Leslie Charteris - The Saint and the People Importers

This is another of those joint efforts which I initiated with The Saint on TV, and which were accepted well enough to be followed by three other titles of similarly mixed parentage.

In this case, however, there are a few small differences. I first suggested the basic theme to Fleming Lee, who wanted to try his hand at a TV script. He worked out a synopsis, in which I made some suggestions, and which I passed on to the TV producers with my approval. Typically, this was not good enough for them: they bought his synopsis, but would not let him work on the script, and turned it over to another writer, eventually ending up with a script in which our original elements were barely recognisable.

Later, I suggested to Fleming that he should draft this book version, but revert to our original outline, ignoring the television improvements. Which he did, at the same time incorporating some slight changes of my own. Finally, as with all the preceding experiments of this kind, I personally revised the whole manuscript, doing my best to see that the style conformed as closely as possible to my own.

Once again, then, this should not be classed as a ghosted job, since I give full credit to my assistant. But since I have also had my own hand in it from start to finish, I dont think it is being offered to Saint fans under false pretences.

L.C.

The identity of the passenger who left his evening paper behind in a certain London taxi one dull September afternoon will probably never be discovered: he passed through this world but once, and may have nothing else in the course of his transit that will ever concern posterity. But the newspaper was still lying there on the seat when Simon Templar hailed the cab on Jermyn Street behind Fortnum & Masons, within which epicurean supermarket he had just concluded a transaction involving several thousand sturgeon eggs, and thus has a fair claim to have been the starting point of this adventure.

Simon Templar had long ago given up trying to predict where Adventure would come from: his only certainty was that he could never escape it. He would stumble upon it, or it would trip over him; but one way or another they were fated to come together, by the same kind of destiny that had ordained perhaps as a symbol for that afternoon, that Mr. Fortnum should be forever linked with Mr. Mason.

There had been an era long ago, admittedly, when Simon Templar had gone more than halfway to meet this agreeable doom. With an imagination as unlimited as possibility itself he had set out on his hunt; his territory was the world and his prey the two-legged predators who fattened on other mens toil and hopes and sufferings: extortioners, swindlers, racketeers every manner of human parasite that crept on the scalp of the earth, and especially those who had burdened themselves with a weighty enough load of ill-gotten gold to warrant the attention of a man of Simons expensive tastes.

But while a fair share of the wealth he rescued from the coffers of the Ungodly found its way into his own bank accounts, a large proportion of it ended up back in the hands of its original rightful owners. This fact, combined with Simons penchant for extralegal action and his contempt for the creaky wheels of due process, had caused some historically attuned pen-pusher to dub him the Robin Hood of Modern Crime. The comparison was apt, but another shorter and more mysteriously ambivalent sobriquet had attached itself to him very early in his career and had soon all but replaced his real name in the public mind.

It was a nom de guerre heard by detective officers and bandit chieftains with equal unease: The Saint.

More recently, he claimed that he positively leaned sideways in a noble effort to avoid trouble, but with no more success than an unskilful matador attempting to evade an educated bull. Their mutual karma was bigger than both of them. And that afternoon where we came in was a fair sample of its working.

Having directed the driver to take him to the Hilton Hotel, where he had no more nefarious objective in mind than the inhibition of a cool quenching rum punch in Trader Vics air-conditioned basement, the Saint pushed the abandoned newspaper out of his way, and settled back to relax while he was ferried through dense shoals of rush-hour traffic. The newspaper lay ignored beside him as he crossed his legs, folded his arms, and watched the crowds rushing along the sidewalks in a last-minute push to spend as much of their money as possible before the last shops closed, or to catch a homeward bus or train before everyone else with the same idea got ahead of them.

Even among those elegantly draped though unseemly hurrying West End throngs, Simon Templar had stood out as an extraordinarily well-tailored, handsome, and striking man. His six feet two inches, honed to balanced perfection through hard and steady use, set him above most of his fellow-creatures in stature as well as in fitness, and his blue eyes blazed in his tanned face with a magically startling translucency. Even the way he carried himself was unusual, somehow combining the urbane poise of an idle aristocrat with the quiet watchful readiness of a jungle-fighter.

Natures lavish kindness to the Saint, included the visual acuity of a jet pilot, and also burdened him with a ceaseless curiosity about everything that it took in. Long before his taxi turned from Piccadilly into Clarges Street, his eye had been caught during the cabs frequent pauses in the inevitable jams by those hand-lettered, forcefully worded broadsheets which Londons newspaper vendors hang on their small red or yellow stands. There was such a journalistic entrepreneur on almost every corner an invariably afflicted-looking man in stained cap and shapeless shoes and ordinarily the Saint would not have found his imagination stirred by even their most lurid promises.

He could pass by CIGARETTE TAX SHOCK without a glance. DOCK STRIKE CHAOS was such a commonplace that it would have blended indiscernibly with the pavement and the shopfronts. Even AU PAIR GIRL MURDER! PICTURES! which could be counted on to galvanise weary commuters into a veritable stampede towards the news-hawkers with coins thrust forward in impatient hands, and to hold them spellbound on an underground ride from Piccadilly Circus to Maida Vale, would not have produced even a responsive tremor in the Saints vital organs.

But PAKISTANI CRUCIFIED IN SOHO rang with such a brazen barbaric resonance that even the Saints well-tempered nervous system could not entirely resist its call.

PAKISTANI CRUCIFIED IN SOHO!

The message was echoed and repeated as Simons taxi made its way in halts and spurts of sudden speed towards the hazy green of Hyde Park and the sunset-reddened glassy tower of the Hilton Hotel. In his imagination he saw the Pakistanis exotic fate proclaimed before the department stores of Oxford Street, made loudly known along the Strand, and writ large on every corner of Trafalgar Square. The whole of the West End was aquiver with the ghastly tidings, and vast ant-streams of rail-borne commuters were even now pouring out into the countryside to spread the word to Croydon, Tunbridge Wells, and Beaconsfield.

The Saints immunity was not total. While he was not curious enough to have stopped his driver so that he could buy a newspaper, he was too intrigued to resist the impulse to pick up the secondhand tabloid that happened to be lying beside him. But before unfurling it he paused to wonder cynically if he might after all be cheated. Perhaps the editor of this particular journal had suffered a lapse in his sense of values or a misjudgment of public taste and had left the unfortunate Pakistani out of his columns altogether, assuming that the devaluation of some Latin American currency or the murder of a refugee by Russian border guards were matters more worthy of public knowledge?