Simon
Templar is a fictional Robin Hood-like criminal known as The Saint -
plausibly from his initials; but the exact reason for his nickname is
not known (although we're told that he was given it at the age of
nineteen). Templar has aliases, often using the initials S.T. such as
"Sebastian Tombs" or "Sugarman Treacle". Blessed
with boyish humour, he makes humorous and off-putting remarks and
leaves a "calling card" at his "crimes", a stick
figure of a man with a halo. He is described as "buccaneer in
the suits of Savile Row, amused, cool, debonair, with
hell-for-leather blue eyes and a saintly smile..."
The Saint is featured in a long-running
series of books by Leslie Charteris published between 1928 and 1963.
After that date, other authors collaborated with Charteris on books
until 1983; two additional works produced without Charteris's
participation were published in 1997. The character has also been
portrayed in motion pictures, radio dramas, comic strips, comic books
and three television series. The most famous TV series starred Roger
Moore and ran from 1962 to 1969.
Leslie
Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, on May 12th 1907 in
Singapore to a Chinese father, Dr S. C. Yin (Yin Suat Chwan,
18771958), and Lydia Florence Bowyer, who was English. His
father was a physician, who claimed to be able to trace his lineage
back to the emperors of the Shang Dynasty.
Charteris became interested in writing at
an early age. At one point, he created his own magazine with
articles, short stories, poems, editorials, serials, and even a comic
strip. He attended Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire, England.
Once his first book, written during his
first year at King's College, Cambridge, was accepted, he left the
university and embarked on a new career. Charteris was motivated by a
desire to be unconventional and to become financially well off by
doing what he liked to do. He continued to write English thriller
stories, while he worked at various jobs from shipping out on a
freighter to working as a barman in a country inn. He prospected for
gold, dived for pearls, worked in a tin mine and on a rubber
plantation, toured England with a carnival, and drove a bus. In 1926,
he legally changed his last name to Charteris, after Colonel Francis
Charteris. In a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the author his daughter
would state that he selected his surname from the telephone directory.
Charteris' third novel, Meet the Tiger
(1928), introduced his most famous creation, Simon Templar. However,
in his 1980 introduction to a reprint by Charter Books, Charteris
indicated he was dissatisfied with the work, suggesting its only
value was as the start of the long-running Saint series.
Occasionally, he chose to ignore the existence of Meet the Tiger
altogether and claimed that the Saint series actually began with the
second volume, Enter the Saint (1930).
Although
he wrote a few other books (including a novelisation of his
screenplay for the Deanna Durbin mystery-comedy Lady on a Train, and
the English translation of Juan Belmonte: Killer of Bulls by Manuel
Chaves Nogales), his lifework consisted primarily of Simon Templar
Saint adventures, which were presented in novel, novella, and
short-story formats over the next 35 years.
Charteris relocated to the United States
in 1932, where he continued to publish short stories and also became
a writer for Paramount Pictures. However, Charteris was excluded from
permanent residency in the United States because of the Chinese
Exclusion Act, a law which prohibited immigration for persons of
"50% or greater" Oriental blood. As a result, Charteris was
forced to continually renew his six-month temporary visitor's visa.
Eventually, an act of Congress personally granted his daughter and
him the right of permanent residence in the United States, with
eligibility for naturalisation, which he later completed. In America,
The Saint became a radio series starring Vincent Price. In the 1940s,
Charteris, besides continuing to write The Saint stories, scripted
the Sherlock Holmes radio series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel
Bruce. In 1941, Charteris appeared in a Life photographic adaptation
of a short story of The Saint, with himself playing the Saint.
The
adventures of The Saint were chronicled in nearly 100 books (about
50 published in the UK and US, with others published in France).
Charteris himself stepped away from writing the books after The Saint
in the Sun (1963). The next year, Vendetta for the Saint was
published and while it was credited to Charteris, it was actually
written by science fiction writer Harry Harrison. Following Vendetta
came a number of books adapting televised episodes, credited to
Charteris, but written by others, although Charteris did collaborate
on several Saint books in the 1970s. Charteris acted as an editor for
these books, approving stories and making revisions when needed. He
also edited and contributed to The Saint Mystery Magazine, a
digest-sized publication. Charteris spent 55 years - 1928 to 1983 -
as either writer of or custodian of Simon Templar's literary
adventures, one of the longest uninterrupted spans of a single author
in the history of mystery fiction, equalling that of Agatha Christie,
who wrote her novels and stories featuring detective Hercule Poirot.
