Mon 26 Dec 2016
Mystery Review: LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint in New York.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[12] Comments
LESLIE CHARTERIS – The Saint in New York. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1935, First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1935. Reprinted many times, including: Avon T-317 (1950s); IPL, November 1988.
I have a great fondness for this book, more perhaps, I have to confess, than its intrinsic reading value. Back in the 50s, after a few weeks of checking out “grownup” mysteries from the local library, the Avon edition credited above, itself a later printing, somehow found itself into my hands. It is among the first I ever read in paperback. I may have purchased it myself, based on the cover (shown below), or it may have have been given to me by my grandparents, who were great readers of mysteries and most conveniently lived next door.
This is a great book for a young teenaged boy to have come across quite serendipitously in the 1950s. Simon Templar (aka The Saint) is a character any boy can immediately identify with: insouciant, carefree, impetuous, daring, and afraid of nothing. He was able to be dragged into any underworld hangout of the worst hoodlums and gangsters that the great city of New York could offer, and act as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
That The Saint was also the luckiest guy in the world didn’t enter into it, although a recent reading of the IPL edition (also shown) made that abundantly clear to the adult version of me. [Warning: Plot Alerts ahead.] That he was saved (twice!) by a beautiful slip of a girl he had never met before was nothing less than an intoxicating dream come true to a teenaged boy, but something less so to an adult.
I also wonder, but not for very long, why it didn’t occur to my younger self that a vigilante for hire could come to New York and kill a short list of villains without remorse or more recrimination from the law was not the way the real world should work.
But Leslie Charteris was the kind of writer who could make you think it should. His often flamboyant overwriting can be difficult to parse if you read his words and sentences one at a time. What I discovered during this most recent re-reading is that if you were to take in large gulps of entire paragraphs all at once, you will be reading the adventures of The Saint exactly as they were meant to be read.
December 26th, 2016 at 6:52 pm
I have The Sun Dial Press photoplay edition with a single photograph from the film of two cops giving off a gangster vibe as they push Louis Hayward around. It is the only film that captures the essential ‘saintliness’ of its literary source. In this book, and perhaps in several earlier incarnations, The Saint does the job of The Four Just Men. All badly needed right now.
December 26th, 2016 at 9:28 pm
This must be the one:
December 26th, 2016 at 6:56 pm
The Saint In New York will be run Friday evening at 8:00 P.M. January 20th by TCM.
December 26th, 2016 at 9:30 pm
Alas, I don’t believe I will be in the vicinity of a TV or Tivo on the 20th. While I’ve never seen the film and I should, so far both time and opportunity have eluded me.
December 26th, 2016 at 9:58 pm
Steve, it is almost required viewing. Someone you know must mercifully be able to record it.
December 26th, 2016 at 10:08 pm
Breathlessly is the way to consume, not read, Charteris. Minor cuts and burns from rapid page turning should accompany the effort.
Rereads nf the best of the Saint, and this one is, makes me briefly feel 12 again.
December 26th, 2016 at 10:12 pm
Agree with Barry on the film. Hayward is ideal, the closest thing we ever get to the early Saint, despite Charteris complaints. The plot is followed closely, the action is constant, and the fun assured.
Keep an eyeout for Jack Carson as a thug the Saint outwits.
December 26th, 2016 at 11:48 pm
TCM is running 7 of the Saint movies on January 20. I see amazon has a video tape of THE SAINT IN NEW YORK for $8.00 plus postage.
Steve mentions checking out mysteries from the library but even back then as a young teenager, I wanted to own my own copies of books. I was spending all my allowance money and the money I made every Saturday cleaning a local barber shop on books and the SF digests. I wanted to also buy MANHUNT and similar crime magazines but couldn’t afford all the SF magazines and the crime magazines also.
Later on I bought all the back issues of just about every fiction magazine and still have them in my library.
December 27th, 2016 at 10:03 am
Yes, the “Saint” books are best enjoyed by teenagers, but IN NEW YORK seems self-consciously “hard-boiled” to me, as if Charteris were deliberately trying for what he saw as the American market.
December 27th, 2016 at 11:58 am
Dan, if your thought is so, Charteris got it right. And please, never doubt that professional people in the arts want to make sales. It is a business. Shouldn’t be a surprise there. It lead to The Saint in film and on radio, both of which evolved into the television series, and on going interest in the character. Should be obvious to anyone.
December 27th, 2016 at 1:35 pm
I have a bunch of Saint books I’ve gathered, though not this one, and of my reading it’s the short stories that I’ve enjoyed the most. I will tune into TCM on Jan 20 to have a look.
December 29th, 2016 at 10:53 am
Hey Dan, speaking of getting it right for the market… I just rewatched The Thin Man and paid attention to the structure. I thought for the first time that Hammett was going for the Christie market and the Charles could easily been replaced by Poirot. This is quiet a change from the structure of his Op or Spade tales, and I suspect he was deliberately trying for a breakthrough.