The Saint And The Fiction Makers

Foreword

The history of this book repeats that of The Saint on TV and The Saint Returns. That is, it started life as a television scenario, not written by me, and not based on anything that I created except the character of Simon Templar. After its second draft I was allowed to make some suggestions, not all of which were adopted. However, in this readable adaptation by Fleming Lee (who also worked on those other two) I have availed myself of the producer’s privilege in reverse: just as movie producers always take unto themselves the right to change any story they have bought in adapting it to the screen, so I with the collaboration of Fleming Lee did not hesitate to make what improvements I thought I could see in translating the screen play to the printed page.

The only difference between this and our previous experiments is that The Fiction Makers in its original form seemed much too good and spacious an idea to throw away on just one TV show, and was therefore expanded first into a two-parter, and then abducted bodily out of the television series to be presented as a full-length feature film. In conformity with that aggrandizement, this adaptation has become a full-length novel.

As with the preceding composites, I worked closely with Fleming Lee on this adaptation, and personally revised the final manuscript to satisfy myself that it was as close to an authentic Saint book as anything could be of which I had not written every line myself. But the only honest way to present a work like this, to which three other writers have contributed their imagination and their talents in such measure, seems to me to be to give them full credit as co-authors — unprecedented perhaps in the middle world where ghosts walk.