[1] He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of his hero Simon Templar, alias "The Saint".Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, in Singapore.

In the BBC Radio 4 documentary Leslie Charteris – A Saintly Centennial, his daughter stated that he had selected the name from a telephone directory.

He prospected for gold, dived for pearls, worked in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, toured Britain with a carnival, and drove a bus.

Charteris wrote a few other books, including a novelization of his screenplay for the Deanna Durbin mystery-comedy Lady on a Train, and the English translation of Juan Belmonte: Killer of Bulls by Manuel Chaves Nogales.

However, his lifework – at least in the literary world – consisted primarily of Simon Templar Saint adventures, which were presented in the novel, novella, and short-story formats over the next 35 years.

Charteris relocated to the United States in 1932, where he continued to publish short stories and also became a writer for Paramount Pictures, working on the George Raft film Midnight Club.

[7] However, Charteris was excluded from permanent residency in the United States because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law which prohibited immigration for persons of "50% or greater" Oriental blood.

Eventually, an act of Congress personally granted his daughter and him the right of permanent residence in the United States, with eligibility for naturalization, which he later completed in 1946.

In the 1940s, Charteris, besides continuing to write The Saint stories, scripted the Sherlock Holmes radio series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

Charteris lived to see a second British TV series, Return of the Saint starring Ian Ogilvy as Simon Templar, enjoy a well-received, if brief, run in the late 1970s (with Charteris himself making a cameo appearance in one episode) and, in the 1980s, a series of TV movies produced by an international co-production and starring Simon Dutton kept interest in The Saint alive.

The next year, Vendetta for the Saint was published and while it was credited to Charteris, it was actually written by science fiction writer Harry Harrison.

Charteris spent 55 years – 1928 to 1983 – as either writer of or custodian of Simon Templar's literary adventures, one of the longest uninterrupted spans of a single author in the history of mystery fiction, equalling that of Agatha Christie, who wrote her novels and stories featuring detective Hercule Poirot.

[16] In 1952, Charteris married Hollywood actress Audrey Long (1922–2014); the couple eventually returned to England, where he spent his last years living in Surrey.

[17] He died at Princess Margaret's Hospital Windsor, Berkshire, on 15 April 1993, survived by his wife and daughter, Patricia Charteris Higgins.