The Saint Returns

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The genesis of this book is exactly the same as that of my last publication, THE SAINT ON TV. Therefore, to explain it to anyone who may have incredibly missed that epoch-making ops, I cannot do better than repeat the explanatory note with which it was prefaced:

When, after many years of noble and lofty-minded resistance, I finally broke down and sold the Saint to the Philistines of Television, I fear that I must have added one more argument to the armory of the cynics who maintain that every man has his price; because I certainly got mine. It must have been a shattering blow to the countless millions who until then had thought I was perfect, even though I myself had never made that claim. However, I did have enough remnants of probity to limit his period of bondage to two years, knowing full well the voracity of the mills which grind out the fodder for what I still regard as the mini-medium of mini-minds, and figuring that in that time, at the relentless pace of one show a week, they would have devoured the entire product of a not inactive writing lifetime, or anyway as much of it as was suitable for adaptation to filmlets of about 50 minutes without the commercial “messages” and the pauses for what is hilariously called “station identification.” I was resigned to the expectation that my stories would be considerably garbled and mutilated to conform either with the puerile tabus of unwritten censorships or the congenital megalomania of all moviemakers who can never resist “improving” any literary creation that falls into their power, or both; but it had never occurred to me to allow the Saint to be projected into plots that had absolutely no connection whatsoever with anything I had ever written, and in fact any such liberties were specifically prohibited in my first…

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