The Saint is the nickname of the fictional character Simon Templar, featured in a series of novels and short stories by Leslie Charteris published between 1928 and 1963.

Simon Templar is a Robin Hood-like figure known as the Saint—from his initials, per The Saint Meets the Tiger,[1] and the reader is told that he was given the nickname at the age of nineteen.

Blessed with boyish humour, he makes humorous remarks and leaves a "calling card" at his "crimes," a stick figure of a man with a halo over his head.

Supposedly, the stick figure was created by Charteris when he was a boy, "...drawing cartoons for his own four-page magazine at 10...."[3] He is described as "a buccaneer in the suits of Savile Row, amused, cool, debonair, with hell-for-leather blue eyes and a saintly smile".

[4] His origin remains a mystery; he is explicitly British, but in early books (e.g. Meet the Tiger) there are references which suggest that he had spent some time in the United States battling Prohibition villains.

There are references to a "ten percent collection fee" to cover expenses when he extracts large sums from victims, the remainder being returned to the owners, given to charity, shared among Templar's colleagues, or some combination of those possibilities.

In the early books, Templar refers to this as murder, although he considers his actions justified and righteous, a view usually shared by partners and colleagues.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Saint is fighting European arms dealers, drug runners, and white slavers while based in his London home.

During the first half of the 1940s, Charteris cast Templar as a willing operative of the American government, fighting Nazi interests in the United States during World War II.

[6] Although the Saint functions as an ordinary detective in some stories, others depict ingenious plots to get even with vanity publishers and other rip-off artists, greedy bosses who exploit their workers, con men, etc.

Early talents as an amateur poet and songwriter were displayed, often to taunt villains, though the novella The Inland Revenue established that poetry was also a hobby.

Charteris in his narrative also frequently breaks the fourth wall by making references to the "chronicler" of the Saint's adventures and directly addressing the reader.

Furthermore, in the 1955 story "The Unkind Philanthropist," published in the collection The Saint on the Spanish Main, Templar states outright that (in his fictional universe) his adventures are indeed written about by a man named Leslie Charteris.

For the first half until the late 1940s, the most recurrent is Patricia Holm, his girlfriend, who was introduced in the first story, the 1928 novel Meet the Tiger, in which she shows herself a capable adventurer.

Another recurring character, Scotland Yard Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, could be found attempting to put the Saint behind bars, although in some books they work in partnership.

The Saint had a band of compatriots, including Roger Conway, Norman Kent, Archie Sheridan, Richard "Dicky" Tremayne (a name that appeared in the 1990s TV series, Twin Peaks), Peter Quentin, Monty Hayward, and his ex-military valet, Orace.

In books written during World War II, the Saint was recruited by the government to help track spies and similar undercover work.

The first, The Saint in New York in 1938, based on the 1935 novel of the same name, starred Louis Hayward as Templar and Jonathan Hale as Inspector Henry Fernack, the American counterpart of Mr Teal.

In the mid-1980s, the National Enquirer and other newspapers reported that Roger Moore was planning to produce a movie based on The Saint with Pierce Brosnan as Templar, but it was never made.

A feature film The Saint starring Val Kilmer was released in 1997, but it diverged in style from the Charteris books, although it did revive Templar's use of aliases.

Kilmer's Saint is unable to defeat a Russian gangster in hand-to-hand combat and is forced to flee; this would have been unthinkable in a Charteris tale.

[citation needed] Inspector John Fernack of the NYPD, played by Kevin Tighe, made his first film appearance since the 1940s in that production, while Templar (sporting a moustache) got about in a black Lamborghini bearing the ST1 licence plate.

This time, English actor Adam Rayner was cast as Simon Templar and American actress Eliza Dushku as Patricia Holm (a character from the novels never before portrayed on television and only once in the films), with Roger Moore producing.

[21] Unlike the prior attempts, production of the Rayner pilot did commence in December 2012 and continued into early 2013, with Moore and Ogilvy making cameo appearances, according to a cast list posted on the official Leslie Charteris website[22] and subsequently confirmed in the trailer that was released.

[23] The pilot was not picked up for a series, but a large amount of additional footage was shot to complete it as the television film The Saint, released on 11 July 2017.

Three of the actors to play Templar—Roger Moore, Ian Ogilvy, and Simon Dutton—have been appointed vice presidents of "The Saint Club" that was founded by Leslie Charteris in 1936.

For many years it was thought to be lost; however, two copies are known to exist in private hands, and correspondence relating to the play can be found in the Leslie Charteris Collection at Boston University.

[27] The original Saint novellas first appeared in The Thriller (1929–1940), edited by Monty Hayden, a friend of the author, who was sometimes given a thinly disguised role in the early stories.

The French books were generally novelisations of scripts from the radio series, or novels adapted from stories in the American Saint comic strip.

Barer also tells of a 1979 novel titled The Saint's Lady by a Scottish fan, Joy Martin, which had been written as a present for and as a tribute to Charteris.