ILLUSTRATED
HISTORY

OF THE FRENCH

"SAINT" NOVELS

- PART 2 -

by Jean-Marc Lofficier


Article Page 1

Article Page 2

Article Page 3

Article Page 4

Article Page 5

Bibliography

Cover Gallery 1

Cover Gallery 2

Cover Gallery 3

Cover Gallery 4

Cover Gallery 5

Cover Gallery 6

Cover Gallery 7

German covers by Regino Bernad

Le Saint Detective Magazine 1

Le Saint Detective Magazine 2

Le Saint Detective Magazine 3

Le Saint Detective Magazine 4

About Nero Wolfe & The Toff

About artist
Regino Bernad


The Saint on French Radio

French-English
Text Comparisons


De Saint (The Dutch Saint)


© 2001 Jean-Marc Lofficier. This article first appeared in a slightly different form in the Summer '94 issue of The Epistle.

Thanks to Ian Dickerson for Research Assist.
Thanks to Dan Bodenheimer, Marcel Bernadac, and Patrick Verdant for additional cover scans.

2. The radio "fix-ups" (1950-1953)

The first French Saint pastiche, No. 26 in the series, was published in 1950 under the title When the Saint Meddles. It was really an anthology of three stories. In From Soja to Textile (source material unknown), Simon exposes Lyman, a killer who uses an ultrasound musical instrument to commit murder. In On the Edge of the Grave (based on the radio script The Man Who Sang by Maurice Zimm), he helps Fernack arrest a gangster, Dixon, who had secretly killed his associate, Blakely, who had stolen a fortune in US Bonds. Finally, in The Doll's Head, which was based on the radio script Doll With a Broken Head by Les Crutchfield, Simon finds a Chinese emerald hidden inside a doll.

(I am very much indebted to Burl Barer's superb book
The Saint: A Complete History (McFarland, 1993) for the research concerning the radio scripts.)

The radio "fix-ups" were undoubtedly responsible for the bad reputation that the French
Saint pastiches may have acquired. It was stated in Barer's book (page 99) that the first few were reviewed, then rejected by Dutch publisher A. W. Bruna & Zoon. (This, as it turns out, was entirely inaccurate.) Furthermore, it is reported that Mr. Margulies, a friend of Charteris, and Mr. Attenborough of Hodder & Stoughton felt that the French Saint pastiches were badly done and would, if retranslated into English, do great harm to Charteris' reputation.

Despite this, it is worth noting that the Dutch Saint series continued very successfully for many years relying on translastions of the French Saint. (
See article by Rinus Daane of the Dutch Saint here.)

Upon closer examination, this accusation appears to be somewhat well-founded, but the blame lies not with the French publisher and/or Madeleine Michel-Tyl, but with the material handed to her, presumably by Charteris himself or his publishers. I am referring, of course, to the radio scripts themselves.

Instead of his suave and debonair self, a British version of
Arsène Lupin, Simon suddenly turns into an American tough guy, straight out of a Peter Cheyney novel. And, needless to say, all the stories now take place in America. The transition is awkward at best, and reflects more on Michel-Tyl's desire, at first, to be faithful to the tone of the material she was given, rather than her own presumed incompetence.

Michel-Tyl's adaptation from the radio scripts are, stylistically and plot-wise, competent. But they just do not feel like
Saint novels -- at least from a purist's eye -- and one can understand the Dutch publisher's rejection.

On the other hand, one strongly questions Mrrs. Attenborough's and Margulies' judgment. Certainly, their harsh comment regarding the quality of Michel-Tyl's work was not only unwarranted, but ignorant. One wonders if their knowledge of French was adequate enough to enable them to properly assess the situation. In any event, no matter how flawed their reasoning may have been, their decision was ultimately right, since Michel-Tyl's radio "fix-ups" would probably have not survived one more translation, back into English.

