Lemme be one of those clichéd tourists who wanted to buy a book from the banks of the Seine from an old bookseller. I didn’t realise how picky I was when I selected my books that I managed not to buy as many as I had planned. I wanted a book by a French author as I want to read the book in the original language, something not too hard because my French isn’t that great and something that isn’t readily available in English.
The old bookseller was nice to me and recommended me Leslie Charteris, a French sounding guy who actually is the precursor of Ian Fleming before he even wrote James Bond. So I got duped, and yeah I took the bookseller’s word for granted. Though he might enjoy these adventure novels I guess he couldn’t care less where the author was from. But no matter, once I started a book I have to finish it and the French translation from the English original was easy enough to understand.
Charteris was British-Chinese by origin — an eclectic heritage, not to mention that he was born in Singapore, a cosmopolitan mix reflective of his origin. You wouldn’t have picked this up if you read his novels blindly, as I did, but I’ve always wanted to know the author’s background as I’ve always believed that it shapes the viewpoint of the author. Charteris is a good-looking bloke with a mixed blood, a lack of roots and an English accent you’d mistake for what could be an imitation of his creation — James Bond.
Stepping into rubbery business
We meet Simon Templar, the somewhat reputable Saint, speaking to a woman who had procured his services. She was threatened by a mysterious party, not to meet with a man who may procure her father’s invention: synthetic rubber made out of common materials. It is a material which may be pivotal in the cogs of war: rubber, it seems, is an important material for the building blocks of war.
What follows is a series of sleepless events where the Saint has to follow the girl in question, fend off baddies of her, take her to safety and being pursued by other mysterious characters that may or may not have malicious motives themselves. In the meantime, the inventor has gone missing from his house and may have been kidnapped. Time is running out as the whole thing stinks like a Nazi-engineered scheme.
The success and plight of The Saint
I didn’t know it, but The Saint is single-handedly one of the greatest survivors in the history of novels: from 1928 to 1963, manned by Charteris. At its height, The Saint was battling Nazis while Bond was living under the shadow of the Cold War. And I can understand why: The Saint is a novel that is easy to digest, that packs little punch and a formulaic plot, with a plethora of adventurism. It is good for escapism, nothing more.
For this reason, Charteris was able to spin out close to 50 novels and 100 short stories featuring Simon Templar. I’m glad he did, for one of my favourite movies from my childhood was The Saint starring Val Kilmer as the title character where he played a dozen different characters in disguise, and played them all equally well. I much prefer that version of Templar than the one I just read.
The novel’s Simon Templar has the toxic characteristics of James Bond: a womaniser, sharp with his tongue and arguably, an unofficial licence to kill. He’s a bit of a douche as well on how he treats his adversaries and even colleagues. The Saint to me, feels like a run of the mill hero we’ve seen a lot in movies and TV, of which he also regenerated into.
The context of the novel is perhaps more of a draw than the novel itself — the year of publication is 1942. At this time, Nazism and fascism is more dangerous than Covid nowadays, and nobody is ever sure whether the virus has penetrated the homeland or not. It is a climate of uncertainty where capitalism still rules and rules riot, loyalties to the nation are tested even before McCarthyism was a thing, and the war was in everybody’s minds even in their quiet moments. Perhaps the success of The Saint is in the people’s needs of heroes such as Templar — who can succeed in his endeavours to swing the tides of war their way.
In this case, I don’t think I would go too deeply into the Saint and his other novels. I can’t help comparing Templar to Bond, and I much prefer Fleming’s prose. Then again, I might read a couple more of Charteris’s work if I ever come across them, because I’d argue that I read the book in the wrong language. Perhaps Charteris’s prose is better than the translation. But if I don’t come across another Templar novel, I’m fine with that too.