Charteris also wrote a column on cuisine for an American magazine,
and invented a wordless, pictorial sign language called Paleneo,
which he wrote a book on. Charteris was also one of the earliest
members of Mensa.
Charteris was married four times, in 1931
to Pauline Schishkin (19111975), daughter of a Russian
diplomat, in 1938 to Barbara Meyer (19071950), editor at The
American Magazine and in 1943 to Elizabeth Bryant Borst
(19092003), Boston society woman and night club singer. In
1952, Charteris married Hollywood actress Audrey Long (1922-2014
above left); the couple eventually returned to England, where he
spent his last years living in Surrey. He died at Princess Margaret's
Hospital Windsor, Berkshire, on April 15th 1993, survived by his wife
and daughter, Patricia.
Charteris brother was Rev Roy Bowyer-Yin,
who was a Chaplain and Master of Choir, known for introducing a
tradition of choral music to Ceylon. He left an abiding musical
presence in Sri Lanka.
The
Saint's origin remains a mystery; he is explicitly British, but in
early books (e.g. Meet the Tiger) there are references which suggest
that he had spent some time in the United States battling prohibition
gangsters. Presumably, his acquaintance with Bronx sidekick Hoppy
Uniatz dates from this period. In the books, his income is derived
from the pockets of the "ungodly" (as he terms those who
live by a lesser moral code than his own), whom he is given to
"socking on the boko". There are references to a "ten
percent collection fee" to cover expenses when he extracts large
sums from victims, the remainder being returned to the owners, given
to charity, shared among Templar's colleagues, or some combination of
those possibilities.
Templar's targets include corrupt
politicians, warmongers, and other low life. "He claims he's a
Robin Hood", bleats one victim, "but to me he's just a
robber and a hood". Robin Hood appears to be one inspiration for
the character; Templar stories were often promoted as featuring
"The Robin Hood of modern crime", and this phrase to
describe Templar appears in several stories. A term used by Templar
to describe his acquisitions is "boodle" (a term also
applied to the short story collection).
The Saint has a dark side, as he is
willing to ruin the lives of the "ungodly", and even kill
them, if he feels that more innocent lives can be saved. In the early
books, Templar refers to this as murder, although he considers his
actions justified and righteous, a view usually shared by partners
and colleagues. Several adventures centre on his intention to kill
(for example, "Arizona" in The Saint Goes West has Templar
planning to kill a Nazi scientist).
During the 1920s and early 1930s, The
Saint is fighting European arms dealers, drug runners, and white
slavers while based in his London home. His battles with Rayt Marius
mirror the 'four rounds with Carl Petersen' of Bulldog Drummond.
During the first half of the 1940s, Charteris cast Templar as a
willing operative of the American government, fighting Nazi interests
in the United States during World War II.
Beginning
with the "Arizona" novella, Templar is fighting his own
war against Germany. The Saint Steps In reveals that Templar is
operating on behalf of a mysterious American government official
known as Hamilton who appears again in the next WWII-era Saint book,
The Saint on Guard, and Templar is shown continuing to act as a
secret agent for Hamilton in the first post-war novel, The Saint Sees
it Through. The later books move from confidence games, murder
mysteries, and wartime espionage and place Templar as a global adventurer.
According to Saint historian Burl Barer,
Charteris made the decision to remove Templar from his usual
confidence-game trappings, not to mention his usual co-stars Holm,
Uniatz, Orace and Teal, as they weren't appropriate for the post-war
stories he was writing.
Although The Saint functions as an
ordinary detective in some stories, others depict ingenious plots to
get even with vanity publishers and other rip-off artists, greedy
bosses who exploit their workers and con men
The Saint has many partners, though none
last throughout the series. For the first half until the late 1940s,
the most recurrent is Patricia Holm, his girlfriend, who was
introduced in the first story, the 1928 novel Meet the Tiger in which
she shows herself a capable adventurer. Holm appeared erratically
throughout the series, sometimes disappearing for books at a time.
Templar and Holm lived together in a time when common-law
relationships were uncommon and, in some areas, illegal.
