Leslie Charteris

• Born: May 12, 1907
• Birthplace: Singapore
• Died: April 15, 1993
• Place of death: Windsor, England

Type of Plot: Thriller

Principal Series: Simon “the Saint” Templar, 1928-1980 (stories by other writers continued, with Charteris’s approval)

Contribution

In Simon Templar, Leslie Charteris fashioned the perfect hero of popular fiction for the twentieth century. Templar, known by his sobriquet, the Saint, possesses all the modern virtues: He is bright and clever, but not intellectual; he is charming and sensitive, but not effete; he is a materialist who relishes good food, good drink, luxurious surroundings, and the company of beautiful women, but he lives by a strict moral code of his own devising.

Templar is “good,” as his nickname indicates, but his view of good and evil does not derive from any spiritual or ethical system and has nothing whatever to do with Anglo-Saxon legalisms. Rather, his morality is innate and naturalistic. He is one of the very fittest in an incredibly dangerous world, and he survives with aplomb and élan. Even when he becomes more political (serving as an American agent during World War II), he supports only the causes that square with his own notions of personal freedom. He is always the secular hero of a secular age. As such, he has lived the life of the suave adventurer for more than sixty years, in novels, short stories, comic strips, motion pictures, and television series. Moreover, because Simon Templar is not a family man, James Bond and every Bond manqué may properly be viewed as the illegitimate literary progeny of the Saint.

Biography

Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin on May 12, 1907, in Singapore, the son of Dr. S. C. Yin, a Chinese surgeon and Englishwoman Florence Bowyer. A slight air of mystery attaches to Charteris’s origins. His father was reputed to be a direct descendant of the Yin family who ruled China during the Shang Dynasty (c. 1700-1027 b.c.e.). Charteris recalls that he learned Chinese and Malay from native servants before he could speak English and that his parents took him around the world three times before he was twelve. He valued the education afforded by this cosmopolitan experience far more than his formal education, which he received in England—at Falconbury School, Purley, Surrey (1919-1922) and at Rossall School, Fleetwood, Lancashire (1922-1924). However, he worked eagerly on school magazines, and sold his first short story at the age of seventeen.

After leaving school for a brief stay in Paris in 1924, Charteris was persuaded to enter King’s College, Cambridge, in 1925. He stayed for little more than a year, spending his time reading voraciously in the fields of criminology and crime fiction. He left the university to pursue a career as a writer when his first full-length crime novel was accepted. Around this same time, he changed his name by deed poll to Leslie Charteris, though sources differ as to the year. At first, despite the popularity of the Saint, Charteris struggled to support himself, taking odd jobs in England, France, and Malaya until 1935. Syndicated comic strips, such as Secret Agent X-9 (mid-1930’s) and The Saint (1945-1955), helped further his career, as did his work as a Hollywood scriptwriter. When his novel The Saint in New York (1935) was brought to the screen in 1938, Charteris gained international fame.

Over the next several years, Charteris developed a dashing persona, of which a monocle and a small mustache were manifestations. He married Pauline Schishkin in 1931 and was divorced from her in 1937. His only child, Patricia Ann, was born of this marriage. Charteris first came to the United States in 1932 and went to Hollywood the following year. He eventually returned to England but moved to New York after his divorce. In 1938, he married Barbara Meyer, an American, from whom he was divorced in 1943. That same year, he married Elizabeth Bryant Borst, a singer. He was naturalized an American citizen in 1946. He was divorced again in 1951, and the next year he married Audrey Long, a film actress.

Charteris also worked as a scenarist, columnist, and editor. His avocations—eating, drinking, shooting, fishing, flying, and yachting—mirror those of his dapper hero. His odd jobs reportedly included working in a tin mine and a rubber plantation, prospecting for gold, hiring on as a seaman on a freighter, fishing for pearls, bartending, working at a wood distillation plant, and becoming a balloon inflator for a fairground sideshow. He took a pilot’s license, traveled to Spain, and became a bullfighting aficionado. He invented a universal sign language, which he named Paleneo. He once listed himself as his favorite writer. In 1992, he was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. He died in Windsor, England, in 1993.

