And then, one afternoon in June, yelling newsboys spread a special edition of the Evening Record through the streets of London, and men and women stood in impatient arid excited groups on the pavements and read the most astounding story of the Saint that had ever been given to the Press.

It was the story that is told again here, as it has already been retold, by now, half a hundred times. But now it is taken from a different and more intimate angle, and some details are shown which have not been told before.

It is the story of how Simon Templar, known to many as the Saint (plausibly from his initials, but more probably from his saintly way of doing the most unsaintly things), came by chance upon a thread which led him to the most amazing ad­venture of his career. And it is also the story of Norman Kent, who was his friend, and how at one moment in that adventure he held the fate of two nations, if not of all Europe, in his hands; how he accounted for that stewardship; and how, one quiet summer evening, in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died for an idea.

1. How Simon Templar went for a drive,  and saw a strange sight

Simon Templar read newspapers rarely, and when he did read them he skimmed through the pages as quickly as possible and gleaned information with a hurried eye. Most of the matter offered in return for his penny was wasted on him. He was not in the least interested in politics; the announcement that the wife of a Walthamstow printer had given birth to quadruplets found him unmoved; articles such as "A Man's Place is in the Home" (by Anastasia Gowk, the brilliant authoress of Passion in Pimlico) left him completely cold. But a quarter-column, with photograph, in a paper he bought one evening for the racing results chanced to catch his roving gaze, and roused a very faint flicker of attention.