Leslie Charteris
| Leslie Charteris | |
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| Born | Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin 12 May 1907 Singapore |
| Died | 15 April 1993 (aged 85) Windsor, Berkshire, England |
| Occupation | Thriller writer, screenwriter |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 20th century |
| Genre | Thriller |
| Website | |
| www |
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Leslie Charteris (12 May 1907 – 15 April 1993), born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, 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 the charming anti-hero Simon Templar, alias "The Saint."
Charteris was born in Singapore to a Chinese father, Dr S. C. Yin (Yin Suat Chwan, 1877–1958), and his wife Lydia Florence Bowyer, who was English. His father was a physician who claimed to be able to trace his lineage back to the emperors of the Shang Dynasty.
Charteris 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 Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire, England.
Once his first book, written during his first year at King's College, Cambridge, was accepted, he left the university and embarked on a new career. Charteris was motivated by a desire to be unconventional and to become financially well off by doing what he liked to do. He continued to write English thriller stories, while he worked 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 England with a carnival, and drove a bus. In 1926, he legally changed his last name to Charteris, after Colonel Francis Charteris, although, in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Leslie Charteris – A Saintly Centennial, his daughter stated that he selected his surname from the telephone directory.
His 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).
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Wikipedia