Analysis

Leslie Charteris’s first novel, X Esquire, appeared in 1927 and was quickly followed by Meet the Tiger (1928), the first of the series that would make its author famous. It took some time, however, for the Tiger to evolve into the Saint. Charteris required another two years and another three novels to develop this character satisfactorily. When Charteris began writing Saint stories for The Thriller in 1930, Simon Templar had finally settled into a personality that would catch the fancy of the reading public.

To begin with, the hero’s name was masterfully chosen. Along with other connotations, the name Simon suggests Simon Peter (Saint Peter), foremost among the apostles and an imperfect man of powerful presence. The name Templar reminds the reader of the Knights Templar, twelfth century crusaders who belonged to a select military-religious order. Thriller fiction at the time Charteris began to write was replete with young veterans of World War I who were disillusioned, restless, disdainful of law and social custom, and eager for any adventure that came to hand. Simon Templar was very much a member of this order. Like the Knights Templar and the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, the Saint and his fictional colleagues set out to rout the barbarians and foreigners. The villains of many thrillers of the period were foreigners, Jews, and blacks. Charteris certainly adopted the convention, and for this reason it has been remarked that his early novels sometimes had a racist, fascist cast to them.

“The Million Pound Day”

In chapter 1 of “The Million Pound Day,” the second of three novelettes in The Holy Terror (1932), the Saint saves a fleeing man from a black villain, clad only in a loincloth, who is pursuing him along a country lane. The black is perfectly stereotypical. He is a magnificent specimen physically but is savage and brutal. He exudes primeval cruelty, and the Saint “seemed to smell the sickly stench of rotting jungles seeping its fetid breath into the clean cold air of that English dawn.” The reader should not, however, make too much of such passages. Racial and ethnic sensibilities have been heightened considerably since 1932, so that the chauvinism and offhand use of racial epithets found in the work of some of the finest writers of Charteris’s generation (for example, Evelyn Waugh) are quite jolting to the modern reader.

On the other hand, Charteris himself was something of an outsider in those days. Although he often deferred to the prejudices of his readers, his work contained a consistent undercurrent of mockery. Simon Templar mixes effortlessly with the members of the ruling class, but as often as not, his references to them are contemptuous. Like a Byronic hero, his background is mysterious, romantic, and essentially classless. It is significant that, during a period in which most fictional heroes are members of the officer class with outstanding war records, Simon Templar has no war record.

“The Inland Revenue”

An example of how the Saint—and Charteris—tweak British smugness is found in “The Inland Revenue,” the first of the novelettes in The Holy Terror. As chapter 2 opens, Simon Templar is reading his mail at the breakfast table. “During a brief spell of virtue some time before,” Templar has written a novel, a thriller recounting the adventures of a South American “super-brigand” named Mario. A reader has written an indignant letter, taking issue with Templar’s choice of a “lousy Dago” as his hero rather than an Englishman or an American. The letter writer grew so furious during the composition of his screed that he broke off without a closure. His final line reads, “I fancy you yourself must have a fair amount of Dago blood in you.” Templar remarks with equanimity that at that point the poor fellow had probably been removed to “some distant asylum.”

The earlier Saint stories are marked by such playful scenes. They are also marked by a considerable amount of linguistic playfulness and ingenuity. For example, Charteris often peppers the stories with poetry that is more or less extrinsic to the plot. In chapter 3 of “The Inland Revenue,” Templar is composing a poem on the subject of a newspaper proprietor who constantly bemoans the low estate of modern Great Britain. He writes of this antediluvian:

For him, no Transatlantic flights,Ford motor-cars, electric lights,Or radios at less than costCould compensate for what he lost By chancing to coagulateAbout five hundred years too late.

The Saint’s disdain for authority is more pronounced in the early books. He dispenses private justice to enemies with cognomens such as “the Scorpion,” and at the same time delights in frustrating and humiliating the minions of law and order. His particular foil is Claud Eustace Teal, a plodding inspector from Scotland Yard. Chief Inspector Teal is a device of the mystery genre with antecedents stretching back at least as far as the unimaginative Inspector Lestrade of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

“The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal”

There is—on the Saint’s part, at least—a grudging affection that characterizes the relationship between Teal and him. “The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal” in The Holy Terror is, in part, the story of a trap the Saint lays for Inspector Teal. Templar allows Teal temporarily to believe that he has finally got the goods on his nemesis, then Templar springs the trap and so shocks and mortifies the inspector that he appears to age ten years on the spot. The Saint has totally conquered his slow-witted adversary, yet “the fruits of victory were strangely bitter.”

