SIR Roger Moore has been remembered lovingly this week after his death at the age of 89. He is recalled for many things: his sense of humour; his handsomeness; his charity work; and, of course, his Bond.
I say “of course”, and it’s true Bond is adduced most when it comes to Moore’s acting roles. But it is as The Saint that I remember him most fondly, partly because the television series coincided with the happy, carefree days of my childhood, and partly because, later, as I declined into adulthood, I came to love the Leslie Charteris novels on which the character is based.
Moore brought much of his own character to The Saint, as he did to Bond, and to Lord Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders: debonair, confident, witty, to the manor born. He always claimed the confidence was an act, as was the upscale accouchement (he grew up in the back streets of Lambeth), but he was genuinely funny and I think the suavity came naturally to him too.
Some say The Saint in the books was classless and, in this, it might be said to have suited Moore, as it did Charteris, the character’s creator. Charteris wasn’t even his real name. It was Bower-Yin, and he was born in Singapore to a Chinese father and an English mother.
But he created his own persona, became what he wanted to be and, while he had the advantage of a public school education in England (and a year at Cambridge), he still had work to do from his starting point as an outsider.
Both Moore and Charteris knew about reality-style life. Charteris dived for pearls and worked in a tin-mine. Moore, one Christmas, peddled ornaments from a suitcase. But neither could possibly be as swashbuckling as the character who made them, who ran rings round PC Plod or handled effortlessly any violent situation.
The Saint laughed loudly at life. He moved sleekly but without noticeable haste. He is what we all want to be and what nobody is.
Still, Moore and Charteris, each in his own way, made a good fist of approaching that Platonic ideal. Moore had many admirable qualities. I have before me a newspaper cutting of an interview with the man from 1981 that inspired me at a time in my life when I was contemplating change.
Reading it now, I’m not sure which part in particular penetrated my biddable brain. Perhaps it was just the idea of approaching life with a hey-nonny-no instead of whit-noo-aw-naw.
As for Charteris, it was his adroit use of language that first attracted me to his books. I was never big on plots but I like language – ken? – and Charteris chose his words like fine wines, always going the extra mile to get the right one, yea, even unto Agnew’s.
Often, I daresay, he was lucky enough to have a lexical choice in the folds of his brain (I certainly don’t – accouchement, above, took me 12 minutes’s research, not including a break to eat a pie).
Thus armed with a deadly vocabulary, Charteris set about creating a character that he described thus: “He believes in romance. He isn’t merely going through the mechanical movements of a man in an exciting situation. He is, vitally and positively, squeezing the last drop of delight from living the best life he knows in the best way he
can.”
As for themes, these were “battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer”. Charteris added: “It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”
Some manifesto. And who better to deliver it than the late Sir Roger Moore? The stars aligned. The gods looked down and got their popcorn out. An author, a fictional character and an actor came together and made of each other a perfect fit.
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