Dr Hermes Reviews - THE SAINT Back to our Contents Page

"The Man From St. Louis" (June 12, 2003) From a November 1932 issue of THE THRILLER (where it appeared as "The Saint -- Hi-jacker", this is an exciting action piece with an interesting twist. Instead of a Chinese secret society bringing their sinister activties to England or an ancient Egyptian sorceror invading the Isles with black magic, the foreign threat this time is a single American gangster. Hmmm, well, it makes sense, especially in the 1930s. From all I can gather, England has always had its fair share of crime and criminals but the wild Tommygun-firing hoodlums made famous in the US during the Roaring Twenties never had their counterparts in the UK. Even today, from all reports, crime in the UK involves much less gunplay than in the US. So we find an unwelcome visitor from the American city of St. Louis, Tex Goldman. ("Tex" from Missouri?! I suppose it's better than having the logial nickname "Miss"....) I don't know why Leslie Charteris has his villain hailing from St. Louis instead of the more dramatic Chicago or Brooklyn, but possibly he was basing it on a newspaper clipping, as many of his stories from their springboards in a news item. Goldman is on the run from a vengeful Chinese tong (in Missouri?) and he sees England as a peaceful, vulnerable meadow ready to be plundered. He recruits minor London goons to be his new gang and they promptly get going on a rampage of robberies and looting; their advantage is that they carry guns and are quick to use them. There's nothing comical in Goldman himself. He's a genuine thug ("All my life I been a hood....I came out of the gutter - but I came out.") He's mean, crude and accepts killing bystanders as part of the business. Bad as he is, though, he does have the rudimentary code of honor sometimes found in crooks, never crossing a pal. When Simon tests him by threatening to kill both him and a girl he's picked up, Goldman doesn't beg or whimper. ("Give me what's coming to me. But let the kid get the hell out of here first. I can take it for both of us.") This basic show of chivalry is enough for the Saint to decide to spare Goldman's life. The humour in an otherwise brutal story comes from the English crooks becoming fascinated with this American gangster and trying to imitate his ways. One of them spends three hours at the movies and picks up a lot of tough guy slang, and they almost visibly change into copies of their leader. ("He was one of the first examples of a type of crook that was still new and strange to England... educated in movie theatres and the raw underworld fiction imported by F.W. Woolworth.") But, fortunately for the peaceable London citizens, there is a cheerful freebooter living in their town who is displeased with Tex Goldman's visit. ("This country can get along without your kind of crime. Maybe America can show us lot of things, but you've come over with one kind of thing we don't want to be shown.") With Patricia Holm alongside him (always a delight, she takes a bomb through their window with the same panache as she would a moonlit dinner) and Claud Eustace Teal working in reluctant partnership, the Saint goes after these neo-Capones with a vengeance. Simon is at his tricky, ingenious best here. His entrance into the story has a wonderful flair, as the crooks suddenly realize there's something awful funny about their driver. He's not above a quick uppercut to send a thug to the dreaming country, but mostly he uses strategy. At one point, he (and Charteris) have the nerve to brazenly appropriate Holmes' trick from "The Empty House" with equal success. (The bomb which somehow has been planted in the gangster's getaway car is something Sherlock never tried, though.) It's the true Charteris touch that Simon intimidates a prisoner with torture instruments which include what looks like a thumbscrew but is actually a can-opener. We also get a few insights into Simon's past and character. Standing on a bridge while trailing a suspect, he has a surge of "nostalgia of other and perhaps better days when he had been free to go down to limpid tropical seas under the swelling white sails of a schooner..." and he's sick of dirty city streets and his current crusade. I would love to see someone somewhere do a series of "Untold Tales of the Saint" set in that tatalizing decade before he met Pat, when he roamed over the danger spots of the world in the 1920s. And after a brisk morning of hi-jacking some crates of machine guns being smuggled into England (the brutes!), Simon blithely orders a cardiac-arrest breakfast. "I'll have two fried eggs, lots of bacon and about a quart of coffee... After that, I might be able to toy with three more eggs, a pound of mushrooms and a lot more bacon". Considering that he also drinks about as much as a college student on spring break and considers every spare moment a good opportunity for a cigarette, it's a wonder Simon isn't a dead ringer for Teal.