The Saint Evolves

The Saint’s romantic interest in the early stories is Patricia Holm. Their relationship is never explored in detail, but it is clearly unconventional. The narrator hints at sexual intimacy by such devices as placing the beautiful Patricia, without explanatory comment, at Templar’s breakfast table. Charteris moved to the United States in the late 1930’s, and the Saint moved with him. In The Saint in Miami (1940), Patricia, Hoppy Iniatz (Templar’s muscleman bodyguard), and other series regulars are in the United States as well. They fall away, however, as Simon Templar undergoes two decided changes.

First, the sociable Saint of the stories set in England evolves during the 1940’s into a hero more in the American mold. The mystery genre in the United States was dominated at that time by the hard-boiled loner, such as Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe. During the war years, the Saint defends democracy, becoming more of a loner in the process. He never evolves into an American, but he becomes less of an Englishman. Eventually, he becomes a citizen of the world, unencumbered by personal relationships, taking his adventures and his women where he finds them.

Second, the Saint, like so many real people, was changed by his own success. Charteris had collaborated on a screenplay as early as 1933 and, during 1940 and 1941, he worked on three Saint films. He had earlier written a syndicated comic strip entitled Secret Agent X-9; he adapted Simon Templar to the medium in Saint, a strip that ran from 1945 to 1955. He had edited Suspense magazine in the 1940’s, and he turned this experience to the Saint’s account as well. Charteris was editor of The Saint Detective Magazine (later retitled The Saint Mystery Magazine) from 1953 to 1967. The wit, the clever use of language, the insouciance of the early stories and novels, however, did not translate well to films, comic strips, or television.

Still, the Saint of the screen remained very British. The first of the films, The Saint in New York (not written by Charteris), was produced in 1938, during a period in which a large contingent of British actors had been drawn to Hollywood. Among this group was Louis Hayward, who portrayed the Saint in his first screen appearance. The Saint films were rather short, low-budget pictures, designed for exhibition as part of a twin bill. George Sanders, a leading character actor in major Hollywood productions for more than thirty years, was an early Simon Templar. He was succeeded in the role by his brother, Tom Conway, who resembled him greatly and whose voice was virtually identical to his.

As played by the brothers, the Saint was a sophisticated, well-dressed adventurer with a limpid manner. He spoke in flawless stage English, and his mature looks were emphasized by a pencil-thin mustache. Although Charteris had nothing to do with most of the films, he did collaborate on the screenplays for The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940), The Saint’s Vacation (1941), and The Saint in Palm Springs (1941). During the 1940’s, he sold many Saint stories to American magazines, and he also wrote a radio series, Sherlock Holmes. The Saint also appeared in various productions on British, American, and Swiss radio from 1940 to 1951, with a return to British radio in 1995.

Saint films appeared at regular intervals through 1953, when the advent of television moved the popular Simon Templar from the large to the small screen. Several television movies appeared, as well as further feature-length films. During the 1960’s, Roger Moore became television’s Simon Templar. Moore was a larger, more physically imposing, more masculine Saint than his predecessors. This series was filmed in England, and it established London once again as the Saint’s home base. Also back, largely for comic effect, was the stolid Inspector Teal.

In the next decade, Ian Ogilvy played the part and was the most youthful and handsome Saint of them all. His television series Return of the Saint took a new look at the classic hero, transforming him from a man outside the law serving his own brand of justice to one who helped the police by solving crimes with his wits rather than through further crime and violence. Initially perturbed by the Saint’s increasingly youthful appearance, Charteris remarked,

God knows how we shall reconcile this rejuvenation with the written word, where there is incontrovertible internal evidence that by this time Simon Templar has got to be over seventy. After all, he is clearly recorded as having been over thirty during Prohibition, which senile citizens like me recall as having ended in 1933. Perhaps the only thing is to forget such tiresome details and leave him in the privileged limb of such immortals as Li’l Abner, who has never aged a day.

