Wed 21 Sep 2022
Stories I’m Reading: LESLIE CHARTERIS “The Angel’s Eye.â€
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading1 Comment
LESLIE CHARTERIS “The Angel’s Eye.†Short story. Simon Templar aka “The Saint.” First published in The Saint Detective Magazine, June/July 1953; reprinted in the September 1963 issue. First collected in The Saint in Europe, (Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1954). TV episode: The Saint, 11 November 1966. (Season 5, Episode 7), with Roger Moore.
While making various stops along the way in a vacation trip across Europe, Simon Templar, as he always does, comes across a strange request for help, this time in Amsterdam. An employee of a diamond merchant tells the Saint he brought an expensive diamond known as The Angel’s Eye into the office of a well-known diamond cutter to be recut. When he returned later, he was told they did not have the diamond, that it was never brought in, the receipt was forged, and they’d never seen him before.
The Saint has a certain kind of radar for this sort of thing:
Could you stop reading at this point? I think not.
If in any dreams I may have ever had of writing mystery fiction and producing passages such as this, I’d pinch myself immediately and wake up.
September 21st, 2022 at 9:28 pm
I think at times in waxing poetic about how much fun the Saint stories and novels are we forget what a good writer, a stylistic, and expressive writer Charteris was. His voice in its own way is as distinctive as Hammett, Chandler, Fleming, Spillane, or any of the writers we hold up as immediately recognizable in fiction.
I’m not arguing Charteris is as important as a Hammett or Chandler or that his own art is on the same level, only that his voice is as unique to him and his corner of the genre as theirs are.
You know the real thing and for millions of us it is almost impossible to stop reading once we have heard it.