Saint creator Leslie Charteris (left) with Saint actor Roger Moore
The Saint has returned a number of times of course Crimeziners, so it is small wonder that those nice people at the crimetastic Hodder imprint Mulholland books have decided that Leslie Charteris’ super sleuth should return once again.
Mullholland will be making 35 titles Saint titles available as e-books. The first batch of titles will be released on 6th December 2012, with Enter the Saint, The Saint Closes the Case, The Avenging Saint and Featuring the Saint all published in e-book and paperback, priced £8.99. Mulholland will then release four or five titles each month through to July 2013.
The books will have new introductions by famous thriller writers, with the introduction to Enter the Saint to be written by Patricia Charteris-Higgins, the author’s daughter. Ian Dickerson, who runs The Saint fan club and moderates a number of Saint internet forums, is also compiling extra material to run in the e-books, to give the novels context.
No doubt many Crimeziners will be familiar with the Roger Moore and Ian Ogilvy incarnations of the Saint character on television, but the genesis of the Saint started many years before in the 1920’s.
Charteris an English writer of Chinese extraction, moved to the United States in 1932 by this time he had already written at least ten Saint novels, and the Saint character quickly began appearing in Black Mask Magazine, Double Detective and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Leslie Charteris was one of the most prolific crime fiction authors of all time, he wrote over forty books himself, The Saint in the Sun 1963 was the last he wrote alone, but once collaborations are thrown into the mix, the number of Saint books rockets to over a hundred. Charteris also worked as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures. He wrote the George Raft classic Midnight Club and also scripted the Sherlock Holmes Radio series, featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Charteris had problems becoming a US citizen and although he was finally accepted as American. He returned to England, where he died in 1993 aged 85.
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