"The Blind Spot" (June 24, 2003) From the EMPIRE NEWS of November 13 1932 (where it appeared as "The Stolen Formulas"*), this is a brief but charming little episode of Simon Templar at his most benevolent. Sometimes, he has to bust a few noses of the ungodly or push a few thugs off roofs, but he's just as content to pull a peaceful scam on a well deserving mark. I would guess that this story was inspired by a newspaper or magazine article that Lesllie Charteris spotted and clipped for possible use. The action of the chemical in this tale, and its formula, does not sound like common knowledge but to an author, all is grist for the mill. Briefly, a despondent inventor has been robbed of the patent which he hoped might give him a reasonable income, and (having by chance obtained a trick chemical which apparently chromium plates metal instantly), Simon takes it upon himself to bring a little justice to this sad world to turn the trick on the fradulent patent agent. Does he get away with it? Of course he does. This is the Saint in 1932, at the height of his (and Charteris') audacity and creativity. Simon could have tricked Loki himself at that point. There is a breathless moment when the inventor despairingly throws himself in front of a train at Charing Cross and our boy leaps right after him ("The train was hardly more than a yard away when the Saint picked him up and heaved him back onto the platform, flinging himself off the line in the opposite direction as he did so.") Brushing away nosy police questions, Simon hauls off the would-be suicide and finds out his story. His Saintly instincts aroused, he promises the man he'll straighten things out. Now, it's traditional pulp plotting to casually introduce an element at the beginning that will later prove (coincidentally) to be exactly what's needed to save the world. But if the Saint didn't have the bottle of phony chromium liquid, he certainly would have come up with a dozen different ways to go after the patent agent. Then again, the details of this solution (it's just mercury diluted with weak nitric acid) are probably what inspired this story; I doubt if Leslie Charteris would work out the plot and then ask a chemistry professor what would be used in such a case. Short as it is, the story has a lot of amusing details. When he's looking for a penny he can't find (the spilled liquid has made it look like a silver coin, his old crony Monty Hayward unkindly suggests, "I expect you put it in a slot machine to look at rude pictures". Patricia Holm also makes a brief but pleasant appearance. An interesting detail is that, when the crooken agent has the formula Simon gave him analyzed, he finds its has the cryptic letters "Bf" in the middle for no apparent reason. Since American readers could not fairly be expected to catch the reference to "bloody fool" ("boyfriend" would be today's usage), the initials were changed in the American reprint to "St"....much more appropriate to our hero and a nice substitute for the little stick figure with the halo. ___________________ *Many times, I find the original title more clever and memorable than the later, and it escapes me why Charteris makes some of these changes. "The Blind Spot" makes sense in the context of the story as Simon has a philosophy that even the most shrewd man has such a weakness. But "The Stolen Formulas" takes in both the inventor's original creation and the fake chromiumizer which the Saint manipulates the agent into snatching from him and I much prefer it.

"The Death Penalty" (Jan 5, 2003) From 1933 (where it first appeared in ONCE MORE THE SAINT with no previous magazine publication...bit odd, that but we'll see a possible reason why), this is a beautifully crafted little thriller that shows Leslie Charteris at his best. There are two particularly vile villains, a pair of likeable innocents caught between them, and the frisky figure of the Saint leaping into the mixture. The story starts with a detailed, sober account of a hanging and ends with a mention of that same event, but the twists and surprises between the start and the finish make up a brisk, colorful tale that is more than slightly lurid. Irritated at the unusual heat of London (it is actually sunny and ninety degrees) and the mores of that time which required Englishmen to swelter in heavy modest clothing, our hero is ripe for an adventure. And when he receives word that an old enemy of his, Abdul Osman, is active again in the Scilly Islands, Simon needs no more prompting to immediately go on the chase. The Saint here is the way we remember him best, quick thinking and full of mischief, with more nerve than any one adventurer would ever need. He promptly rescues a young damsel from drowning, and (with probability being as shaken up as it usually is around Simon), naturally her stepfather is involved in exactly the vile crimes that the Saint is out to foil. And the battle of wits is on, with attempted abduction and impersonations. The main villain here deserves a bit of description. A gangster who owns "white slavery" brothels, smuggles drugs and runs gambling rackets, Abdul Osman had been tackled by Simon five years earlier and (in a melodramatic gesture), the Saint had literally branded the villain on both cheeks with Arabic words that described his crimes. He had then left his famous chalk outline of the haloed stick figure, just for effect. So Osman is not likely to be one of those