Unfortunately, that same impregnable integrity forbids me to make any such claim. The plain truth of the matter is that for eight years I resisted the temptation, clinging fanatically to some ethereal hope that I might go to my grave with that one esoteric epitaph: “At least he never wrote a line about Hollywood.” Having failed to die during that unconscionable time, this harmless fancy seemed to become more tired with every passing year. It finally reversed itself so that it seemed almost mandatory for me to write something about Hollywood, however half-baked, before I appeared actually eccentric.
This then is my superficial version of Hollywood, a town about which I think I know much less today than I thought I knew in 1933.
— Leslie Charteris (1946)
1
It was not to be expected that Simon Templar could have stayed in Hollywood in an ordinary way. Nothing that ever happened to him was really ordinary — it was as if from the beginning he had had some kind of fourth-dimensional magnetism that attracted adventure and strange happenings, or else it may have been because nothing to him was entirely commonplace or unworthy of expectant curiosity, that he had a gift of uncovering adventure where duller people would have passed it by without ever knowing that it had been within reach. But as the saga of perilous, light-hearted buccaneering lengthened behind him past inevitable milestones of newspaper headlines, it became even more inescapable that adventure would never let him alone, for unordinary people went out of their way to drag him into their unordinary affairs. In the most platitudinous and yet exciting and fateful way, one thing simply led to another, and he was riding a tide that only slackened enough to let him catch his breath before it was off on another irresistible lunge.
It was like that in Hollywood, where he was eating his first breakfast of that visit when the telephone rang in his apartment at the Château Marmont, which he had chosen precisely because he thought that he might attract less attention there than he would have at one of the large fashionable hotels with a publicity agent hungrily scrutinising every guest for possible copy.
“Mr Simon Templar?” said a girl’s voice.
It was a businesslike and efficient voice, but it had a nice quality of sound, a freshness and a natural feeling of friendliness that made him feel interested in talking to it some more. So he admitted hopefully that he was Simon Templar.
“Just a moment,” she said. “Mr Ufferlitz is calling.”
Simon was not quite sure whether he caught the name right, but it didn’t sound like any name among his acquaintances. In any case, he had arrived late the night before, and hadn’t yet told anyone he knew that he was in town. Of course, it was possible that some shining light of the local Police Department was already leaping on to his trail, afire with notions of importance and glory — that was an almost monotonous habit of shining lights of local Police Departments, even in much more out-of-the-way places, whenever Simon Templar paused in his travels, although none of them had ever achieved the importance and glory to which their zeal would have entitled them in a world less hidebound by the old-fashioned rules of evidence. But Simon also felt sure that no Police Department employed telephone girls with such friendly voices. It would have disrupted the whole system...