They
have an easy, non-binding relationship, as Templar is shown flirting
with other women from time to time. However, his heart remains true
to Holm in the early books, culminating in his considering marriage
in the novella The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal, only to have Holm
say she had no interest in marrying. Holm disappeared in the late
1940s, and according to Barer's history of The Saint, Charteris
refused to allow Templar a steady girlfriend, or Holm to return
(although according to the Saintly Bible website, Charteris did write
a film story that would have seen Templar encountering a son he had
with Holm). Holm's final appearance as a character was in the short
stories "Iris", "Lida," and "Luella,"
contained within the 1948 collection Saint Errant; the next direct
reference to her does not appear in print until the 1983 novel
Salvage for the Saint.
Another recurring character, Scotland Yard
Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, could be found attempting to put The
Saint behind bars, although in some books they work in partnership.
In The Saint in New York, Teal's American counterpart, NYPD Inspector
John Henry Fernack, was introduced, and he would become, like Teal,
an Inspector Lestrade-like foil and pseudo-nemesis in a number of
books, notably the American-based World War II novels of the 1940s.
The Saint had a band of compatriots,
including Roger Conway, Norman Kent, Archie Sheridan, Richard
"Dicky" Tremayne (a name that appeared in the 1990s TV
series, Twin Peaks), Peter Quentin, Monty Hayward, and his
ex-military valet, Orace.
In later stories, the dim-witted and
constantly soused but reliable American thug Hoppy Uniatz was at
Templar's side. Of The Saint's companions, only Norman Kent was
killed during an adventure (he sacrifices himself to save Templar in
the novel The Last Hero); the other males are presumed to have
settled down and married (two to former female criminals: Dicky
Tremayne to "Straight Audrey" Perowne and Peter Quentin to
Kathleen "The Mug" Allfield; Archie Sheridan is mentioned
to have married in "The Lawless Lady" in Enter the Saint,
presumably to Lilla McAndrew after the events of the story "The
Wonderful War" in Featuring the Saint).
Charteris gave Templar interests and
quirks as the series went on. Early talents as an amateur poet and
songwriter were displayed, often to taunt villains, though the
novella The Inland Revenue established that poetry was also a hobby.
That story revealed that Templar wrote an adventure novel featuring a
South American hero not far removed from The Saint himself.
Templar also on occasion would break the
fourth wall in an almost metafictional sense, making references to
being part of a story and mentioning in one early story how he cannot
be killed so early on; the 1960s television series would also have
Templar address viewers. Charteris in his narrative also frequently
breaks the fourth wall by making references to the
"chronicler" of The Saint's adventures and directly
addressing the reader and in one instance (the story "The
Sizzling Saboteur" in The Saint on Guard) inserts his own name.
Furthermore, in the 1955 story "The Unkind Philanthropist",
published in the collection The Saint on the Spanish Main, Templar
states outright that (in his fictional universe) his adventures are
indeed written by a man named Leslie Charteris.
The origins of The Saint can be found in
early works by Charteris, some of which predated the first Saint
novel, 1928's Meet the Tiger, or were written after it but before
Charteris committed to writing a Saint series. Burl Barer reveals
that an obscure early work, Daredevil, not only featured a heroic
lead who shared "Saintly" traits (down to driving the same
brand of automobile) but also shared his adventures with Inspector
Claud Eustace Teal, a character later a regular in Saint books. Barer
writes that several early Saint stories were rewritten from non-Saint
stories, including the novel She Was a Lady, which appeared in
magazine form featuring a different lead character.
Charteris utilized three formats for
delivering his stories. Besides full-length novels, he wrote novellas
for the most part published in magazines and later in volumes of two
or three stories. He also wrote short stories featuring the
character, again mostly for magazines and later compiled into omnibus
editions. In later years these short stories carried a common theme,
such as the women Templar meets or exotic places he visits. With the
exception of Meet the Tiger, chapter titles of Templar novels usually
contain a descriptive phrase describing the events of the chapter;
for example, Chapter Four of Knight Templar is titled "How Simon
Templar dozed in the Green Park and discovered a new use for toothpaste".
The
period of the books begins in the 1920s and moves to the 1970s with
the character being seemingly ageless. In early books most activities
are illegal, although directed at villains. In later books, this
becomes less so. In books written during World War II, The Saint was
recruited by the government to help track spies and similar
undercover work. Later he became a cold warrior fighting Communism.
