The Saint and The Hapsburg Necklace Quotes

“With the continuing demand for new Saint novels Michael Attenborough of Charteris’s UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton sent him a book they’d recently published called The Naked Skier by Christopher Short. Charteris responded, “This writer has a good sense of humour and also sardonic observation which is the type of talent we’re looking for. In fact I am rather surprised he should be available for our purposes but that is our good luck.”* Christopher Charles Douglas Short was born in America and grew up in Charleston. However in his early twenties he got polio and spent the rest of his life on crutches. He was determined not to be thought of as a cripple and would almost never go out as that would mean being in a wheelchair. By the early 1970s he had written nine novels which had been published to varying degrees of success. His first draft of this novel, under the working title of The Saint Lends a Hand, was not well received by Charteris, but he rewrote it with guidance from the Saint’s creator to their mutual satisfaction. A French edition, Le Saint et le collier des Habsbourg, was published by Livre de Poche in 1977. * The Saint: A Complete History,”
― Leslie Charteris, The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace

“The Saint had borrowed Monty Hayward’s M.G. N-type Magnette, for the trip—his own Hirondel was too well known, not necessarily to the Austrian authorities, nor even the German, but to the British.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace