Novel BY Simon Templar

[ffutures]

One of the Saint stories (I think a novella rather than a full-length novel) begins with The Saint annoyed about negative reviews of a novel he has written. Can anyone remember the title of the novel and in which story it is mentioned?

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

"The Uncritical Publisher" in The Saint Intervenes deals with a vanity press scam: after one of his sidekicks gets sucked in, Templar re-writes it as a giant libel against himself and extorts money out of the publisher.

I've only read The Saint stories up to the mid-1940s, but I don't remember any of the other ones having anything to do with publishing.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That isn't it, but thanks anyway - it's only a minor part of the story, not the main plot.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I thought I didn't remember that story - couldn't find it in my copy of The Saint Intervenes, turns out it's never been in a British collection. If you could let me have the details of the book he writes in that one it could be useful.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

I can send you a scan after Gen Con if you'd like. Briefly, Peter Quentin writes a book (a thinly disguised hero-worship of Templar titled The Gay Adventurer. It is accepted for publication by Herbert Parstone & Co, which is a vanity publisher that asks for £300. Peter is sucked in, but when Templar hears about it he explains it to him, and gets an idea. He reads Peter's MS (it is terribly written with awful misspellings), and then rewrites it... by making it a horrible libel against himself, including using his real name, while leaving Peter sole author credit. The libel stuff says he's a dope pushing monster, among other things. Parstone publishes the book without editing or reading it, and Templar then visits him and blackmails £50,000 out of him.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'd love to read it - thanks!

The one I was actually looking for was in one of the very early Saint stories - I think one of Charteris' non-Saint novels got some very poor reviews, and he took his "revenge" by parodying them in the story.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Did you figure out which one? I'm pretty familiar with all of The Saint stories up until the mid-1940s, and that isn't ringing any bells for me.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry - I posted about it separately - it's The Inland Revenue in The Saint Versus Scotland Yard, AKA The Holy Terror.