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.