By Leslie Charteris
FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY • NEW YORK
Copyright 1932, 1933 by Leslie Charteris. Published by arrangement
with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Printed in U.S.A.
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
This story is virtually the third volume of a trilogy begun by The Saint Closes the Case and The Avenging Saint. Although it was written a few years after them—with, in fact, four or five other books in between—it was still first published as far back as 1933. I was a lot busier in those days.
In it, the Saint concludes his personal feud with Prince Rudolf, his most interesting opponent in the first two rounds. His other arch enemy, Rayt Marius, does not appear in this one, and actually is only heard of again, posthumously, in The Saint in London. As I have had to explain in other prefaces, these were villains out of a mythology which today seems almost as dated as the Ruritanias from which they came. But this book, although the title may seem less appropriate now than the first one, in retrospect, actually winds up a sequence as well as an era.
Some of the more dated notions which motivated the first two books, the themes of mercenary war-makers putting strings behind the international scene, to activate the puppet but ambitious rulers of minor countries such as Prince Rudolfs, play an almost casual part in this story, and do not need elaborate explanation here. This book can stand, better than the first two, purely on its merits as an adventure and a chase.
Needless to say, however, because of its period, it contains anomalies which may have to be pointed out to some readers who have met the Saint only in his latest environments.
The Austria in which it begins, and the Germany in which it ends, were not only pre-NATO but pre-Hitler. (Although Adolf was busily on his way at the time, he had still not attained any great power, and was largely written off as a minor crackpot who would never really amount to anything.) The kind of mythical principality ruled by Prince Rudolf was still loosely acceptable to the popular imagination, at least as a nostalgic tradition, even though in fact there were precious few left which anyone could actually name.
It is, perhaps, a timely consolation to the writers of high adventure who would try to survive the present trend towards sordid back-street 'realism' that although those fascinating plot-fertile Balkans have long since disappeared behind the gray shadows of the Iron Curtain, the surge of anti- colonialism and indiscriminate independence elsewhere has led to a proliferation of even more pint-sized and retrograde republics and dictatorships, all over the globe, than anyone but the United Nations secretariat and the most studious amateur geographers can keep track of. Perhaps, after all, these themes may yet have a romantic renaissance, in some new-born African or Asian Graustark.
Meanwhile, this book is offered simply as an adventure. It never aspired to be anything more.
I. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FELL FROM GRACE
AND STANISLAUS WAS UNFORTUNATE
IT all began to happen with a ruthlessly irresistible kind of suddenness that was as unanswerable as an avalanche. It was like the venomously accurate little explosion that wrecks a dyke and overwhelms a country. The Saint has sworn that he did his level best to get from under—that he communed with his soul and struggled manfully against temptation. But he never had a chance.
On the bridge, scarcely a dozen yards away, the four men swayed and fought; and the Saint stood still and stared at them. He stood with one hand on Monty Hayward's arm and the other on Patricia Holm's, exactly as he had been walking when the astonishing beginning of the fight had halted him in his tracks like the bursting of a bomb, and surveyed the scene in silence. And it was during this silence (if the Saint can be believed) that he held the aforesaid converse with his soul.
The change that had taken place so abruptly in the landscape and general atmosphere of that particular piece of Innsbruck was certainly a trifle startling. Just one split second ago, it seemed,