The quality of writing also changes; early books have a freshness
which becomes replaced by cynicism in later works. A few Saint
stories crossed into science fiction and fantasy, "The Man Who
Liked Ants" and the early novel The Last Hero being examples;
one Saint short story, "The Darker Drink", was even
published in the October 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction.
When early Saint books were republished in
the 1960s to the 1980s, it was not uncommon to see freshly written
introductions by Charteris apologizing for the out-of-date tone;
according to a Charteris "apology" in a 1969 paperback of
Featuring the Saint, he attempted to update some earlier stories when
they were reprinted but gave up and let them sit as period pieces.
The 1963 edition of the short story collection The Happy Highwayman
contains examples of abandoned revisions; in one story published in
the 1930s ("The Star Producers"), references to actors of
the 1930s were replaced for 1963 with names of current movie stars;
another 1930s-era story, "The Man Who Was Lucky", added
references to atomic power.
Charteris
started retiring from writing books following 1963's The Saint in
the Sun. The next book to carry Charteris's name, 1964's Vendetta for
the Saint, was written by science fiction author Harry Harrison, who
had worked on the Saint comic strip, after which Charteris edited and
revised the manuscript. Between 1964 and 1983, another 14 Saint books
would be published, credited to Charteris but written by others. In
his introduction to the first, The Saint on TV, Charteris called
these volumes a team effort in which he oversaw selection of stories,
initially adaptations of scripts written for the 19621969 TV
series The Saint, and with Fleming Lee writing the adaptations (other
authors would later take over from Lee). Charteris and Lee
collaborated on two Saint novels in the 1970s, The Saint in Pursuit
(based on a story by Charteris for the Saint comic strip) and The
Saint and the People Importers. The "team" writers were
usually credited on the title page, if not the cover. One later
volume, Catch the Saint, was an experiment in returning The Saint to
his period, prior to World War II (as opposed to recent Saint books
set in the present day). Several later volumes also adapted scripts
from the 1970s revival TV series Return of the Saint.
The last Saint volume in the line of books
starting with Meet the Tiger in 1928 was Salvage for the Saint,
published in 1983. According to the Saintly Bible website, every
Saint book published between 1928 and 1983 saw the first edition
issued by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom (a company
that originally published only religious books) and The Crime Club
(an imprint of Doubleday that specialized in mystery and detective
fiction) in the United States. For the first 20 years, the books were
first published in Britain, with the United States edition following
up to a year later. By the late 1940s to early 1950s, this situation
had been reversed. In one case, The Saint to the Rescue, a British
edition did not appear until nearly two years after the American one.
French language books published over 30
years included translated volumes of Charteris originals as well as
novelisations of radio scripts from the English-language radio series
and comic strip adaptations. Many of these books credited to
Charteris were written by others, including Madeleine Michel-Tyl.
After
Charteris death in 1993, two additional Saint novels appeared around
the time of the 1997 film starring Val Kilmer: a novelisation of the
film (which had little connection to the Charteris stories) and
Capture the Saint, a more faithful work published by The Saint Club
that was originated by Charteris in 1936. Both books were written by
Burl Barer, who in the early 1990s published a history of the
character in books, radio, and television.
Charteris wrote 14 novels between 1928 and
1971 (the last two co-written), 34 novellas, and 95 short stories
featuring Simon Templar. Between 1963 and 1997, an additional seven
novels and fourteen novellas were written by others.
In 2014, all the Saint books from Enter
the Saint to Salvage for the Saint (but not Meet the Tiger nor Burl
Barer's Capture the Saint) were republished in both the United
Kingdom and United States.
Untitled
Several radio drama series were produced
in North America, Ireland, and Britain. The earliest was for Radio
Éireann's Radio Athlone in 1940 and starred Terence De Marney.
Both NBC and CBS produced Saint series during 1945, starring Edgar
Barrier and Brian Aherne. Many early shows were adaptations of
published stories, although Charteris wrote several storylines for
the series which were novelised as short stories and novellas.
The
longest running radio incarnation was Vincent Price (right), who
played the character in a series between 1947 and 1951 on three
networks: CBS, Mutual and NBC. Like The Whistler, the program had an
opening whistle theme with footsteps; some sources say the whistling
theme for The Saint was created by Leslie Charteris, while others
credit RKO composer Roy Webb. Price left in May 1951, to be replaced
by Tom Conway, who played the role for several more months; his
brother, George Sanders, had played Templar on film.
