Then in early 1941, Dan Longwell, chairman of the Editorial Board of Life magazine, paid me a visit in California. I had known Dan many years before, when he was one of the editors of my New York publishers, a firm then known as Doubleday, Doran & Co. (Everything in this busy life keeps changing, as we reminiscent ancients are continually being reminded.) Dan, or somebody on his staff, had abruptly recalled that in 1841 Edgar Allen Poe had published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, that therefore in 1941 the world should theoretically be celebrating the centenary of the detective story, and that therefore Life should somehow be represented in the chorus of tribute.
Dan’s idea was that Life should mark the occasion by publishing the first “mystery” story of the new era, and for reasons which I am far too bashful to speculate about, he wanted me to write it. It was, of course, to be done in a series of photographs with captions, rather like stills from an unmade movie.
Again I thought of Palm Springs, and what could be better than a trip there, in good company, at the expense of Life?
But RKO still owned (and for that matter still owns) the original Palm Springs story I had written, since they had paid me handsomely for it — even though to this day they have never used a line of it. (This is why it costs you so much to go to the movies.)
So I wrote another story, and was especially careful to include three beautiful girls in it. And since Life magazine, at that time anyway, had not discovered that it was as great a creative genius as the current crop of producers at RKO, they stupidly accepted it as I wrote it. We went to Palm Springs with three models and a photographer — and they not only left me to direct the shots but, God help me, made me play the part of the Saint as well.
This was my first and only appearance as a film star, even on static film, and I am not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it. A hell of a time was had by all.
The resultant million-dollar comic strip was duly published in eight pages of Life magazine in May 1941. And there again an immortal Palm Springs story might have been decently interred.
But I am a very persistent, or at least economical, writer. I still wanted a Palm Springs story, and even after a lapse of years I thought this was a good one. I went to work elaborating it. And the story you are about to read is what came out.
— Leslie Charteris (1951)