Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

Then Mac’s eyes glazed and he went down, and the Saint’s right hand snaked hipwards for his own gun while his left flung Jimmy bodily at the paunch of Appopoulis.

And that was when the amazing, the incredible, and impossible thing went wrong. For Jimmy didn’t fly away from the Saint’s thrust, as he should have, like a marble from a slingshot. Somehow he remained entangled with the Saint’s arm, clinging to it as if bogged in some indissoluble bird-lime, with a writhing tenacity that was as inescapable as a nightmare. And Simon looked down the barrel of Appopoulis’s gun and saw the fat man’s piggy eyes brighten with something that might have been lust...

The Saint tried to throw a shot at him, but he was off balance, and the frenzied squirming of his erstwhile shield made it like trying to shoot from the back of a bucking horse. The bullet missed by a fraction of an inch, and buried itself in the wall beside the mirror. Then Appopoulis fired back.

The Saint felt a jar, and a flame roared inside his chest. Somehow, he couldn’t pull the trigger any more. The gun fell from his limp fingers. His incredulous eyes looked full in the mirror and saw a neat black hole over his heart, saw it begin to spread as his life’s blood gushed out.

It was strange to realize that this was it, and it had happened to him at last, as it had always been destined to happen someday, and in an instant he was going to cheat to the back of the book for the answer to the greatest mystery of all. Yet his last conscious thought was that his image was sharp and clear in the mirror. When he had seen Dawn’s reflection, it had been like one seen in an agitated pool...

When he opened his eyes again it was broad daylight, and the intensity of the light told him that it must have been more than twelve hours since he had been shot.

He was lying on the floor of the cabin. He felt for his heart. It was beating strongly. His hand did not come away sticky with blood.

His eyes turned hesitantly down to his shirt. There was no hole in it. He jumped to his feet, felt himself all over, examined himself in the mirror. He was as whole as he’d ever been, and he felt fine.

He looked around the cabin. The mattresses were piled in the corner under the pine cones, the bunks unmade. Otherwise there were no signs of the brawl the night before. No trace of Jimmy and Mac, or Appopoulis. No Big Bill Holbrook. No Dawn...

And no hole in the wall beside the mirror where his hopeless shot at Appopoulis had buried itself.

The Saint shook his head. If it had all been a dream, he might have to seriously consider consulting a psychiatrist. Dreams reach only a certain point of vividness. What he remembered was too sharp of definition, too coherent, too consecutive. Yet if it wasn’t a dream, where were the evidences of reality, the bullet hole in his chest, in the wall?

He went to the door. There should be footprints. His cabin had rated with Grand Central Station for traffic last night.

There were no footprints, other than his own.

Simon reached for a cigarette, and suddenly sniffed it suspiciously before he put it in his mouth. If some joker, either in fun or malice, had adulterated his tobacco with some more exotic herb... But that, too, was absurd. A jag of those dimensions would surely bequeath a hangover to match, but his head was as clear as the mountain air.

He fumbled in his pockets for a match. Instead, his questing fingers touched something solid, a shape that was oddly familiar — yet impossibly alien. The tactile sensation lasted only for an instant, before his hand recoiled as if the thing had been red hot. He was afraid, actually afraid, to take it out.

The address of Andrew Faulks was in the Glendale directory. The house was a modest two-bedroom affair on a side street near Forest Lawn Memorial Park. A wreath hung on the door. A solemn gentleman who looked like, and undoubtedly was, an undertaker opened the door. He looked like Death rubbing white hands together.

“Mr Faulks passed on last night,” he said in answer to the Saint’s query. Unctuous sorrow overlaid the immediate landscape.

“Wasn’t it rather sudden?”

“Ah, not exactly, sir. He went to sleep last Saturday, passed into a coma, and never awakened.”

“At what time,” Simon asked, “did he die?”

“At ten-forty,” the man replied. “It was a sad death. He was in a delirium. He kept shouting about shooting someone, and talked about a saint.”

Simon had moved into the house while listening to the tale of death and found himself looking off the hallway into a well-lighted den. His keen eyes noted that while most of the shelves were gay with the lurid jackets of adventure fiction, one section was devoted to works on psychology and psychiatry.

Here were the tomes of Freud, Adler, Jung, Brill, Bergson, Krafft-Ebing, and lesser lights. A book lay open on a small reading table.

The Saint stepped inside the room to look at it. It was titled In Darkest Schizophrenia by William J Holbrook, Ph.D.

Simon wondered what the psychic-phenomena boys would do with this one. This, he thought, would certainly give them a shot in the aura.

“Mrs Faulks is upstairs, sir,” the professional mourner was saying. “Are you a friend of the family? I’ll be glad to ask whether she can see you.”

“I wish you’d just show her this.” Simon forced one hand into a pocket. “And ask her—”

He never finished the question. Never.

There was nothing in the pocket for his hand to find. Nothing to meet his fingertips but a memory that was even then darkening and dying out along his nerves.

The eight stories in this book were all written, initially, for magazine publication: “Judith” first appeared in the January 1934 edition of The American Magazine with a subsequent first British appearance being in the April 1934 edition of The Strand Magazine . “Iris” was based on a radio script entitled “The Man Who Murdered Shakespeare,” an original script written by Irvin Ashkenazy for the very first series of The Saint on the radio, which aired on 22 March, 1945. The prose version of the story then appeared in the Winter 1948 edition of Mystery Book Magazine before being collected in this volume. “Lida” first appeared in the August 1947 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine whilst “Jeannine” made it in to the February 1948 edition of Argosy prior to this book. “Lucia” is one of the older stories, having first made print in the November 1937 edition of Double Detective magazine; “Teresa,” meanwhile, is almost as old, as it first appeared in the 5 November, 1938 edition of The Winnipeg Tribune under the title of “Masquerouge” and was subsequently syndicated to a number of newspapers around that date. “Luella” appeared in the October 1946 edition of Rex Stout’s Mystery Quarterly whilst “Emily” debuted in the November 1948 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine . “Dawn,” which is an unusual story for Leslie Charteris and the Saint anyway, first appeared under the title of “The Darker Drink” in the October 1947 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories . It was then retitled to fit in with the ethos of this book, but subsequent magazine and book publications have reverted back to its original title.

The book was first published in late 1948 by the Doubleday Crime Club with a British edition following in August 1949. A French translation appeared in 1949 under the not terribly complicated title of Le Saint at les Femmes whilst a Spanish edition, with the even less complicated title of El Santo Errante , appeared in 1958.

All but two of the stories in this book were adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore: “Judith” appeared as part of the first season, initially airing on Thursday, 3 October, 1963 and starring Julie Christie as the eponymous lady. “Teresa” followed the week after, whilst “Iris” had to wait until 7 November. “Luella” first aired on 23 January, 1964 whilst “Lucia,” for reasons lost in the mists of time, was retitled “Sophia” and in an episode directed by Roger Moore first appeared on 27 February, 1964. “Lida” and “Jeannine” had to wait until the third season and were first broadcast on 4 October, 1964 and 11 October, 1964 respectively.