The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

FLORIDA: THE JOLLY

“Sometimes,” Simon Templar pronounced once, “I think that critics make far too much fuss about the use of coincidence in detective stories. In real life, mysteries are solved by coincidence at least half the time—because some chance witness happened to notice and remember something, or the criminal accidentally lost a button at the scene. An alibi goes blooey because an unpredictable fire stops the schemer getting back to his apartment in time for the phone call he’s arranged to answer. And how many plays and movies have you seen where the perfect crime was all laid out at the start, and you sat happily on the edge of your seat waiting for the inevitable coincidence to foul it up—the incalculable old lady who comes looking for her wandering Fido, or the power failure that stops the electric clock that should have fired the bomb? The plain truth is that without some sort of fluke there’d usually be no story or no suspense. Coincidences happen to everyone, but they’re only branded as far-fetched when somebody does something with one.”

One such coincidence which he might have been recalling was not really extravagant at all, reduced to its prime essentials, which consisted of:

A: reading about, and being mildly intrigued by, a minor offense committed against an individual of no obvious importance and certainly unknown to him: and

B: having that victim pointed out to him less than 48 hours later, before he had time to forget the association.

That is, if you exclude the third factor, that such coincidences seemed to happen to the Saint with exceptional frequency. But modern insurance studies have revealed that it is not purely accidental that some people have more accidents than others, and can be properly called “accident-prone.” In the same way, Simon Templar seemed to attract interesting coincidences, perhaps because he made better use of them than ordinary people. This, therefore, on the best actuarial authority, should not even be called a coincidence.

The first ingredient, then, was an item in a Palm Beach, Florida, newspaper reporting that a Funeral Home in Lake Worth operated by an undertaker with the rather delightful name of Aloysius Prend had been broken into during the night, but appeared to have rewarded the robbers with no more than $7.18 and some postage stamps, the contents of a petty cash box in an office drawer.

“Now, what would give any burglar the idea of cracking an undertaker’s shop?” Simon apostrophized the counter girl in the coffee shop where he was eating breakfast.

“Those guys’ve got more money than anybody,” she said darkly. “Inflation, depression, recession, whatever, people keep dying just the same. There’s one business can always be sure of customers.”

“And the worse a depression gets, the more it might boom, with more people committing suicide,” Simon admitted, following her cheerful trend of thought. “But no matter how fast the bodies roll in, an undertaker doesn’t normally ring up cash sales like a supermarket. He presents a nice consolidated bill for his assorted services, which is pretty certain to be big enough to be paid by check.

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