When the idea of featuring Leslie Charteris's Saint books first came to me, I expected the article to be a short one. I soon realised that there was far too much material of interest for even a long article, so I produced a second post about the Saint stories. That still wasn't enough to cover everything I wanted to say about the books and their author!
This article contains most of the remaining material.
After finding many fascinating occurrences of the colour green in the lives and works of various writers including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I decided to see what I could dig up for Leslie Charteris and the Saint. While the results of the investigation are nowhere near what I found for other authors, some references seem worth a mention.
Leslie Charteris spent the last years of his life, from 1967 to 1993, in Englefield Green, a village in Surrey.
Leslie Charteris co-wrote scripts for Sherlock Holmes radio programmes with a Denis Green in the 1940s.
Rather confusingly, some Saint stories are narrated by a Dennis Green, who appears to be a different person from the one above.
Simon Templar, aka The Saint, is known as the Robin Hood of modern crime; Robin Hood is traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln Green.
The Saint lives for a while in an apartment that overlooks London's Green Park.
The short story The Export Trade features a gang of jewel thieves called the Green Cross Bunch.
In the short story titled The Green Goods Man, the Saint puts a stop to the activities of a conman who produces counterfeit pound notes, the 'green goods' of the title.
A few early editions of Saint books were published with green covers:
The first Saint book was published in 1928; over five decades' worth of Saint titles were to follow. Some of the later Saint stories were co-written or ghost-written with Leslie Charteris's approval. Perhaps he ran out of inclination and inspiration; perhaps his daemon had opted out of the partnership!
I turned to other things before many of the later stories were published. From what I have seen of the more recent works, I don't seem to have missed much: they lack many of the attractions of the pre-war books.
Some of them feature the same old disguises, miraculous escapes, blackmailers, con men, gangsters and jewel thieves, and from what I have seen there is a lot less of the kind of humour that made the earlier books so enjoyable when I read them as a child.
I loved the outrageous little stories that the Saint often tells. This example is from The Brighter Buccaneer (1933):
“Have I,” he inquired blandly, “‘ ever told you my celebrated story about a bob-tailed ptarmigan named Alphonse, who lived in sin with a couple of duck-billed platypi in the tundras of Siberia ? Alphonse, who suffered from asthma and was a believer in Christian Science . . .”
The Saint books are available in many editions from many decades; confusingly, some of the books and stories have different titles for the UK and the US markets and some stories appear in more than one collection.
The covers are of varying quality and attractiveness, with some of them looking very cheap and sensational.
This, in my opinion, is one of the better examples:
I decided to investigate Leslie Charteris's life in the hope of finding some more article material.
There is a lot of information about him and his works online; it is interesting, but mostly not very commentary-inspiring.
Leslie Charteris was born on May 12th 1907 - one day earlier than the novelist Daphne du Maurier.
I have learned that his name is pronounced 'Charters' - in some circles in the UK at least.
I was very surprised to learn that he was half Chinese.
Leslie Charteris said this in a BBC radio interview in 1935:
"I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”
http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/feature_view.aspx?FEATURE_ID=22
"Blipping the ungodly over the beezer": this is really funny. The slang words of the time, 'boodle' and 'mazuma' meaning money for example, are for me one of the big attractions of the earlier Saint stories.
Leslie Charteris's quoted words are very similar to an impassioned speech that the Saint makes in The Avenging Saint aka Knight Templar (1930). Perhaps the Saint was Leslie Charteris's avatar, the idealised fearless, free and dashing hero he always wished he could be.
The man who believed in romance:
I haven't seen any of the TV series based on the Saint books. Many dramatisations are disappointing at best, and I always prefer the printed word - all the more when much of the appeal of a story is in the descriptions and the narrative.
Roger Moore however does come quite close to how I always imagined the Saint to look. I may watch one or two episodes some time, but my expectations are low!
The Saint often said, “Be seein’ ya!” This reminds me of one of the catchphrases in The Prisoner.
I used to like the typical last page of a Saint book: "Watch for the sign of The Saint, he will be back!"
Now, this picture just makes me feel sad because the Saint as I first encountered him has gone for ever.
