Charteris, Leslie - The Saint 28 - Saint Errant by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 1444766406
Publisher: CRIME CLUB
Published: 1948-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

TERESA

INTRODUCTION

One more story that stems from long ago. From 1931, to be quite exact—although I didn’t write it for a longish while afterwards.

This is another story in which the locale, and only that, was changed for contemporary geopolitical reasons, between the time it was first written and published in a magazine and the time when it ended up in a book collection.

I can make no more apologies for the liberties I have taken with times and places in the reprinting of stories such as this.

The way I see it, nothing is so dated as last year—at least in fiction. Put your setting back a century, and anything goes: any apparent anachronism, any unfamiliarity, is acceptable because it is said to have occurred in an era about which the reader happily admits his ignorance. Things were different in those days—that’s all. But let the period fall within the theoretical scope of his faulty memory, and the reader is at once a dissecting critic: anything that seems as if it could have happened yesterday must be submitted to the awareness of today. If a story uses a telephone, this kind of telescoping consciousness requires that it should also take cognizance of television.

This story was first written around a Corsican bandit whom I had the pleasure of meeting on his home ground in very similar circumstances to those I have used in this narrative. But they caught him eventually, although it took several regiments of the French Army to do it, and today Corsican bandits are just an old wives’ tale. Mexican bandits, however, for some reason, are still exotic currency. So let the story go there. If it is considered legitimate to disguise names, why not places?

—Leslie Charteris

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