Also there was a story about the Saint’s vengeance on an absconding company promoter, readable but not particularly distinguished, and a story called “The Spanish Cow,” the only recorded instance where the Saint deliberately played gigolo with a covetous eye on a fat old woman’s jewels, but with a most unpredictable denouement. The manuscripts of these I have lost somewhere: nobody else could find them except me, and I don’t seem to be able to. Nor do I have the heart to try and write them again from memory. There is nothing so dead to me as a story that has been written once and left behind. These are like children that died young: it’s too bad we can’t have them with us today, but there would be something zombie-like about their resurrection, and so we can only write them off and devote ourselves to the more positively entertaining business of making new ones.
— Leslie Charteris (1947)
( Editorial note: Needless to say, it was revived...)
1
“People,” said Myra Campion languidly, “ought to have to pass an examination and get licensed before they’re allowed to exhibit themselves on a bathing beach.”
Simon Templar smiled vaguely and trickled sand through his fingers. Around them spread the sun-baked shambles of Juan-les-Pins — a remarkable display of anatomy in the raw. As far as the eye could see in either direction, men and women of all nationalities, ages, shapes, sizes, and shades of color, stripped to the purely technical minimum of covering demanded by the liberal laws of France, littered themselves along the landscape and wooed the ultra-violet ray with a unanimous concentration of effort that would have restored world prosperity if it had been turned into the channels of banking or breeding pedigree wombats or some such lucrative field of endeavor. Reclining on straw mat, under beach umbrellas, in deck chairs, or even on the well-worn sand itself, they sprawled along the margin of that fashionable stretch of water in a sizzling abandon of scorched flesh that would have made a hungry cannibal lick his lips. To the Saint’s occasionally cynical eye there was something reminiscent of an orgy of human sacrifice in that welter of burnt-offerings on the altar of the snobbery of tan. Sometimes he thought that a keen ear might have heard the old sun-god’s Homeric laughter at the childish sublimation that had repopulated his shrine, as the novices turned themselves like joints on a spit, basted their blistered skin with oils and creams, and lay down to roast again, suffering patiently that they might triumph in the end. Simon looked at teak-bronzed males with beautifully lubricated hair parading themselves in magnificent disdain amongst the pink and peeling and furtively envious newcomers, and, being as brown as they were, only larger-minded, he was amused.
But not at that moment. At that moment he was interested exclusively in Mrs Porphyria Nussberg.
Mrs Nussberg, at that moment, was methodically divesting herself of a set of boned pink corsets, preparatory to having her swim. The corsets were successfully removed under cover of her dress, defiantly rolled up, and deposited in her canvas chair. The dress followed, and Mrs Nussberg was revealed in a bright yellow bathing costume of nineteenth-century cut, which rose to the base of her neck and extended itself along her limbs almost to the knees and elbows. The completion of her undressing was hailed with irreverent applause from several parties in her neighbourhood.
“I wonder,” said Myra Campion languidly, making her observation more particular in all the arrogance of her own golden slenderness, “how that woman has the nerve to come here.”
“Maybe it amuses her,” suggested the Saint lazily, with his blue eyes narrowed against the sun. “Why do fat men feel an urge to wear check suits?”