Certainly, it would appear that both Fayard and Michel-Tyl quickly reached the same conclusion than the Dutch publisher. No. 27 in the series, entitled
The Law of the Saint, was another three-story anthology written in the "tough guy" mode, in the same style that must have put off the Dutch publisher, if he ever saw it. The book included The Wine Bottle Rack, based on radio script Family Gun Play by Michael Cramoy; The Bells, based on the radio script Rare Painting Smugglers by Michael Cramoy; and The Filipino Carpet, based on radio script Murder for a Buried Treasure, also by Michael Cramoy. Wisely, Michel-Tyl tried, whenever she could, to combine radio scripts by the same writer.

Starting with No. 28, Michel-Tyl slowly reverted to using a style that became increasingly "laid back", closer to that of the original
Saint. She was also no longer satisfied with simply adapting three scripts into three short stories, but started creatively weaving three unconnected scripts into one single novel, often changing the names of the characters, etc. (This elaborate reconstruction work makes the discovery of the source material very difficult.)

No. 28, entitled
The Saint Brings Back an Heir, was one single novel, clearly made up of three interconnected stories. The first, The Saint's Mission (possibly but, in that case, very loosely based on Murder on the High Seas by Michael Cramoy), sets the stage: Hamilton, Simon's OSS contact, asks the Saint to bring back the heir to an enormous forture, one Bodhan Kupchinsky, from India. Bodhan turns out to be an old scientist. On board the return ship, Simon foils a plot by the villainous Nadia to kill Bodhan and take his place. The story continues with The Lions' Train, based on Michael Cramoy's Baseball Team Shooting, and finally culminates with King Olsen, based on Sidney Marshall's The Steel Ice Murders.

With No. 29, entitled
The Saint Refuses to Sing, Michel-Tyl became increasingly clever in her "fix-up" technique, smoothly blending plot threads from Michael Cramoy's Blackmail and Ken Crossin's Baby Adoption Blackmail Ring into an excellent thriller about a nationwide ring of blackmailers. No. 30, The Saint and the Lame Duck, similarly combined Michael Cramoy's The Disappearing Dentist, Howard Dimsdale's Tiger by the Tail and Margolis & Morheim's Night Club Story.

No. 31,
The Saint and the Black Widow, was probably Michel-Tyl's best "fix-up" of the period. It combined three of Cramoy's best efforts: Hard Money, The Latest Style in Murder and Pearls Before Swine into a tautly-paced, relentless thriller, at the end of which Simon discovers that his lady companion, Marie Virva, who called on him to solve the murder of her ex-husband, in in reality the mysterious Black Widow, the leader of the merciless gang of racketeers -- a substial dramatic improvement on the original scripts.

The next volume,
The Angels Call For the Saint (No. 32), takes place in Los Angeles and combined three of Howard Dimsdale's scripts: Playing with Fire, The Fence and Crime Wave. Then, The Saint Bets on Death (No. 33) combined Dimsdale's The Saint is Framed with two Joel Murcott scripts: The Death of a Fighter and Jailbreak.

Even though Michel-Tyl had managed, to a large extent, to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, the days of the "tough guy"
Saint were numbered. Three years later, in 1954, Fayard either decided to discontinue the use of the radio scripts, or someone else, very likely Leslie Charteris himself, instructed that they no longer be used. Mrs. Charteris' comment that her husband intervened when he felt that the quality of the novelizations had become unacceptable, and offering instead the comic scripts that he had himself written as source material, would appear to validate the second hypothesis.

In any event, Fayard switched to the
New York Herald- Tribune comic-strips for inspiration for its Saint novels. Because these were written by Charteris, with full dialogue and descriptions, they provided Madeleine Michel-Tyl and her editors with much better quality source material.

In total, and as far as I can determine, only twenty-four radio scripts were used, and all came from the first fifty-one episode series. No later scripts seem to have been used. (This information is difficult to ascertain as it requires careful plot comparisons.)

PART 3 TO BE CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE: