward are travelling through Europe, on the run from the police, and on the trail of Crown Prince Rudolf, that ‘worthy adversary’.

The covers of the Pan editions sometimes showed the Saint as a fairly mature middle-aged chap, which always puzzled me when I found these books in the second-hand charity/thrift shops for £0.10p, since I had imagined him to be mo more 30 years old.

In Getaway, the Crown Prince is as clever and articulate as the Saint, and Charteris weaves an intricate plot around him:

The prince stroked his silky figment of moustache, and behind his hand the corners of his mouth twitched into the shadow of a smile.

“My dear young friend, this is a most unexpected pleasure! When you were described to me, I could scarcely believe that our acquaintance was to be renewed.”

Simon Templar looked at him through a sort of haze.

His memory went careering back over two years—back to the tense days of battle, murder, and sudden death, when that slight, fastidious figure had juggled the fate of Europe in his delicate hands, and the monstrous evil presence of Rayt Marius, the war maker, had loomed horribly across an unsuspecting world; when the Saint and his two friends had fought their lone forlorn fight for peace, and Norman Kent laid down his life for many people. And then again to their second encounter, three months afterwards, when the hydra had raised its head again in a new guise, and Norman Kent had been remembered… . Everything came back to him with a startling and blinding vividness, summed up and crystallized in the superhuman repose of that slim, dominating figure—the man of steel and velvet, as the Saint would always picture him, the stormy petrel of the Balkans, the outlaw of Europe, the man who in his own strange way was the most fanatical patriot of the age; marvellously groomed, sleek as a sword-blade, smiling. …

Charters modestly describes this concluding part of the trilogy thus:

This book can stand, better than the first two, purely on its merits as an adventure and a chase.

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The Saint versus Scotland Yard (1932)

The Holy Terror is a collection of three mystery novellas, and the eighth book to feature the adventures of Simon Templar, alias “The Saint”. When published in the United States for the first time, in September 1932, the title was changed to The Saint vs. Scotland Yard.

There are three stories in the book: The Inland Revenue, The Million Pound Day, and The Melancholy Journey of Mr Teal. They’re loosely interconnected and take place over the course of about nine months.

In this book, we see the return of Patricia Holm, the first in a long line of strong female characters in the Saint series, and supposedly the Saint’s long-term girl friend, after a long absence (since The Last Hero). As the wikipedia observes:

Charteris does not obscure the clear implication that the unmarried Templar and Holm are living together at the time of these stories—something that is commonplace today but was rare in popular fiction in the early 1930s.

The Inland Revenue is a tale of a master blackmailer, the Scorpion, who is hunted down by Templar.

In The Million Pound Day, the Saint is up against Kuzela, and there are hints of Sherlock Holmes in the anonymous delivery of a poisonous gift which eventually rebounds onto the villain (shades of the villainous doctor in Conan Doyle’s The Dying Detective, although the Saint is as hyperactive as usual in this episode.

The Melancholy Journey of Mr Teal sees Simon Templar working even harder than usual to outrage the hapless Chief-Inspector Claud-Eustace Teal while foiling a diamond heist. Firmly on the wrong side of the law in this episode (although morally more or less in the right, as ever), he escapes from the country with Patricia and the diamonds, in search of new adventures, but not before asking her if she wants to come with her (and allowing Charteris to state his desire to continue writing Saint stories?):

“Pat, is that really what you want?”

“It’s everything I want.”

“To go on with the fighting and the fun? To go on racketing around the world, doing everything that’s utterly and gloriously mad—swaggering, swashbuckling, singing—showing all these dreary old-dogs what can be done with life—not giving a damn for anyone—robbing the rich, helping the poor—plaguing the pompous—killing dragons, pulling policemen’s legs—”

“I’m ready for it all!”

The next novel, Getaway, continues the story of their escape and subsequent adventures in Austria.

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The Saint Meets his Match (She was a Lady) (1931)

This full length novel was originally published as She was a lady, although it had been based on an earlier novel which Charteris had written to feature a main character who wasn’t Simon Templar. It was extensively revised to feature the Saint.

We find the Saint matched against a new adversary:

“Mr. Templar, I presume?” she said calmly.

The Saint bowed as profoundly as his position in the car window admitted.

“Correct.” A flickering little smile cut across his mouth. “Jill Trelawney?”

“Miss Trelawney.”

“Miss Trelawney, of course. For the present. You’ll be plain Trelawney to the judge, and in jail you’ll just have a number.”

At the start of the novel, Simon Templar looks like he’s going straight at last:

Later, he heard further facts about Jill Trelawney from Chief Inspector Teal himself, and was even more interested. And the day came when he inveigled Chief Inspector Teal into accepting an invitation to lunch; and when the detective had been suitably mellowed by a menu selected with the Saint’s infallible instinct for luxurious living, the Saint said, casually: “By the way, Claud Eustace, do you happen to remember that I was once invited to join the Special Branch?”

It’s not long before Templar and Trelawney, still on the wrong side of the law, are closing in on the drug-smuggling bad guys.

It’s a gripping yarn, and in particular there are some good appearances by Chief Inspector Claud-Eustace Teal, but perhaps its origins as a non-Saint story are clearly visible.

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Alias the Saint (1931)

In some editions, Alias the Saint contains three stories, but my copy contains only two: The National Debt, and The Man who could not die. The latter story also appeared in Featuring the Saint. The confusion is due to the rapid increase in Charteris’ popularity and his prolific output, and his entry into the US market.

In The National Debt, we meet evil Professor Bernhard Raxel, who kidnaps young chemist Betty Tregarth and forces her to work on the production of some xylyl bromide, which he intends to use to steal gold from a transatlantic ship.

The Man who could not die, also published in Featuring the Saint, tells the story of Miles Hallin, a minor celebrity adventurer with a charmed life and a dark secret. Templar takes exception to his misdeeds, and the final confrontation sees Hallin — finally — meet his end.

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Featuring the Saint (1931)

This book contains three novella-style stories, “The Logical Adventure”, “The Wonderful War”, and “The Man who could not die”.

In The Logical Adventure, the Saint takes a job as a pilot, working for one Francis Lemuel, who turns out to be a drug smuggler and also involved in what was known in the 1930s as ‘white slavery’ – sexual enslavement of women. Lemuel hasn’t yet heard of Simon Templar, the Saint, and doesn’t realise that his new pilot is investigating his criminal activities at every opportunity:

There were rows and rows of neatly packed square tins, plain and unlabelled. Fishing one out, the Saint gently detached the strip of adhesive tape which sealed it, and prised off the lid. He came to a white, crystalline powder … but that had been in his mind when he opened the tin. Almost perfunctorily, he took a tiny pinch of the powder between his finger and thumb, and laid it on his tongue; and the Saintly smile tightened a little.

This cunningly plotted short story sees the Saint outwitting the long-suffering Claud-Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard and consigning the bad guys to a more permanent fate.

The hilarious The Wonderful War sees the irrepressible Saint rampaging almost single-handedly through a small South American ‘banana republic’ currently suffering under a military dictatorship. He organizes a bloodless revolution, liberates the populace, bankrupts the criminal oil barons, and reunites the leading lady with her boyfriend.

The Man who could not die tells the story of Miles Hallin, a minor celebrity adventurer with a charmed life and a dark secret. Templar takes exception to his misdeeds, and the final confrontation sees Hallin — finally — meet his end.

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