The next English-language radio series
aired on Springbok Radio in South Africa between 1953 and 1957. These
were fresh adaptations of the original stories and starred Tom
Meehan. Around 1965 to 1966 the South African version of Lux Radio
Theatre produced a single dramatization of The Saint. The English
service of South Africa produced another series radio adventures for
six months in 19701971. The most recent English-language
incarnation was a series of three one-hour-long radio plays on BBC
Radio 4 in 1995, all adapted from Charteris novels: Saint Overboard,
The Saint Closes The Case and The Saint Plays With Fire, starring
Paul Rhys as Templar.
Not long after creating The Saint,
Charteris began a long association with Hollywood as a screenwriter.
He was successful in getting a major studio, RKO Radio Pictures,
interested in a film based on one of his works. The first, The Saint
in New York in 1938, based on the 1935 novel of the same name,
starred Louis Hayward as Templar and Jonathan Hale as Inspector Henry
Farnack, the American counterpart of Mr Teal.
The
film was a success and seven more films followed in quick
succession. George Sanders took over the lead role from Hayward and
did it for five of those films, while Hugh Sinclair portrayed Templar
in the last two. Several of the films were original stories,
sometimes based upon outlines by Charteris while others were based
loosely on original novels or novellas.
In 1953, British Hammer Film Productions
produced The Saint's Return (known as "The Saint's Girl
Friday" in the United States), for which Hayward returned to the
role. This was followed by an unsuccessful French production in 1960.
In the 1960s Roger Moore revived the role
in a long-running television series The Saint. According to the book
Spy Television by Wesley Britton, the first actor offered the role
was Patrick McGoohan of Danger Man and The Prisoner. The series ran
from 1962 to 1969, and Moore remains the actor most closely
identified with the character.
Since Moore, other actors played him in
later series, notably Return of the Saint (19781979) starring
Ian Ogilvy; the series ran for one season, although it was picked up
by the CBS network. In the mid-1980s, the National Enquirer and other
newspapers reported that Moore was planning to produce a movie based
on The Saint with Pierce Brosnan as Templar, but it was never made.
(Ironically Brosnan almost became Moore's immediate successor as
James Bond.)
A television pilot for a The Saint in
Manhattan series starring Australian actor Andrew Clarke was shown on
CBS in 1987 as part of the CBS Summer Playhouse; the pilot was
produced by Don Taffner, but it never progressed beyond the pilot
stage. Inspector John Fernack of the NYPD, played by Kevin Tighe,
made his first film appearance since the 1940s in that production,
while Templar (sporting a moustache) got about in a black Lamborghini
bearing the ST1 licence plate. In 1989, six movies were made by
Taffner starring Simon Dutton.
These were syndicated in the United States
as part of a series of films titled Mystery Wheel of Adventure, while
in the United Kingdom they were shown as a series on ITV.
In 1991, plans were announced for a series
of motion pictures. Ultimately, however, no such franchise appeared.
The
Saint starring Val Kilmer was made in 1997 but diverged far from the
Charteris books, although it did revive Templar's use of aliases.
Kilmer's Saint is unable to defeat a Russian gangster in hand-to-hand
combat and is forced to flee; this would have been unthinkable in a
Charteris tale. Whereas the original Saint resorted to aliases that
had the initials S.T., Kilmer's character used Christian saints,
regardless of initials. This Saint refrained from killing, and even
the main villains live to stand trial, whereas Charteris's version
had no qualms about taking another life. Kilmer's Saint is presented
as a master of disguise, but Charteris's version hardly used the
sophisticated ones shown in this film. The film mirrored aspects of
Charteris's own life, notably his origins in the Far East, though not
in an orphanage as the film portrayed. Sir Roger Moore features
throughout in cameo as the BBC Newsreader heard in Simon Templar's Volvo.
Since the Kilmer film, there have been
several failed attempts at producing pilots for potential new Saint
television series:
On March 13th, 2007, TNT said it was
developing a one-hour series. James Purefoy was announced as the new
Simon Templar but production of the pilot, which was to have been
directed by Barry Levinson, did not go ahead.