opponents who is content with subtle remarks and schemes... he wants blood. Osman is heinous in every way, but he at least has understandable motivation. An Arab with much Black ancestry, he was sent to an English school by misguided parents, where his abuse and degradation permanently made him vicious. In fact, he now keeps a former classmate as an addicted henchman to be constantly beaten and cursed. ("I was a dirty nigger then, wasn't I? And it seemed so humourous to you to humiliate me. I trust you look back on those days with satisfaction, Clements?") Leslie Charteris doesn't make Osman sympathetic but at least he does provide a believable reason for his brutality. In his chasing a rival gangster out of his territory, Osman wants the man's lovely young stepdaughter as payment for letting the crook escape alive. There are a lot of heated remarks about the villain's lust for her fair white body, and in 1933 readers would likely have been boiling with rage at the thought. Although her suitor tries to intervene bravely enough, he's no match for a gang of hardened pirates. But the Saint is.... "The Death Penalty" is a neatly plotted story that never quite goes as you might expect, and right up to the final page, there are a few more twists.I might wish Patricia Holm took an active role; she had a brief cameo that hardly seems worth including. What's most worth noting is how Leslie Charteris manages to place a few remarks critical of British racial attitudes in a time and a medium where such bias was taken so much for granted as to be unnoticed. The narration itself says that it was not the young surrogate hero's fault that he had been brought up to that "inscrutable system of English thought in which all coloured men are niggers unless they happen to also to be country cricketeers..." And Simon Templar composes one of his ambiguous epic poems which goes on for nearly a page and seems to be an indictment of the idea that Englishmen are by nature brave and noble, while other nationalties can only try to live up to these standards. You have to wonder what Leslie Charteris (whose original name was Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin) would have liked to further say about this subject, except for the realties of editors and publishers. As it was, I don't recall him ever pitting the Saint against an Asian mastermind.

"The Unfortunate Financier" (Aug 24, 2002) THOROUGH SPOILERS AHEAD But it seems the only way to explain some rather dated references, so be warned. If you haven't read this particular story and would like to be surprised by it, just skip the following.... From the October 8, 1933 issue of EMPIRE NEWS, this very short piece was originally titled "The Whipping of Titus Oates." This is a textbook example of Simon Templar at his most devious. Not a single punch is thrown, no guns are fired or even mentioned... it's all subterfuge and strategy. This time, the Saint takes it upon himself to break a crooked stock market investor and he does it with an audacity that is breathtaking (if perhaps a bit cruel). So we start with Wellington Titus Oates, a wealthy financier who has made his fortune through decetful practices, usually manipulating stocks so that he makes a profit while innocent investors lose every penny. (Sadly enough, this sort of thing is still very much in the news.) With a few of his bunko henchmen, Oates is cooking up a way to make a Mideast oil company* (which has been barely breaking even) suddenly seem to have immense new stores of oil. And as the value of that company's stock skyrockets and peaks, Oates will sell it at its high point and (when the fraud is discovered), he will be much richer and the investors will have lost their last pennies. The hound. You may have heard of similar evils going on in recent times. Anyway, he attracts the notice of Simon Templar, who decides to elbow his way into the situation. With the help of the invaluable Patricia Holm (who is quite capable of acting undercover as a personal secretary to Oates and charming the brute), the Saint poses as an acquirer of rare stamps and, using Oates' obsession with philately as bait, lures the financier into a stunningly appropriate trap. Titus Oates may not be familiar to most modern Brits and certainly to few American readers, but he was a late 17th century fanatic who stirred up hatred about a nonexistent Popish plot (resulting in many deaths of innocent people) and whose name stood for slander and shame. So when Simon arranges for the modern swindler to unwittingly present himself to a psychiatrist as the original Titus Oates, it would be rather like a modern American going into a hospital emergency room and introducing himself as General Benedict Arnold. Especially as the Saint had earlier convinced the doctor that Oates was his own deranged uncle. Quite a neat prank to pull. My only misgiving about this story is that Simon expects to clear twenty thousand pounds himself through this manuever, but as far as I see the investors will still be swindled out of their money. Still, the Saint was after all a modern Robin Hood, not a modern Santa Claus, and it may be expecting too much to think he would further find a way to protect the investors' money. There was a strong streak of larceny in Simon, and after all, highwaymen did hold up travellers. ______________ *To give a sense of how long ago this was, it's described as being located in Mesopotamia.