Forgotten Books: MEET THE TIGER (and The Saint) by Leslie Charteris (1928)

This is my first encounter with the REAL Saint. I saw Roger Moore pretending to be him on TV when I was a kid, and over the last couple of years I've seen him in Golden Age comics on Comicbookplus.com. But I wasn't intrigued enough to seek out the real deal until a couple of months ago, when I saw the first of the movies, The Saint in New York (1938), recently on TCM. Louis Hayward - a guy I don't recall seeing in anything else - portrayed a character I wanted to see more of. He was tough, fearless, devil-may-care, and every bit as suave as James Bond, but with a quirky sense of humor that made Roger Moore seem bland.

So I started hunting Meet the Tiger, and found it surprisingly tough to get. Though the book has been reprinted many times since its first appearance in 1928, it appears to have been out of print for the past forty years. When the other early Saint novels and collections were reissued in trade paperback and ebook in 2014, this one was left behind. This seem to have something to do with copyright issues, but may also be related to the author's wish that it be best forgotten.

Leslie Charteris was only twenty when this was published, and later found some of the execution embarrassing. Plus, he apparently had no plan to begin a series, and revealed more about the character than he would have liked. When we meet Simon Templar (the initials S.T. prompting his nickname), he's already a notorious character, known for his globetrotting quasi-legal adventures. When Charteris decided to make him a series character, beginning with the three novelettes collected in Enter the Saint (1929), he deemed it sort of a reboot for the character, making his past more mysterious.

Anyway, I finally found a copy of Meet the Tiger and sat down to read it - and had my socks knocked off. The REAL, original Simon Templar is every bit as entertaining as the guy played by Louis Hayward, and Leslie Charteris' storytelling is an almost non-stop kick in the pants.

The young author's prose - and especially Templar's dialogue - is a riotous mix of British and American slang. There are smiles and surprises lurking in dang near every paragraph. The best scenes are those where the Saint interacts with other characters, putting both his wit and peculiar sense of humor on display. Late in the book, when our hero is offstage, then alone for a good stretch, there's a declded slackening of fun, but it all comes aright in the end.

At times, Chateris seems to be channeling P.G. Wodehouse, and late in the book he even points it out himself. "Oh, most frightfully rather!" promised Mr. Lomas-Coper. "Cheer-screamingly-ho, wuff, wuff!"And the character prances off in "a realistically Wodehousian manner."

The plot - as gradually rolled out - involves the loot from a Chicago gold robbery staged by a mastermind called the Tiger. The Saint has made a deal with the bank: he'll get a percentage if he recovers the booty. The entire story takes place in the English coastal village of Baycombe, where Templar believes the Tiger has stashed the gold. The big mystery, keeping the Saint and the reader guessing until the final pages, is who is the Tiger?

Wikipedia tells me Charteris wrote 14 Saint novels between 1928 and 1971, the last with a co-writer. It also credits him with 34 Saint novellas and 93 short stories. Beginning in 1963, he began farming him out to other writers, resulting in seven more novels and 19 novellas. Another site says there were another 45 stories by other hands published only in French. It all sounds mighty complicated, and reviews say the tales became blander as time rolled on. So I'm pretty sure I'll never read them all, but I'll definitely be moving on to Enter the Saint, followed by the second novel, The Last Hero.