Another attempt at production was planned
for 2009 with Scottish actor Dougray Scott starring as Simon Templar.
Roger Moore announced on his website that he would be appearing in
the new production, which is being produced by his son, Geoffrey
Moore, in a small role. This production also did not proceed.
It was announced in December 2012 that a
third attempt would be made to produce a pilot for a potential TV
series. This time, English actor Adam Rayner was cast as Simon
Templar and American actress Eliza Dushku as Patricia Holm (a
character from the novels never before portrayed on television and
only once in the films), with Roger Moore producing. Unlike the prior
attempts, production of the Rayner pilot did commence in December
2012 and continued into early 2013, with Moore and Ogilvy making
cameo appearances, according to a cast list posted on the official
Leslie Charteris website and subsequently confirmed in the trailer
that was released. The pilot was not picked up for a series and was
broadcast as the TV movie The Saint on July 11th 2017.
Paramount Pictures, having secured the
rights to the original book series (in 2016), is attempting to launch
another action franchise at the studio with a reboot of The Saint.
In the late 1940s Charteris and sometime
Sherlock Holmes scriptwriter Denis Green wrote a stage play titled
The Saint Misbehaves. It was never publicly performed, as soon after
writing it Charteris decided to focus on non-Saint work. For many
years it was thought to be lost; however, two copies are known to
exist in private hands, and correspondence relating to the play can
be found in the Leslie Charteris Collection at Boston University.
The Saint appeared in a long-running
series starting as a daily comic strip September 27th 1948 with a
Sunday added on March 20th the following year. The early strips were
written by Leslie Charteris, who had previous experience writing
comic strips, having replaced Dashiell Hammett as the writer of the
Secret Agent X-9 strip. The original artist was Mike Roy. In 1951,
when John Spranger replaced Roy as the artist, he altered The Saint's
appearance by depicting him with a beard. Bob Lubbers illustrated The
Saint in 1959 and 1960. The final two years of the strip were drawn
by Doug Wildey before it came to an end on September 16th 1961.
Concurrent with the comic strip, Avon
Comics published 12 issues of a The Saint comic book between 1947 and
1952 (some of these stories were reprinted in the 1980s). Some issues
included uncredited short stories; an additional short story,
"Danger No. 5", appeared as filler in issue 2 of the 1952
war comic Captain Steve Savage.
The
1960s TV series is unusual in that it is one of the few major
programs of its genre that was not adapted as a comic book in the
United States.
In Sweden, The Saint had a long-running
comic book published from 1966 to 1985 under the title Helgonet. It
originally reprinted the newspaper strip, but soon original stories
were commissioned for Helgonet. These stories were also later
reprinted in other European countries. Two of the main writers were
Norman Worker and Donne Avenell; the latter also co-wrote the novels
The Saint and the Templar Treasure and the novella collection Count
on the Saint, while Worker contributed to the novella collection
Catch the Saint.
A new American comic book series was
launched by Moonstone Comics in the summer of 2012, but it never went
beyond a single promotional issue "zero". Charteris also
edited or oversaw several magazines that tied in with The Saint. The
first of these were anthologies titled The Saint's Choice that ran
for seven issues in 194546. A few years later Charteris
launched The Saint Detective Magazine (later titled The Saint Mystery
Magazine and The Saint Magazine), which ran for 141 issues between
1953 and 1967, with a separate British edition that ran just as long
but published different material. In most issues of Saint's Choice
and the later magazines Charteris included at least one Saint story,
usually previously published in one of his books but occasionally
original. In several mid-1960s issues, however, he substituted
"Instead of the Saint", a series of essays on topics of
interest to him. The rest of the material in the magazines consisted
of novellas and short stories by other mystery writers of the day. An
Australian edition was also published for a few years in the 1950s.
In 1984 Charteris attempted to revive the Saint magazine, but it ran
for only three issues.
Leslie Charteris himself portrayed The
Saint in a photo play in Life magazine: The Saint Goes West.
Most Saint books were collections of
novellas or short stories, some of which were published individually
either in magazines or in smaller paperback form. Many of the books
have also been published under different titles over the years; the
titles used here are the more common ones for each book.
From 1964 to 1983, the Saint books were
collaborative works; Charteris acted in an editorial capacity and
received front cover author credit, while other authors wrote these
stories and were credited inside the book.
