Leslie Charteris (1907–93,) born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, was a British-Chinese author best known for creating Simon Templar, The Saint.
Born in British Singapore, he attended King’s College-Cambridge but left after a year to focus on writing.
Charteris introduced The Saint in Meet the Tiger (1928,) launching a long-running series. He wrote or oversaw nearly 100 books, including The Saint in New York (1934,) Saint vs Scotland Yard (1932,) The Saint’s Getaway (1932,) The Saint Goes West (1940,) and The Saint in Miami (1940.) His works were translated globally and adapted for film, radio, and TV.
Beyond writing, Charteris worked as a merchant seaman, gold prospector, tin miner, and bartender. He moved to the U.S. in 1932, becoming a Hollywood screenwriter for several Saint films. In 1946, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen but later returned to England.
He stopped writing Saint novels after The Saint in the Sun (1963) but continued editing and overseeing new stories.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Leslie Charteris
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
—Leslie Charteris
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