Quotes from Leslie Charteris

About the Saint's amorous adventures, by the way, I can't speak so brazenly.

If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.

In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between.

Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

The reason is that for many years I have avoided reading anything whatsoever that approaches my own line of country, out of a somewhat fanatical desire to avoid the risk of unconscious imitation.

In 1939 I hadn't even realized that this was an immigration problem.

The gleam in their eyes telegraphs only too clearly that they are hoping for a headline, which of course means something disparaging, because nothing makes such good copy as a feud.

It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes.

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

He believes in romance. He isn't merely going through the mechanical movements of a man in an exciting situation. He is, vitally and positively squeezing the last drop of delight from living the best life he knows in the best way he can.

Simon wrote on the paper and passed it over. Mr Parnock studied it wisely, as he would have studied a Greek text. Cu + Hg + HNO3 + Bf = CuHgNO3 + H2O + NO2

It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.

Nothing is won without sacrifice.

It sounds good," he said. "It's the caterpillar's spats!

I'm a bit farther ahead in the day," Simon said negatively. "But a Dry Sack on the rocks would go down nicely.

He had made a very profitable killing on a certain trip which he took to Madeira, but coming back overland from Lisbon a sylph-like blonde detained him too long in Paris, and he woke up one morning to find that he was a full twenty pounds short of his fare to New York. He set out for London with this pressing need of capital absorbing his mind, and

Pardon me. In the excitement of the moment, and all that sort of thing, I forgot to introduce myself. I'm afraid I've had you at a disadvantage. My name is Templar-Simon Templar"-he caught the flash of stark hypnotic fear that blanched the big man's lips, and grinned even more gently. "You may have heard of me. I am the Saint.

She was in the mood then for some of the more boisterous native entertainment, so he walked her a couple of blocks up Bay Street to the Junkanoo, where it was noisy enough to make any but the most succinct and rudimentary forms of conversation impossible. It was a respite of sorts, if not

And the Sunday trains are as slow as a Scotchman saying good-bye to a bawbee…Look here, the only one you'll have time to catch now is the 4:

The following year, Leslie married an American, Barbara Meyer, who'd accompanied him to Tenerife. In early 1938, Charteris and his new bride set off in a trailer of his own design and spent eighteen months travelling round America and Canada.

This," the Saint said to nobody in particular, "sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write.

Once again the Saint had proved, to his own sufficient satisfaction, as he had proved many times in his life before, that desperate dilemmas are usually best solved by desperate measures and that intelligent foolhardiness will often get by where too much discretion betrays valour into the mulligatawny.

Merchants of Death.

the wrath of saints can be a far more dreadful thing than the wrath of sinners.