The Saint Abroad

Foreword

Our first three experiments in turning the tables on the television producers (The Saint on TV, The Saint Returns, and The Saint & the Fiction Makers) having been tolerably well received, we have been encouraged to bring out yet another of these hybrid books — that is, Saint stories which were originally created expressly for television, not by me, adapted for reading as ordinary fiction by yet another writer, and indebted to me only for the parentage of the Saint himself, for sundry suggestions along the way, and for a final revision of the manuscript in which I did my best to see that the style was as close to my own as possible, short of a complete personal rewrite. In the construction of these adaptations, I have not hesitated to call for quite drastic changes from what you may have seen on the mini-screen, exactly as a film producer does not hesitate to take liberties with any story he has bought, whenever I thought I could improve on the material. In this case, reversing the traditional sequence of events, I am the character who has had the last word.

Nor do I feel that I owe any apology to old and faithful readers of the Saint Saga. The television stories which I have selected for this treatment are only those which I thought had genuine possibilities — which by no means qualifies everything that has gone out on the TV networks. Nor would I have published these adaptations if they dissatisfied me. Whether this kind of composite authorship is kosher may be debatable on a rarified intellectual plane, but if it satisfies enough aficionados of the Saint who want more books to read than I can supply, it can’t be all bad.

LC