By James Aitchison

He was born in Singapore to a Chinese father and British mother.  Not only was he the most successful Singaporean author of all time, but also the creator of a character whose uninterrupted success was one of the longest in mystery fiction history, equalling Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

He wrote 100 novels, novellas and short stories, and The Saint appeared in 16 films and three TV series.

And it all began as a young boy who patiently tapped out his own magazine on an Oliver typewriter, illustrated by stick figures, which he sold to his parents, relatives and governesses. 

Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin was born on 12 May 1907 in British Singapore.  His father was a prosperous, highly skilled physician and surgeon Dr S. C. Yin (Yin Suat Chuan), M.S., M.R.C.S., L.A.C.P., who reportedly could trace his ancestry back to Shang Dynasty emperors.  Leslie’s mother, Lydia Florence Bowyer, was English.  By the time he was twelve, he had travelled around the world several times with his parents.

He was a voracious reader, consuming all the youthful literature the British Empire produced in that era: boys’ own yarns, historical adventures featuring Cavaliers and Roundheads, and very significantly, tales of the dashing highwayman Dick Turpin and Robin Hood, the outlaw who robbed the rich and gave to the poor.  All grist for the mind of a young boy creating his own magazines, retyping each page several times without the convenience of carbon paper.

In 1919, the First World War over, his parents sent him to boarding school in England.  Not surprisingly, he started reading all the crime stories by such famous authors as Alexandre Dumas, Dornford Yates and Edgar Wallace.  Suitably inspired, he sold his first magazine story at the age of sixteen.  In 1925, a second effort followed: One Crowded Hour, written under his pen name Leslie C. Bowyer.

That same year he was admitted to King’s College Cambridge, but all too soon decided to leave and become a fiction writer.  His conservative father was horrified; if his son wanted to become a writer, “he would have to do so at his own expense!”

Young Leslie could not have chosen a worse time to become an author; the General Strike disrupted Britain.  The budding scribe took on such bizarre jobs as bus driver, barman, professional bridge player, and even returned to Malaya working as a gold prospector, tin miner and rubber planter.

And then, in September 1928, fame and fortune found him.

The venerable old London publisher Ward Lock & Co Ltd released the book-length story Meet the Tiger.  It made history for two reasons.  Firstly, the author finally decided his pen name would be Leslie Charteris.  (He also changed his name legally by deed poll at the same time.)  Why Charteris?  While it bore a faint resemblance to his middle name Charles, more importantly it was the name of a notorious gambler, rake and duellist Colonel Francis Charteris who founded the Hellfire Club. 

Secondly, Meet the Tiger introduced the world to Simon Templar, The Saint, who lived in a converted army pillbox in North Devon.  He was described as “aged twenty-seven, tall, dark, keen-faced, deeply tanned and with blue eyes.”  The name “Templar” was taken from the Knights Templar, a military religious order established in 1118 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land.  Why “Simon”?  For the subtlest of reasons: Simon Templar would prove to be no “Simple Simon” to his enemies.  Together, Simon Templar’s initials would be “ST”, short form of the word saint (St).

The concept of a gentleman crook who took justice into his own hands was not entirely original.  However, Charteris swiftly carved out an enduring niche for his increasingly best-selling character.  One biographer suspected that the Saint was “the author’s mental image of what he himself would have liked to be.”  And certainly, in a brilliant masterstroke, Charteris revisited his childhood love of drawing stick figures to create The Saint’s calling card.  By adding a halo, he achieved a perfect and versatile trademark!

Charteris adopted a very disciplined writing method.  He thought out the entire plot and dialogue first, then typed the story straight through without any alterations, corrections or revisions.  He also had a keen sense of business, switching from Ward Lock to Hodder & Stoughton, a major force in his genre.

Hollywood soon came knocking.  Between 1938 and 1943, RKO produced eight films in The Saint series, culminating in a love-hate relationship with the author.  The first Saint was a miscast Louis Hayward, too short for starters, lacking The Saint’s sophistication, thus disappointing legions of fans.  The legendary George Sanders would prove better, certainly suave, but sadly prone to sneering.

Fast forward to 1962 when Britain’s Associated Television finally secured Charteris’s reluctant approval to make a television series.  Charteris had been bitterly disappointed at the portrayal of his character in past films; the actors, scripts and productions had fallen “well below his ideals.”  Speculation was rife in the press: who would play The Saint?  The smart money said Patrick McGoohan who had played Danger Man; others felt he was too serious and lacked the devil-may-care characteristics of Simon Templar. 

The final choice was Roger Moore, who was The Saint’s height and age.  The TV Times crowed that the actor also “speaks fluent French, Italian and German, and he drives fast cars.”  Moreover, the charming Roger Moore had women appeal.  As far as audiences were concerned, Roger Moore was The Saint.  The show became one of the top-rated TV shows of all time and was screened worldwide.

As Charteris admitted late in life, “I love The Saint.  Over all of this time he has grown into me, and I have grown into him, so much so that there may after all be some excuse for a confusion of our identities.”

Charteris left a unique literary legacy that spanned many languages.  In one case, it was said that if all the French editions sold were stacked one on top of the other, they would reach eight hundred times the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Charteris died in 1993, having become one of the earliest members of Mensa. 

As a fascinating parallel, Charteris’s younger brother Canon Roy Bowyer-Yin followed a “saintly” path of a more traditional kind.  At his death in Singapore at the age of 100, he had been at various times parish priest at St Andrew’s Cathedral Singapore, chaplain of the King’s College Chapel Cambridge, and seventeen years as chaplain and math teacher at St Thomas’s College, Mount Lavinia in Sri Lanka.