The Saint

I've been watching The Saint, and I'm very impressed. The art design on
those old sets is brilliant, the characters are well cast, and the accents
quite amusing. It's like having an hour long episode of Roger Moore doing
James Bond again, each week. I oughta read the Charteris book I've got,
but it's old and rare, and I don't want to wreck it.

Bill Steele...

Well, find a few more; lots of paperback reprints around. There's lots
more to the character in the books than you'll see on TV.

Barbara Bailey...

But stay with the ones thatwere written before the TV show. Once
Charteris started riding the Hollywood cash cow the quality of the
books went down dramatically.

et472...

Is it really quality rather than tone?

I've never read them, but I have read some James Bond books, after
watching the movies for years. They are quite different from the movies,
not merely because of the way movies aren't a direct translation of books
to the screen, but the character is quite different.

I can imagine that if Ian Fleming had lived long enough to keep writing
after the James Bond movies hit, he might feel compelled to match
the movies in the books, rather than continue with James Bond as
originally portrayed.
Michael

Barbara Bailey...

I think it's quality. Charteris wrote about one book a year
(sometimes more than a year passed between books,) from the 20's
through late 30's. He slowed down to about a book evey two years
through the 40's and then to about one every three or more years in
the 50's.

Ian.Dickerson...

Erm no. You can't categorise it like that because a lot of the early
books were reprints or rewrites of magazines stories that had been
published in the previous months.

The first 20 Saint books appeared between 1928 and 1938. Number 30
appeared in 1955.

Ian Dickerson,
Honorary Secretary, The Saint Club

Barbara Bailey...

Ah, thank you. I had a list of book publishing dates, but not of the
contents or the publishing dates of the various short
stories/novellas. I do know that I inadvertently got one of the
franchise books (although I don't remember which one it was, to look
up which of the franchise writer-teams was guilty of it.) and
considered it so bad that I actually gave it away unfinished.

Once the Saint hit TV in 1961, though, two things happened. First and
most important, Charteris himself very rarely wrote them anymore, even
though they were credited as "by Leslie Charteris." He did co-write a
couple of them, with Harry Harrison and Fleming Lee.

The other problem was a combination of two factors: the speed at
which they were cranked out in 1968: The Saint on TV; The Saint
Returns; & The Saint and the Fiction-Makers; all written by some
combination of Fleming Lee, John Kruse, D.R. Motton, and Leigh Vance
were all published that year. They slowed down a bit after that first
rush of books, but now what they were writing was the *TV* Saint, not
the Saint of the Charteris' books. The equivalence to what happened to
James Bond is quite apt. The character who viewers met through the TV
series was very different from the one in the books.

Agent Smith...

Do you recall what is the most recent reprint series that was widely
distributed in America, and which publisher published them? They're not
still in print, are they?

Barbara Bailey...

Nope, not as far as I know. But an ebay search on <+"The
Saint"+"Leslie Charteris">in the books/fiction category turns up 34
listings, with opening bids ranging from $.98 to $29.00 with shipping
ranging from $2.50 to $17.00. It also yields a pointer to Half.com,
with another 68 books, from $2.95 to $77.00+

Agent Smith...

"You can get anything you want, at the Ebay restauraunt." (Excepting
Alice)

Ian.Dickerson...

No, they're not still in print. Caroll & Graf did a couple of
paperbacks in the 90s but your best bet is to use Ebay or abebooks.com
and get copies of some of the early stuff like The Last Hero, Getaway,
The Brighter Buccaneer.