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 the Saint books were published with green covers:
