I’m called the Saint,” he murmured. “But don’t let us get melodramatic about it, son. The last man who got melodramatic with me was hanged at Exeter six months back. It don’t seem to be healthy!
Regretfully, I have decided that if the Saint Saga must remain permanently in print in its entirety, then it can only do so in its original form.
Simon Templar was a man who couldn’t help spreading melodrama all around him like an infectious disease.
For there is a price ticket on everything that puts a whizz into life, and adventure follows the rule. It’s distressing, but there you are.
If I didn’t see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn’t write it at all.
Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.
In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between.
I had still never read one of the Bond books when the movie Dr. No came out.
Any stupid remark, quoted often enough, becomes gospel.
The gleam in their eyes telegraphs only too clearly that they are hoping for a headline, which of course means something disparaging, because nothing makes such good copy as a feud.
He believes in romance. He isn’t merely going through the mechanical movements of a man in an exciting situation. He is, vitally and positively squeezing the last drop of delight from living the best life he knows in the best way he can.
It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes.
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
Simon Templar, with the old careless swashbuckling days behind him, more stern and sober, playing bigger games than he had ever touched before – yet with the light of all the old ideals in blue eyes that would never grow old, and all the old laughing hell-for-leather recklessness waiting for his need.
While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue.
And it is also the story of Norman Kent, who was his friend, and how at one moment in that adventure he held the fate of two nations, if not of all Europe, in his hands; how he accounted for that stewardship; and how, one quiet summer evening, in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died for an idea.