This Week’s Mystery Series: The Saint’s Entrance

Mystery and Suspense have always been the genres that I have felt comfortable with. I did try to stretch my limits by watching some horror movies but let’s just say it made me a little too jumpy in the night. I decided to stick to mystery, which is filled with many suspenseful elements, that is more fun for me to analyse for the article.

I saw several episodes of the late and great Sir Roger Moore’s television series The Saint. The series was based on a book series by Leslie Charteris of the same name of a gentleman thief, Simon Templar aka The Saint. The narrative is that of the mystery-thriller-suspense combination with witty dialogue and great character development. Simon Templar is a very original character because he is a gentleman thief who uses his talents to help people. The way that Sir Roger Moore portrays him with the light-heartedness of a schoolboy, but the cleverness and wit of a criminal who uses his talents for good. Given that this series occurred during the early sixties, especially the episodes that I watched, censorship didn’t allow the writers to describe why Simon Templar was so infamous. For instance, the fact that he was a known thief but a thief that was never caught was alluded to yet never mentioned in the series.

One could say, that in The Saint Simon Templar was the closest thing that the sixties had to a modern-day Robin Hood. Simon Templar had to deal with people of every class and nature such as the ingenue, the hardened criminal, and the innocent bystander who wasn’t as innocent as he or she first appeared, to name a few. There are a couple of recurring characters throughout the series run, yet Simon Templar manages to be the only common element in the series beyond the genre.

Simon Templar was a man who had the most luxurious taste and the means to enjoy it. Though he had a cynical point of view and he was seen as someone who was a bad influence, I would say that Simon Templar has to be one of the nicest and altruistic people in the entire mystery genre. He felt that he had the responsibility to keep his best friend from being unfaithful to his wife in an episode titled “Luella.” He did everything in his power to collect the incriminating evidence from ruining his friend’s marriage by exposing a group of blackmailers. Yet, he is a very layered character and that is what makes him very interesting to watch.

This show clearly delved in the patterns of help someone or investigate a strange occurrence. However, he tends to break the fourth wall in the beginning of each episode by speaking directly to the audience or by sharing his thoughts with them. However, the twist that deviates from the usual mystery genre is that he is a gentleman thief instead of an experienced detective or an amateur who just happens to get caught up in a mystery. He is known to be friendly towards the police, which is not often reciprocated by them, yet he always turns to them when the culprit is caught.

As a spectator, I never get tired watching him help a person in need and unravel a mystery with a twist revelation in the end. I am always astounded at the cleverness of the dialogue, Simon Templar’s charisma and mysterious personality, and the psychology of every character, even with the smallest part, makes in each episode. As a writer, I find this both inspiring and something to hold as a standard for my evolution in writing style.