Wed 27 Dec 2017
Stories I’m Reading: LESLIE CHARTERIS “The National Debt.”
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[12] Comments
LESLIE CHARTERIS “The National Debt.” Simon Templar “The Saint.” Novella. First published as a non-Saint story in The Thriller, UK, 06 April 1929, as “The Secret of Beacon Inn.” Reprinted in All Star Detective Stories, US, March 1931. Rewritten and collected as a Saint story in the book Alias the Saint (Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, May 1931) and in the US as part of the larger compilation Wanted for Murder by the Doubleday Crime Club in 1931. Reprinted many times in several collections and formats. TV adaptation: As “The Crime of the Century,” The Saint, starring Roger Moore (Season 3, Episode 22; 1965.)
The history of The Saint over the years is a highly complicated one, and if any of the information above is incorrect, please set me straight. I read this particular story in a paperback entitled Alias the Saint published by Charter in the 1980s, I believe, but as an overall collection, it contains only two of the three stories originally published under that title in the UK in 1931.
That this was not originally a Saint story, but was cobbled into one when the character proved to be so popular in other stories, helps explains why the Saint spends quite a bit of his tine doing his crime-solving duties under the name of Ramses Smith, as the leading character was so named in the Thriller version.
Specifics of how he gets onto the trail of a trio of miscreants is not gone into. Suffice it here to say that the three have grandiose plans of some kind, but definitely criminous. To that end they have forced a young female chemist to work on their project with them. How? By drugging her with a doped cigarette, then killing a detective from Scotland Yard and making her believe she did it.
Enter the Saint. He barges into the inn of the original title where the villains have set up a laboratory for the kidnapped girl to work in. Proving that the direct approach works, and delightfully so, Templar drives up, and improvising as he goes, declares that he’s working for Scotland Yard and if they don’t serve him a meal, he will arrest them all and take them in.
This is not a whodunit by any means. For the Saint it’s only a matter of “what are they up to?” Before the story ends, he has found out, escaped from a cellar room filled with a deadly gas, and (of course) rescued the girl, all in Leslie Charteris’s usual breezy fashion, glossing over messy details as he goes. The story’s so much fun to read, though, that only nitpickers like me would even bring them up.
December 27th, 2017 at 10:01 pm
A few Charteris stories for THRILLER were cannibalized and cobbled together as Saint adventures. Some of the earlier Saint stories originally featured Edgar Wallace-like “Five Kings” (the Saint was the Joker), but by book publication the Saint had supplanted most of the five.
December 28th, 2017 at 2:05 am
Yes! I was just now browsing through a list of early Charteris stories that I found online, and quite by accident came across this, that the story “The Five Kings,” which appeared in The Thriller, May 5, 1929, was rewritten as “The Man Who Was Clever” and was included in the book Enter the Saint (Hodder, 1930).
December 28th, 2017 at 3:12 am
I was in grad school when the Roger Moore series was on, so I missed most of them. And those I did see, I probably didn’t pay enough attention to realize that many of them were based on actual Saint stories. I’ll have find my box DVD set (or sets) of the series and watch some of them.
December 28th, 2017 at 9:14 am
I believe some of Chandler’s early stories were re-issued with the protagonist changed to Philip Marlowe. Chandler always claimed it was the publisher’s doing, not his.
December 28th, 2017 at 3:43 pm
I have all of the Roger Moore Saint episodes and have watched many of them. While they are noted as having been based on the original stories there were changes made to the original texts. Charteris himself was not entirely pleased with this and used to write comments in his “Instead of The Saint” column in The Saint Magazine. I had a subscription to this at the time so I remember those.
December 28th, 2017 at 5:41 pm
I would like to see the episode based on this story. It’s short enough (novella length) that there shouldn’t have to be a lot of trimming, and do you know what? I think it would work even better as a hour TV show (less than 50 minutes) than it does in prose form.
Even at an early age — he was in his early 20s when he wrote this — Charteris seems to have had a real talent for visual effectiveness in almost everything he wrote.
December 28th, 2017 at 11:37 pm
Charteris began as an unsuccessful cartoonist. Later he wrote the comic strip SECRET AGENT X9 following Hammett, a few original Saint stories for a short run in a comic book (PRIZE I think), and eventually the Saint comic strip, at least one book in the SAINT comic for Avon, and both radio and screenplays.
His style was always very visual.
December 30th, 2017 at 12:08 am
With Denis Green he also wrote a number of radio scripts for the Sherlock Holmes series. About a dozen of these have been collected and published by Purview Press. The book was edited by Ian Dickerson.
December 30th, 2017 at 10:14 am
Leslie didn’t begin as an unsuccessful cartoonist. Unless you count the cartoon strip he wrote in his own magazine at the age of 9…his sights were always firmly set on being a writer.
December 30th, 2017 at 11:54 am
Back in the 1960s, I binged on THE SAINT paperbacks with Roger Moore on the covers. Later, I’d pick up any paperback featuring THE SAINT. For a year or two I bought THE SAINT magazine. I have fond memories of those stories.
December 30th, 2017 at 1:25 pm
I haven’t looked at one of the Saint magazines in years but back in the late fifties I remember liking it more than EQMM. The stories seemed livelier and faster paced, or is my memory playing tricks on me?
December 31st, 2017 at 12:54 am
For one thing, other than some of the same writers as EQMM, THE SAINT usually led with a Charteris story or at least article, and would go further afield than EQMM at times, such as “Dead Phone” the only Tygrve Yamamura short by Poul, with his wife Karen, Anderson.
Michael Avallone also graced the pages, and Hans Stefan Santesson was one of the great mystery and SF editors.
Livelier seems a good assessment of TSMM, a magazine with much of the class of EQMM at its best, but which seemed to take itself much less seriously.
A few issues of TSMM, some MANHUNT, EQMM, 87th PRECINCT MM, and EDGAR WALLACE MM can be found for free download on Internet Archive and from Luministas.