Book review by George Simmers: Later the book would be renamed The Saint Plays with Fire. It’s a good example of popular thirties fiction getting stuck into politics. Simon Templar (alias the Saint, the crimefighter who is never afraid of breaking the law himself) had dealt with conspiracies before, but more recntly his dramatic dealings had been with gangsters and so forth. In this adventure he comes up against the political forces that are changing the face of Europe. The adventure begins:
Perhaps the story really began when Simon Templar switched on the radio. At least, before that everything was peaceful; and afterwards, for many memorable days which were to find an unforgettable place in his saga of hairbreadth adventure, there was no peace at all.
First edition cover
What he hears on the radio is a French fascist politician pontificating:
‘. . . to crush them like vermin, to destroy them like rats who would carry their plague germs through our fair land! The blood of a million Frenchmen, dead on the fields of glory, cries out to you to show yourselves worthy of their sacrifice. Rise up and arm yourselves against this peril that threatens you from within; stamp out these cowardly pacifists, these skulking traitors, these godless anarchists, these alien Jews who are betraying our country for a handful of gold . . . Sons of France, I call you to arms.
Immediately he has heard this, the saint, who is driving along a quiet country road with his girlfriens Patricia, sees a large house on fire, and this is where the action begins.
A man is possibly trapped in an upper room of the burning house, and the Saint rushes in to rescue him while lesser men are hesitating. He is too late – the building collapses, the man is not rescued, and Simon Templar only just survives. Various things make him suspicious about the fire, and he is more so when he realises that the people there are members of a potential British fascist group – and also a cross-section of the English Establishment. There is a grim ex-soldier and his unpleasant wife, a scheming ex-cabiney minister and the organiser, the unsubtly named Luker, a financier and arms dealer, who has financial reasons for promoting war:
For instance, he’s one of the directors of the Voix Populaire, a French newspaper that spends most of its time howling about the menace of the Italo-German Fascist entente, and at the same time he’s part owner of the Deutscher Unterricht, which lets off periodical blasts about the French threat to German recovery . . . At home, of course, he’s a staunch patriot.
The Saint, with his infallible instinct, immediately knows that this man is eveil.:
Simon saw Luker’s graven mask slip for a fraction of a second. For that fleeting micron of time, the Saint saw the stark soul of the man to whom murder meant nothing.
There is also an attractive but mercenary young woman called Lady Valerie Woodchester, of whom more later.
The man the Saint tries but failedfailed to rescue was John Kennet, a left-wing journalist who had infiltrated the fascist organisation. In the hope that Kennet had passed on his information about the fascists to his fellow journalist, Ralph Windlay, Templar goes to Notting Hill to talk to him – but discovers him murdered.
At the scene of the crime he meets his old antagonist, Inspector Claude Eustace Teal, still plump, still chewing gum and still desperate to arrest the Saint for something. As ever, the Saint enjoys teasing him.
There is no proof who has committed the murders, but Kennet apparently gave a dossier into the hands of the beautiful Lady Valerie
She had lovely eyes, large and dark and sparkling, shaded by very long lashes. Her dark hair gleamed with a warm autumn richness.
In her Simon Templar meets his match. She has the same lack of respect for authority that he has, and has even fewer principles. She is just looking for ways to monetise her assets, and anything goes. It transpires that she put the dossier at a left-luggage office, and a chase ensues with various people hunting for the ticket. When she is finally persuaded to give the dossier to templar, he finds the key evidence – a photograph that is proof of Luker’s plot to carry out an incident in France that will be like the Reichstag fire in Berlin – an atrocity will be committed by the fascists, and then blamed on the Communists, which will lead to a coup d’etat bringing the french fascist leader, marteau, to power,. This will be good for the arms industry:
Hitler and Marteau will scream insults at each other across the frontier like a couple of fishwives, and pretty soon everything will be lined up for a nice bloody war. Some millions of men, women, and children will be burned, scalded, blistered, gassed, shot, blown up, and starved to death, and the arms ring will sit back on its foul fat haunches and rake in the profits on a turnover of about five thousand pounds per corpse, according to the statistics of the last world war.
Almost as soon as the Saint has discovered this, he and Lady Valerie are captured by the fascists, bundled into an aeroplane and taken to France. The villains make the usual mistake of not killing Templar straight away, thus giving him a chance to turn the tables. (Not to self: George, if you ever capture a charismatic crime-fighter, bump him off very quickly; otherwise the laws of fiction require that he will triumph.)
There is a terrific final section where Templar and Lady Valerie and imprisoned in a cellar, and Luker is desperate to get the incriminating negative. Simon Templar, of course, is unfazed by this. As ever:
“The Saint was as cool as chromium, as accurate and self-contained as a machine.”
But the vile Luker threatens to flog Lady Valerie until he gives in. Being a gentleman, whatever Chief Inspector Teal thinks, Simon can’t have this. It’s probably not a spoiler to say that he gets the better of the fascists in the end. There will, after all, abe another twenty-odd books in the Saint series after this one. There’s a bit of a ‘with-one-bound-he-was-free’ moment – but it’s still a terrific ending.
This is a very exciting thriller, and it makes its politics clear. Simon Templar (and Charteris) are against any kind of brutality. The saint considers one of the brutal sidekicks:
But he was not so much interested in the man individually as in the type, the matrix in which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He had known it in Red Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself lay at the caprice of men from that mold.
There are several references to the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which one was not so likely to find in popular fiction of this time. Charteris had his personal feelings about racial prejudice. His father was Chinese, and as a mixed-race boy he had been sent to an English public school, where he had a hard time. Hence perhaps his negative view of English establishment figures. Simon Templar (whose origins are never explained) is always an outsider-figure, following his own rules, not those of any authority. He was willing to use violence (and very good at it)
“You know, there are some people who are vastly improved by death.’”
But he had his rules,and only murdered those who deserved it.
Most earlier Saint books had been compilations of magazine stories. This was a full-length commission, and Charteris allows himself to express fully his delight in elaborate description. His style is a long way from ther hard-boiled monosyllables of the toughest American thrillers. Here is his description of Inspector Teal enjoying his chewing-gum:
He had got his spearmint nicely into condition now – a plastic nugget, malleable and yet resistant, still flavorous, crisp without being crumbly, glutinous without adhesion, obedient to the capricious patterning of his mobile tongue working in conjunction with the clockwork reciprocation of his teeth, polymorphous, ductile.
After the great showdown in France, the book ends with a postscript in which Lady Valerie, who at one point had threatened to blackmail the saint into marriage (because she knew he was very rich) reveals she is going to marry the rich but stupid soldier, and use the dossier for blackmail. She has already got ten thousand pounds out of the ex-cabinet minister. The Saint rather admires her. So do I. The women in our reading group are always in favour of female characters who have agency. Lady V has it in spades.
