Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes West

The stories in this volume, the twenty-third book, were written specifically for the book and have, unusually for Charteris, very little history outside of this book. They were written at a time when Charteris was well established in America; he’d been there off and on for many years, was living and working on the west coast and was married to his second wife, Barbara, an American.

The book was first published in June 1942 by Doubleday in the USA, with a UK edition following in August that same year; just ten years later Hodder were on their seventeenth imprint, suggesting it was yet another strong seller for the Saint and Leslie Charteris. Things got complicated though, when Avon started publishing a paperback edition in America in 1948, for they decided — for no clear reason — to omit the first story, Arizona. Subsequent American paperbacks, right up to the 1982 Ace Charter edition, followed suit, despite the fact that references to the Saint’s Arizona adventure remain in the story “Hollywood.”

Leslie’s introduction to the story explains some of the history of the Saint’s adventures in “Palm Springs” and it’s worth highlighting, purely for clarity, that the 1941 film The Saint in Palm Springs , starring George Sanders as the Saint, owes absolutely nothing to the story in this book. But the 1960 French film, Le Saint mène la danse , which starred Felix Marten as the Saint, was loosely based on the story in this book, however it was so bad that Leslie Charteris wouldn’t let it be released in any English-speaking country.

Both “Arizona” and “Hollywood” were adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore; “Hollywood” as “Starring the Saint,” which first aired on 26 September 1963, whilst “Arizona” formed the basis of “The Sign of the Claw,” which first aired on 4 February 1965.

First off the mark to translate the book were the Swedes who released Helgonet i Hollywood in 1946 (but what about Arizona and Palm Springs?); the French published Le Saint au Far-West in 1947 whilst the Dutch opted for De Saint trekt westwaarts and the Portuguese went for O Santo vai para o Oeste , both in 1950.