The Saint novels continued to appear with regularity through 1948, but their energy was largely spent. Simon Templar had become a profitable industry, of which Leslie Charteris was chairman of the board. For the next three decades, except for Vendetta for the Saint (1964), very little work of an original nature appeared. Charteris worked at some other projects, including a column for Gourmet Magazine (1966-1968). Arrest the Saint, an omnibus edition, was published in 1956. The Saint in Pursuit, a novelization of the comic strip, appeared in 1970. The remaining output of the period consisted largely of short-story collections. Many of the stories were adapted from the popular television series and were written in collaboration with others. In fact, Charteris often contented himself with polishing and giving final approval to a story written largely by someone else.

In the 1980’s, the Saint even wandered over into the science-fiction genre. Not surprisingly, critics judged this work decidedly inferior to the early Saint stories. In fact, Charteris specifically began first collaborating with other writers, and then approving novels and stories written solely by others, as a means of ensuring that the Saint legacy would continue after his death. Other Saint novels and story collections, produced in collaboration with Charteris or alone, have involved such writers as Donne Avenell, Burl Barer, Peter Bloxsom, Jerry Cady, Jeffrey Dell, Terence Feely, Jonathan Hensleigh, Ben Holmes, Donald James, John Kruse, Fleming Lee, D. R. Motton, Michael Pertwee, Christopher Short, Leigh Vance, Graham Weaver, and Norman Worker. In 1997, four years after Charteris’s death, the motion picture The Saint, starring Val Kilmer as the Saint, was released.

The Saint’s golden age was the first decade of his literary existence. The wit and charm of the hero and the prose style with which his stories were told will form the basis for Charteris’s literary reputation in the years to come.

Principal Series Character:

• Simon “the Saint” Templar , a modern Robin Hood. Templar changes but does not obviously age. Despite Charteris’s incorporation of real-world events as a means of alluding to Templar’s increasing years, screen depictions feature a perpetually youthful man. The Saint of the early stories resides in London. He lives the good life, made possible by his earnings as an adventurer. He is witty and debonair but also ruthless. Just before World War II, he moves to the United States, where he becomes a far more serious and solitary figure.

Bibliography

Barer, Burl. The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film, and Television of Leslie Charteris’ Robin Hood of Modern Crime, Simon Templar, 1928-1992. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1993. Comprehensive reference guide to the character’s many appearances through 1992.

Blakemore, Helena. “The Novels of Leslie Charteris.” In Twentieth-Century Suspense: The Thriller Comes of Age, edited by Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Examines Charteris specifically as a crafter of suspense stories and analyzes the use of suspense in his work.

Greene, Suzanne Ellery. Books for Pleasure: Popular Fiction, 1914-1945. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1974. This broader study looks at the Saint as a popular character in general, not merely as the protagonist of mystery thrillers.

Lofts, William Oliver Guillemont, and Derek Adley. The Saint and Leslie Charteris. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1972. Discussion of the importance and representation of the Saint character geared toward a popular audience.

Mechele, Tony, and Dick Fiddy. The Saint. London: Boxtree, 1989. An examination of the many incarnations of the Saint, commenting on performances of actors who have played him, as well as his print incarnations.

O’Neill, Dan. “Time to Remember: The Sign of the Saint Left Huge Mark on the Thriller.” South Wales Echo, May 13, 2002, p. 16. Article discusses the creation of the Saint and the print, radio, and film versions as well as Charteris’s life.

Osgerby, Bill. “’So You’re the Famous Simon Templar’: The Saint, Masculinity, and Consumption in the Early 1960’s.” In Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators, and Foxy Chicks, edited by Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates. New York: Routledge, 2001. Analysis of the Saint’s television incarnation from the point of view of gender studies and cultural studies. Bibliographic references and index.

Simper, Paul. Saint: Behind the Scenes with Simon Templar. New York: TV Books, 1997. Short book looking at the making of the television shows featuring Charteris’s character.

Trewin, Ion. Introduction to Enter the Saint. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930. Commentary on the novel and its author by a famous and successful editor and publisher.