Leslie Charteris (; born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin; 12 May 1907 – 15 April 1993), was a British-Chinese author of adventure fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of his hero Simon Templar, alias "The Saint".
Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, in Singapore. His mother, Lydia Florence Bowyer, was English. His father, Dr S. C. Yin (Yin Suat Chuan, 1877–1958), was a Chinese physician who claimed to be able to trace his lineage back to the emperors of the Shang dynasty. He is the elder brother of the Anglican clergyman Roy Henry Bowyer-Yin.
Leslie became interested in writing at an early age. At one point, he created his own magazine with articles, short stories, poems, editorials, serials, and even a comic strip. He attended Saint Andrew's School, Singapore, and after moving to England, Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. His formal education continued at King's College, Cambridge, where he read law. However, he dropped out in his first year to focus on developing his burgeoning literary career.
In 1926, Leslie legally changed his surname to "Charteris". In the BBC Radio 4 documentary Leslie Charteris – A Saintly Centennial, his daughter stated that he had selected the name from a telephone directory. This information is contradicted by other sources, however. William Ruehlmann (author of Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye, in an introduction to the 1988 edition of The Saint in New York, "He acquired..., in 1928, the legal name of Charteris, after the roguish Col. Francis, gambler, duellist and founder of the Hellfire Club" – however this confuses the rake Col. Francis Charteris with Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, also a rake and founder of the Hellfire Club.
Charteris wrote his first book during his first year at King's College, Cambridge. Once it was accepted, he left the university and embarked on a new career, motivated by a desire to be unconventional and to become financially well off by doing what he liked to do. He continued to write British thriller stories while working at various jobs, from shipping out on a freighter to working as a barman in a country inn. He prospected for gold, dived for pearls, worked in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, toured Britain with a carnival, and drove a bus.
Charteris's third novel, Meet the Tiger (1928), introduced his most famous creation, Simon Templar. However, in his 1980 introduction to a reprint by Charter Books, Charteris indicated he was dissatisfied with the work, suggesting its only value was as the start of the long-running Saint series. Occasionally, he chose to ignore the existence of Meet the Tiger altogether and claimed that the Saint series actually began with the second volume, Enter the Saint (1930); an example of this can be found in the introduction Charteris wrote to an early 1960s edition of Enter the Saint published by Fiction Publishing Company (an imprint of Doubleday).
Charteris wrote a few other books, including a novelization of his screenplay for the Deanna Durbin mystery-comedy Lady on a Train, and the English translation of Juan Belmonte: Killer of Bulls by Manuel Chaves Nogales. However, his lifework – at least in the literary world – consisted primarily of Simon Templar Saint adventures, which were presented in novel, novella, and short-story formats over the next 35 years. From 1963 onward, other authors ghost-wrote the stories, while Charteris acted as an editor, approving stories and making revisions when needed.
Charteris relocated to the United States in 1932, where he continued to publish short stories and also became a writer for Paramount Pictures, working on the George Raft film Midnight Club. Charteris also wrote scripts for Alex Raymond's newspaper comic Secret Agent X-9 in 1935 to 1936. One story was drawn by Raymond, and the other two by Raymond's successor Charles Flanders.
However, Charteris was excluded from permanent residency in the United States because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law which prohibited immigration for persons of "50% or greater" Oriental blood. As a result, Charteris was continually forced to renew his six-month temporary visitor's visa. Eventually, an act of Congress granted both Charteris and his daughter the right of permanent residence in the United States, with eligibility for naturalization, which he completed in 1946. After two decades, he permanently resettled in England with his wife.
In 1936, Charteris was a passenger on the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg. In America, The Saint became a radio series starring Vincent Price. In the 1940s, Charteris, besides continuing to write The Saint stories, scripted the Sherlock Holmes radio series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. In 1941, Charteris appeared in a Life photographic adaptation of a short story of The Saint, with himself playing the Saint.
Long-term success eluded Charteris' creation outside the literary arena until RKO produced an eight-film series between 1938 and 1943:
The Saint in New York (1938) with Louis Hayward as The Saint,
The Saint Strikes Back (1939),
The Saint in London (1939, filmed on location),
The Saint's Double Trouble (1940),
The Saint Takes Over (1940), and
The Saint in Palm Springs (1941) all with George Sanders as The Saint. Another Briton, Hugh Sinclair, took over the role in The Saint's Vacation (filmed by RKO's British studio in 1941) and The Saint Meets the Tiger (again produced by RKO in 1941 but shelved until Republic Pictures released it in 1943).
A ninth film, The Saint's Return (known as The Saint's Girl Friday in the US) from 1953, with Louis Hayward returning as The Saint, is sometimes regarded as part of the RKO series. However, it was produced by British Hammer Film Productions, based on an agreement between Hammer Films and Charteris, which gave Charteris a percentage in the film. RKO acted only as the film's US distributor, six months after the UK release.