O Santo e as Importações Ilegais

The Saint #43

by Leslie Charteris, Fernanda Pinto Rodrigues (Translator)

Cover artist: Lima de Freitas

The action starts when, getting in a cab in London, Simon Templar spots a particularly lurid headline on the frontpage of a newspaper forgotten by some previous customer, describing the horrible death of a Pakistani immigrant in Soho.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

196 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, Leslie Charteris was a half-Chinese, half English author of primarily mystery fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of Simon Templar, alias "The Saint."

Reviews

[Alice]

I enjoyed this more than the previous Fleming Lee collaboration. The Saint is still a fish out of water in the Swinging Sixties, but it's less glaring in this outing, and the plot about illegal immigrants surprisingly timely.

[Kenneth G]

quaint story about human trafficking in Britain.

Another Saint novelization from the Saint television series starring Roger Moore. While Charteris supervised the writing, it was not written by him, and it shows.
In this tale, Templar starts out trying to help a restauranteur who is the victim of a protection racket. It soon develops into a much more sinister plot that along with the extortion, the bad guys are also smuggling immigrants illegally into England. Given the current state of affairs in that country and the rest of the West, the plot is both prescient and somewhat naive. Nonetheless, Simon resolves the crimes with his usual nonchalant flair, and makes for an amusing diversion from the real headlines of today.

[Mark]

As this is not pure Leslie Charteris (based on an unscreened script by Fleming Lee for the Saint TV series), it is not as good as the pre-TV Saint adventures. It was an enjoyable romp in the later adventures of Simon Templar, but with the obvious nod to TV land and current events in that era of the UK (1972). A few anachronisms creep into the novel from the 1930s (usage of 'flit gun' from a commercial of that era for 'Quick, Henry, the Flit' (an insect spray)), but Leslie did start writing the series in the late 1920s. Acceptable, but recommend readers go back into those stories from the late 1930s to the late 1950s for a better Simon.

[John Peel]

Any Saint book is always fun to read. This was one written by Fleming Lee from his TV script (and altered from the filmed version to reflect his original script). It's not as good as a Charteris original, of course - Lee tries hard, but Charteris's style is unique - but it's an enjoyable romp. It should be a product of its time (1971), but the tale of smuggling illegal immigrants ashore in England sadly seems to be timeless.

[Melissa S]

This is a fairly short but serviceable later Saint novel that sees our hero on the trail of nefarious blackmailers of illegal immigrants. The pacing is brisk and there's lots of action, which is what you'd expect from Mr. Templar, and his reporter sidekick (who turns out to be - gasp! - a woman!) is both lovely and mostly competent. And although there was a bit of description of the Saint's blue eyes and svelte figure, I miss the absolute and total adoration of author for character that makes the earlier books so much fun to read. But it's also not nearly as racist/sexist as those earlier works, so I guess I can't complain too much. ;-)

[Simon Mcleish]

This review was first published on my blog here.

In recent years, the news has been full of refugees; immigration, legal and illegal, is seen as a problem by many. But people have been concerned about it for decades, and even centuries, and this is a novel about illegal immigration from the early seventies (the TV episodes that the novel was based on were aired in 1969 and the book came out in 1970).

This is not the first Saint novel to take on social and political issues, including pre-war attacks on the Nazis in The Saint Plays with Fire. Many Saint stories have a moral content, as Simon Templar is almost always taking on the bad guys in order to help an innocent victim. Here, his activity is prompted by a newspaper report of the killing of one of the immigrants as a warning by the traffickers. However, there is no serious attempt to integrate any of the issues surrounding immigration into the story, the abuse of would-be immigrants by traffickers being only the motivation for a TV thriller. The eventual "solution" to the problem of the existence of a group of rescued immigrants seems crass and insensitive today. To be fair, the TV episode and this novel were not intended as any kind of serious exploration of the issue; the adventures of the Saint are about entertainment pure and simple. The nature of the MacGuffin in The People Importers is not really suitable for this treatment, and it shows.

Like many of the TV based stories, this is a much more straightforward thriller than the earlier Charteris stories. Although his introduction says that he added his own signature touches to each one, that is little in evidence here. One for Saint collectors only, really.