Leslie Charteris: Saint Errant

This story is a sentimental piece to me because (1) it was the first short story I ever sold to a smooth-paper American magazine, (2) I got paid more for it, many times more, than I had ever received for a short story until then, and (3) this was the first sale I made after I landed in the United States in 1932, with about fifty dollars in my pocket and nothing but an unshakable faith in my own destiny to support me beyond that.

You may well ask why such an ancient manuscript should crop up so late in not even the First , but actually the Second Saint Omnibus.

The reason turns out to be very simple.

A writer writes short stories and sells them at intervals to magazines. Presently he has enough to make a collection suitable for publishing in volume form. And if he wants to milk his work for the last golden drop, he does just that.

I went a little further. Long ago I had the idea for the title Saint Errant , which would be a book of short stories primarily involving dames. This story, “Judith,” would be the first.

Now it is only a matter of record that fifteen years went by before that imagined collection was complete.

I wrote other stories in between, and even whole books. But Saint Errant did not complete itself until 1947. And in the Omnibus we are dipping into the books in the order in which they were published, without regard to the order of first publication, or even conception, of their ingredients.

I hope this explanation will satisfy the most fanatical of my self-appointed bibliographers, who have picked the hell of a subject to give themselves ulcers about.

And while we are at it, one more amplification seems to be called for. I said in the foreword to this monument that I had not tried to revise any of the stories, or bring them up to date. And a glance at this story makes me realize that that was only a half-truth.

I have not changed anything between the source volumes and this one. But the story originally began in Paris, and ended with the Saint on his way to Stuttgart. When Saint Errant was finally being readied for the printers, that kind of movement would have invalidated a plot point for contemporary-minded readers. So I simply switched the geography across a few thousand miles of ocean.

There was nothing to it, really. Any other writer could have done the same, with a mere wave of his magic ball-point pen.

— Leslie Charteris

Simon Templar had to admit that the photograph of himself which adorned the front page of the copy of the New York Daily Gazette on his knee left nothing to be desired.

Taken only a couple of years ago, at the studio of an ambitious photographer who had clearly seen the potentialities of future revenue from an authentic likeness of such a disreputable character, it brought out to perfection the rakish curve of his jaw, the careless backward curl of black hair, the mocking challenge of a gay filibuster’s mouth. Even the eyes, by some trick of lighting in the original which had been miraculously preserved through the processes of reproduction, glinted back at him from under the bantering lines of eyebrow with all the vivid dangerous dance of humor that was in his own.

The story illustrated by the picture occupied two columns of the front page and was continued somewhere in the interior. One gathered from it that that elusive and distressingly picturesque outlaw, the Saint, had set the Law by the ears again with a new climax of audacities: his name and nom de guerre waltzed through the bald paragraphs of the narrative like a debonair will-o’-the-wisp, carrying with it a breath of buccaneering glamour, a magnificently medieval lawlessness, that shone with a strange luminance through the dull chronicles of an age of dreary news. “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” they called him, and with that phrase the Saint himself had least fault of all to find.

At the next table on his left a fair-haired girl was struggling to explain the secret of successful Rumhattan mixing to an unsympathetic waiter. At other tables, other guests of the Windsor Hotel’s Peacock Alley read their evening papers, sipped cocktails, chattered, argued, and gazed incuriously at fellow birds in that pleasantly gilded cage. Outside, but inaudible in that discreetly expensive sanctuary, flowed the common traffic of Montreal, the last outpost of Old France in the New World.

In those surroundings anyone but a Simon Templar might have been embarrassed by the knowledge that a lifelike portrait of himself, accompanied by an account of his latest misdeeds and a summary of several earlier ones, was at the disposal of any citizen who cared to buy a newspaper. The Saint was never embarrassed, except by warrants for his arrest, and in those days he was most careful to leave no legal grounds for one of those.

He folded his paper and lighted a cigarette with the comforting assurance that any casual glancer at his classic features would be far less likely to suspect him of a hideous past than to suspect the eminent politician or the debutante victim of a motor accident whose portraits, in smaller frames, had flanked his own on either side. Certainly he saw no reason to creep into a corner and hide.

At the next table the girl’s gray eyes wavered in humorous despair toward him, meeting his own for an instant, which to a Simon Templar was sufficient invitation.

“ Ecoute, toi! ” The Saint’s voice lanced through the air with a sudden quiet command, the edge of a blade so sweetly keen that it seemed to caress even while it cut, sapping the waiter’s wandering eyes around like a magnet dropped within an inch of twin compass needles. “Mademoiselle desires that one mix three parts of Ron Rey with one part of sweet vermouth and a dash of Angostura. After that, one will squeeze into it a very thin piece of lemon peel. It is quite simple.”

The waiter nodded and moved away in a slight daze. In his philosophy, foreigners were not expected to speak his own patois better than he did himself, nor to cut short his studied obtuseness with a cool self-possession that addressed him in the familiar second person singular. In the doorway he paused to explain that at length to a fellow waiter. “ Sâles Américains, ” he said, and spat. Simon Templar was not meant to hear, but the Saint’s ears were abnormally sensitive.

He smiled. It would never have occurred to him to report the waiter to the management, even though he was sure they would have been grateful to be warned about such a saboteur of goodwill. To the Saint any city was an oyster for his opening, a world for conquest; anything was an adventure, even the slaying of an insolent waiter and the rescue of a damsel in distress about nothing more serious than a cocktail.

He let his cigarette smolder in absolute contentment. The Rumhattan arrived. The girl tasted it and grimaced ruefully — he decided that she had a mouth that couldn’t look anything but pretty even when it tried.

“It’s a good idea, but it needs co-operation,” he said.

“I wish I could speak the language like you do,” she said. “I’d have something to tell that waiter.”

“I’ve spent more time in Paris than any respectable man should,” said the Saint cheerfully. “I used to be the concierge of a home for inebriate art students in the Rue des Deux Paires de Chaussettes de M. Alexandre Dumas. We all lived on absinthe and wore velvet next the skin. It went very well until someone discovered that half the inmates were wearing false beards and reading Ellery Queen in secret.”

The gray eyes laughed.