A
number of Saint adventures were published in French over a 30-year
period, many of which have yet to be published in English. Many of
these stories were ghostwritten by Madeleine Michel-Tyl and credited
to Charteris (who exercised some editorial control). The French books
were generally novelisations of scripts from the radio series, or
novels adapted from stories in the American Saint comic strip. One of
the writers who worked on the French series, Fleming Lee, later wrote
for the English-language books.
Burl Barer's history of The Saint
identifies two manuscripts that to date have not been published. The
first is a collaboration between Charteris and Fleming Lee called Bet
on the Saint that was rejected by Doubleday, the American publishers
of the Saint series. Charteris, Barer writes, chose not to submit it
to his United Kingdom publishers, Hodder & Stoughton. The
rejection of the manuscript by Doubleday meant that The Crime Club's
long-standing right of first refusal on any new Saint works was now
ended and the manuscript was then submitted to other United States
publishers, without success. Barer also tells of a 1979 novel titled
The Saint's Lady by a Scottish fan, Joy Martin, which had been
written as a present for and as a tribute to Charteris. Charteris was
impressed by the manuscript and attempted to get it published, but it
too was ultimately rejected. The manuscript, which according to Barer
is in the archives of Boston University, features the return of
Patricia Holm. At one time Leslie Charteris biographer Ian Dickerson
was working on a manuscript (based upon a film story idea by
Charteris) for a new novel titled Son of the Saint in which Templar
shares an adventure with his son by Patricia Holm. The book has, to
date, not been published.
Movies
The Saint in New York (1938)
The Saint Strikes Back (1939)
The Saint in London (1939)
The Saint's Double Trouble (1940)
The Saint Takes Over (1940)
The Saint in Palm Springs (1941)
The Saint's Vacation (1941)
The Saint Meets the Tiger (1943)
The Saint's Return (1953)
Le Saint mène la danse (1960)
Le Saint prend l'affût (1966)
The Saint (1997)
TV Movies
The Fiction Makers (1968)
Vendetta for the Saint (1969)
The Saint and the Brave Goose (1983)
The Saint in Manhattan (1987)
The Saint: The Brazilian Connection
The Saint: The Blue Dulac
The Saint Fear in Fun Park (a.k.a. The
Saint in Australia 1989)
The Saint: Wrong Number
The Saint: The Big Bang
The Saint: The Software Murders.
The Saint (2017)
Radio and TV Series
The Saint (radio program, 1945 - 1951)
The Saint (TV series, 1962 - 1969)
Return of the Saint (1978 - 1979)
Books by Leslie Charteris
Meet the Tiger (1928)
Enter the Saint (1930)
The Last Hero (1930)
Knight Templar (1930)
Featuring the Saint (UK only 1931)
Alias the Saint (UK only 1931)
Wanted for Murder (US only 1931)
She Was a Lady (1931)
The Holy Terror (1932)
Getaway (1932)
Once More the Saint (1933)
The Brighter Buccaneer (1933)
The Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (1934)
Boodle (1934)
The Saint Goes On (1934)
The Saint in New York (1935)
Saint Overboard (1936)
The Ace of Knaves (1937)
Thieves' Picnic (1937)
Prelude for War (1938)
Follow the Saint (1938)
The Happy Highwayman (1939)
The Saint in Miami (1940)
The Saint Goes West (1942)
The Saint Steps In (1942)
The Saint on Guard (1944)
The Saint Sees it Through (1946)
Call for the Saint (1948)
Saint Errant (1948)
The Saint in Europe (1953)
The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955)
The Saint Around the World (1956)
Thanks to the Saint (1957)
Señor Saint (1958)
The Saint to the Rescue (1959)
Trust the Saint (1962)
The Saint in the Sun (1963)
Collaborations(credited
to Charteris)
Vendetta for the Saint (1964)
The Saint on TV (1968)
The Saint Returns (1968)
The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968)
The Saint Abroad (1969)
The Saint in Pursuit (1970)
The Saint and the People Importers (1971)
Catch the Saint (1975)
The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976)
Send for the Saint (1977)
The Saint in Trouble (1978)
The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1979)
Count on the Saint (1980)
Salvage for the Saint (1983)
Books by Burl Barer
The Saint (film novelization) (1997)
Capture the Saint (1997)