The Saint Sees It Through (Simon Templar ‘The Saint’ #26)

Leslie Charteris did it again; he topped himself with yet another great adventure, in which Simon Templar shines, along with his “halo.”

“Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, took a sip of his latest and most anemic-looking highball, and reflected with considerable gloom that if the vanquishing of villains required any man like himself to endure certain unpleasantnesses and discomforts there must be a lot of more attractive and entertaining places to endure them in than a joint with a name like Cookie’s Cellar, situated in a rejuvenated basement in the East Fifties of New York City, USA.

Such, for instance, as any reasonably busy boiler factory in any moderately insalubrious zone of reconversion.”

“For those rather pleasantly piratical features had probably drifted in and out of more major forms of trouble than those of any other adventurer of this century. Newspaper reproductions of them had looked out from under headlines that would have been dismissed as a pulp writer’s fantasy before the man whom they accoladed as the Robin Hood of modern crime arrived to make them real.”

The Saint is in New York, and is not at all impressed with the booze in the night club scene. He is on the trail of a drug operation, and the likely suspects are a steatopygous piano player, a psychiatrist, a poet and a nancy boy artist.

He also has to decide if the gorgeous singer Avalon Dexter, who has been quite, quite nice to him, is on the level.

This book, from 1947, is the last full-length Saint novel written entirely by Charteris (i.e. not ghost-written with his approval); and it features its hero still in his reformed wartime rle of rather eccentric G-man, on the trail of drug smugglers in New York.

Charteris’s story-telling and character-drawing abilities, with the characteristic flashes of humour, never entirely desert him. But compared with the prewar books, this is dull stuff.

There is one point of especial interest, nonetheless. The Saint says to the heroine:

“[T]his thing goes too far over the world, into too many countries and too many jurisdictions. Only an organisation that’s just as international can cope with it. There is such a thing, and I’m part of it. That’s all I’m allowed to say.”

But on the last page it’s clearly identified as UNCLE, over a decade before this supposedly fictional organisation was supposedly created for the TV series.

P.S. For a list of and discussion of all Charteris’s Saint books, see my So You’d Like To… Guide.

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