THE SIZZLING SABOTEUR (The Saint during wartime)
From 1944, this is a pretty good espionage yarn, but not one which shows the Saint at his best. By this time, he has settled down severely and compromised his earlier boyish illusions enough that he`s now taking assignments from what seems to be the OSS (he has a Washington number he calls to report to some spook named Hamilton).
Now and then, flashes of the old Simon Templar, who had the police and underworld of Europe going crazy trying to catch up with him, still surface. He himself mentions how he misses the old days and his buccaneer past. But this is 1944, and when someone describes him as a
crook, Simon says softly, `I always was, in a technical sort of way. And I may be again. But there`s a war on; and some odd people can find a use for some even odder people...` In fact, even after the war, the Saint never quite gets as rowdy and unpredictable as he was in his earliest adventures. He has gotten older, seen and done some sobering things, and he steps down from being a heroic genius to a more sedate semi-retirement getting involved in more modest exploits.
So here we find the Saint driving through Texas, going from one espionage mission just completed to start another one, when he stumbles upon a shocking discovery. He stops his car for what looks like a burned log in the road, and then to his (and our) horror, the charred thing moves feebly and speaks a few enigmatic clues before dying. Simon Templar stops in the area to investigate and gets tangled up in a mess of police incompetence, German spies and American collaborators, a beautiful Russian named Olga Ivanovitch who might be playing just about any role in the game, and all the usual interrogations, murder of witnesses and other shenanigans that go in this sort of thriller.
Simon is competent and resourceful enough to handle the situation, but there are only a few glimpses of the old Saint glinting here and there. This could easily have been a case starring any number of hard boiled private eyes. Some amusing touches still surface, as when he gives everyone a different alias, all with the ST initials (Sebastian Tombs, Sullivan Titwillow, Sugarman Treacle, all with improbable occupations), but in general our hero is as grim and unimaginative as your typical secret agent. The writing style is also flat and blunt, as was the trend in those years, leading into the bleak pessimism of the Noir school; and while the plotting is competent enough, it lacks the dazzling sudden reversals and close calls that marked Leslie Charteris' earlier work. The Galveston locale is not put to good use, and this story really could have taken place just about anywhere in the US.
The most memorable scene finds our hero in a cellar, tied by the wrists to an overhead pipe, with some Bund spies upstairs getting ready to make his final hours painful. Things look uncertain for the Saint, but he applies himself to the problem with some remarkable limberness and deftness. If you are a freelance vigilante, I cannot stress the importance of staying in shape.
There is a little reference that Simon`s name means no more to a cop than `John Smith or Leslie Charteris`. It`s just a hunch, but these occasional mentions seem to hint that Charteris didn`t write this story entirely by himself; certainly, it has little of the sparkle and creativity I associate with him. In his forewords to the 1960s series of
reprints, Charteris still had his very distinctive, poetic sense of language and that style clashes very oddly with some of the stories within. Perhaps he was just modifying his natural storytelling instinctswith the trends and editorial preferences, but his stories definitely
lost a lot of their unique appeal after the war broke out.