Leslie Charteris: Thanks to the Saint

“Well. How are your bruises? They should be sporting some beautiful color effects by now.”

“Do you remember saying that if I had you sitting on a bomb you didn’t believe I’d have the guts to set it off myself?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to show you how wrong you were.”

“Don’t try it, Nat,” said the Saint soberly. “I can’t give you a fairer warning than that.”

“This isn’t a warning,” Grendel said. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard. But right now, I just wanted to tell you about it, so that the last thing you know’ll be that I’m doing it myself. Now.”

Simon prudently moved the receiver a little further from his ear, but the detective, who was caught unprepared, jumped at the loudness of the clack that came from the diaphragm.

“What was that?”

Simon Templar listened a moment longer, to nothing, and then quietly put down the phone.

“That was the accident I was talking about. I got the idea from Shakespeare. You remember that line about ‘the Engineer hoist with his own petard?’ You didn’t ask me how I got rid of the petard that they fixed for me. I suppose it was rather naughty, but the only thing I could think of was to put it inside a piece of china that he was interested in and send it back to him. It wouldn’t’ve hurt him if he hadn’t pressed the button.” The Saint went back into the living room and finished his drink. “Well, I guess we’d better get in that car I told you to have waiting and go see how much mess it made.”

As with many Saint books of this period, the stories in this book first appeared in The Saint Detective Magazine, a monthly publication that often included a new Saint story along with short stories by other authors. The five stories in this book appeared between August 1956 and September 1957.

The book itself was first published by the Doubleday Crime Club in December 1957. British readers, as with the previous Saint book, had to wait almost a year before they could read it, for a British edition was published on 6 November 1958.

A French translation, Merci, le Saint! , was published in 1960 whilst an Italian edition was published in November 1969 under the title of Grazie al Santo .

All but one of the stories in this book were adapted for the Roger Moore series of The Saint : “The Careful Terrorist” was adapted for the third episode in the show, airing 14 October 1962, whilst “The Bunco Artists” first aired on 19 December 1963; “The Happy Suicide” was broadcast on 11 March 1965, and “The Good Medicine” aired on 6 February 1964. “The Unescapable Word” was renamed “The Inescapable Word” and broadcast on 28 January 1965.