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Simon Templar (aka “The Saint”)

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Lesley Charteris
Pseudonym of Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin
(1907-1993)

“Pardon me. In the excitement of the moment, and all that sort of thing, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m afraid I’ve had you at a disadvantage. My name is Templar–Simon Templar,” he caught the flash of stark hypnotic fear that blanched the big man’s lips, and grinned even more gently. “You may have heard of me. I am the Saint.”
— from The Saint in New York

Adventurer? Con artist? Thief? Spy? Amateur sleuth? Rogue? International playboy? Private eye?

In his long and varied career, Lesley Charteris’ rogue SIMON TEMPLAR (aka “The Saint”) seems to have been all of them, by design or happenstance, at one time or another. He’s been hired to steal, to kill, to spy, to follow and yes, to “look into” things. And sometimes he does all those things just because he wants to.

As Charteris once said of Templar, he “seldom went anywhere with the intention of getting into trouble. But trouble had that disastrous propensity for getting into him.”

But he (almost) always does it with wit and style; a certain bemused joie de vire and humour that often drew comparisons again and again to Robin Hood. But this was a Robin Hood who stole from the rich and was just as likely to keep it for himself, thankyouverymuch. And don’t be mislead by the movies or the TV shows — in his original incarnation he was not some happy-go-lucky chucklehead or a wink, wink charmer. While his antecedents might have been such swashbuckling British adventurers like Bulldog Drummond, he also displayed a steely pragmatism and at times a cold-blooded ruthlessness that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to fans of The Continental Op or James Bond. He was no gentleman sleuth — he wasn’t even a gentleman. He could be a nasty and violent son of a bitch. As originally envisioned, he was a badass.

Hell, several of the short stories and novellas (and there were a ton of them), were published in such iconic American hard-boiled outlets as Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly and Manhunt.

But you didn’t have to read the pulps to be aware of The Saint. There were novels, short stories all over the place (and countless collections of same), films, radio shows, comics, a comic strip, and television shows. From the 1930s to the seventies he was pretty much everywhere, and there seemed to be a Saint for everyone, from the hard-boiled Saint of the original novels and short stories to the suave debonair Saint of the early films starring Louis Hayward and George Sanders and on to the sun-shiny, roguish charm of Roger Moore on TV that my Mom loved. (Me? I was too young to follow most of the plots, but I loved the little cartoon halo and the cars).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on May 12th, 1907, but moved with his mother and brother at the age of twelve to England. In his early years, he rambled, shipping out on a freighter, working as a bartender in a country inn, prospecting for gold, diving for pearls, mining for tin, working on a rubber plantation, touring England with a carnival, and driving a bus, before deciding to study the law.

But his legal career was put on hold when his first novel was published. His third book, Meet the Tiger! (which introduced Simon Templar) was written when he was twenty years old. The books, which have been translated into over thirty languages, number nearly a hundred and have sold over forty million copies around the world, and have inspired feature films, TV and radio series, and a comic strip (originally written by Charteris). A wanderer, much like the Saint himself, Charteris lived in Florida and Hollywood (where his half-Chinese, half-English heritage initially excluded him from permanent residency in the U.S. due to the Chinese Exclusion Act) and finally, in his later years, settling once again in England. He was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger by the Crime Writers’ Association in 1992, in recognition of a lifetime of achievement.

He died the following year, but he’d stopped writing Saint novels way back in the 1940s, focussing instead on short stories and novellas after that, and he stopped writing completely following the 1964 publication of The Saint in the Sun collection, although he kept a hand in (and his name on) everything. The next Saint book,Vendetta for the Saint (1964), was ghostwritten by Harry Harrison, who’d worked with Charteris on the Saint comic strip. For the next twenty years all the Saint books, mostly collections of short stories, novellas and adaptations by of scripts from the 1962-69 TV show), would be written by others, although almost always credited to Charteris.

Charteris, however, was very open about it. In his intro to The Saint on TV (1968), he called the books a “team effort,” with him overseeing the selection of the stories, initially adaptations by Fleming Lee of scripts written for TV series starring Roger Moore, and revising when necessary. The “team” writers were usually credited on the title page, but not the cover. Later collections also adapted scripts from the 1970s series Return of the Saint, starring Ian Olgivy.

    

NOVELS

SHORT STORIES

COLLECTIONS

FILMS

 

RADIO

COMICS

   

COMIC STRIPS

GRAPHIC NOVELS

TELEVISION

   

DVD COLLECTIONS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
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