Friday, January 3, 2020

Forgotten Books: MEET THE TIGER (and The Saint) by Leslie Charteris (1928)


This is my first encounter with the REAL Saint. I saw Roger Moore pretending to be him on TV when I was a kid, and over the last couple of years I've seen him in Golden Age comics on Comicbookplus.com. But I wasn't intrigued enough to seek out the real deal until a couple of months ago, when I saw the first of the movies, The Saint in New York (1938), recently on TCM. Louis Hayward - a guy I don't recall seeing in anything else - portrayed a character I wanted to see more of. He was tough, fearless, devil-may-care, and every bit as suave as James Bond, but with a quirky sense of humor that made Roger Moore seem bland.


So I started hunting Meet the Tiger, and found it surprisingly tough to get. Though the book has been reprinted many times since its first appearance in 1928, it appears to have been out of print for the past forty years. When the other early Saint novels and collections were reissued in trade paperback and ebook in 2014, this one was left behind. This seem to have something to do with copyright issues, but may also be related to the author's wish that it be best forgotten.

Leslie Charteris was only twenty when this was published, and later found some of the execution embarrassing. Plus, he apparently had no plan to begin a series, and revealed more about the character than he would have liked. When we meet Simon Templar (the initials S.T. prompting his nickname), he's already a notorious character, known for his globetrotting quasi-legal adventures. When Charteris decided to make him a series character, beginning with the three novelettes collected in Enter the Saint (1929), he deemed it sort of a reboot for the character, making his past more mysterious. 


Anyway, I finally found a copy of Meet the Tiger and sat down to read it - and had my socks knocked off. The REAL, original Simon Templar is every bit as entertaining as the guy played by Louis Hayward, and Leslie Charteris' storytelling is an almost non-stop kick in the pants.



The young author's prose - and especially Templar's dialogue - is a riotous mix of British and American slang. There are smiles and surprises lurking in dang near every paragraph. The best scenes are those where the Saint interacts with other characters, putting both his wit and peculiar sense of humor on display. Late in the book, when our hero is offstage, then alone for a good stretch, there's a declded slackening of fun, but it all comes aright in the end. 

At times, Chateris seems to be channeling P.G. Wodehouse, and late in the book he even points it out himself. "Oh, most frightfully rather!" promised Mr. Lomas-Coper. "Cheer-screamingly-ho, wuff, wuff!" And the character prances off in "a realistically Wodehousian manner."

The plot - as gradually rolled out - involves the loot from a Chicago gold robbery staged by a mastermind called the Tiger. The Saint has made a deal with the bank: he'll get a percentage if he recovers the booty. The entire story takes place in the English coastal village of Baycombe, where Templar believes the Tiger has stashed the gold. The big mystery, keeping the Saint and the reader guessing until the final pages, is who is the Tiger?

Wikipedia tells me Charteris wrote 14 Saint novels between 1928 and 1971, the last with a co-writer. It also credits him with 34 Saint novellas and 93 short stories. Beginning in 1963, he began farming him out to other writers, resulting in seven more novels and 19 novellas. Another site says there were another 45 stories by other hands published only in French. It all sounds mighty complicated, and reviews say the tales became blander as time rolled on. So I'm pretty sure I'll never read them all, but I'll definitely be moving on to Enter the Saint, followed by the second novel, The Last Hero


12 comments:

Jerry House said...

I loved the early Saint, liked the later Saint, and have a hard time getting through the "collaborations." The final blow for me was the 1997 Val Kilmer ego-fest movie. (And I couldn't get through the first fifteen minutes of the 2017 Adam Raynor flick.)

Chap O'Keefe said...

Evan, did know the genesis of "the REAL Saint" was explored in a Mystery File blog post in 2015? (http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=37295). In the comments there you can also find links to key "Five Kings" stories at Comicbookplus. My own first encounter with the Saint was made when I was aged about 10; my closest encounter with the character (and Charteris's demands of his ghosts) was in the early 1960s as one of the scriptwriters for a Saint comic book series. More about that can be found here: https://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/search?q=Saint+Settles+the+Score.

TC said...

Louis Heyward may be best known for swashbucklers (The Man in the Iron Mask, Fortunes of Captain Blood). He was also in the 1945 version of And Then There Were None, and he played Templar again in the 1950s in The Saint's Return.

There was a B movie series with George Sanders and a radio series with Vincent Price, but the character never really hit it big until the 1960s TV series. Of course, it was Moore's big break, and he may have been the first British actor to become a millionaire from starring in a TV show.

Glen Davis said...

There's a short story in pictures in Life Magazine about The Saint, starring Charteris himself. It was made around 1938 or so, IIRC. It's fascinating.

Howard said...

Lots of copies on abebooks.com, but no bargains. It'll cost you $50 minimum to read this.

Rick Robinson said...

I like the short stories a lot. Try The Saint In Europe, it's good.

Art Scott said...

The Saint was my second hero crush in crime fiction (after Holmes). Took me years of searching,beginning ca. age 12, to track down copies of the books and read them. On revisits, some early novels were disappointing, others like Saint in New York held up well. The character shines best in his many genial battles with Claude Eustace Teal, and especially in the many "conning the con man" short stories, deservedly much-anthologized.

Bob said...

The Saint books are spectacular: from the beginning till about the late 1940s, they are unbeatable entertainment. You're in for a treat!

Evan Lewis said...

Sheesh. Who knew there were so many Saintophiles out there? Thanks for chiming in, guys.

Otis Criblecoblis said...

I've gotten great enjoyment out of reading about the exploits of Simon Templar, especially the full-length novels. My favorite is The Saint in New York, with The Saint in Miami a close second.

Overall, I would agree with Bob above. The series is well worth reading at least through the late '40s.

Ian Dickerson said...

Lovely to see so many comments about Mr Templar's adventures. Can I be cheeky and plug my latest book? It's entirely relevant as it's a full length biography of a writer called Charteris...

https://spitefulpuppet.com/product/a-saint-i-aint-paperback/

Ira Henkin said...

Great thriller. A favorite of mine