Some further collectables in a local charity shop I visited a while back.
Anything you recall?
This red plastic double decker had a sticker below, Springvale Mouldings. I've come across them before in relation to Tudor Rose. Anyone know the exact connection?
Twister was a huge favourite of my family in the Sixties. Cool box art, brilliantly simple and fun game and just one of countless ace games from back then. Did you have Twister?
Lots of old paperbacks at £1 each including lots of Leslie Charteris' The Saint. I've never read any of The Saint novels. What are they like?
Hi, Woodsy.
ReplyDeleteI was an avid reader of THE SAINT books in my teens.
I much preferred reading them to Ian Fleming's James Bond.
Leslie Charteris was a wonderful writer; he wrote with great eloquence and humour.
Have you ever read any stories by P. G. Wodehouse of JEEVES & WOOSTER fame?
Imagine a thriller written in the same style and set in the same period.
I started reading them because I was enjoying the late night reruns of the Roger Moore series -- this was around 1971/72 -- but came to prefer the books.
No one has ever done them justice, in my opinion.
In the books, Templar has a regular girlfriend for a time, and an American gangster as his strong-arm sidekick.
I always felt that -- if a feature film, or a new series was done with some reverence to the source material -- as a period piece (like POIROT) -- it would be a real hit.
But it's all a matter of personal taste at the end of the day!
You might hate them!
Hi Anon, thanks for your insights. They do sound good now you've described the novels. So have none of the TV and film efforts ever captured The Saint properly? Not even Roger Moore?
DeleteHi, Woodsy.
DeleteI think Roger Moore was perfect casting, but the actual series itself didn't really capture the flavour of the books.
I loved the TV show as a kid -- but once I had read the books, I lost my enthusiasm for it.
Charteris hated what ITC had done to his creation and kept bombarding the producers with memos asking them to adhere more to what he had written -- but they just ignored him.
Roger Moore was actually a fan of the books and, long after the show had finished and during the time he was being Bond, obtained the rights to the character at one point (I think it was in the 1970s or 80s), and tried to get a feature film financed which would have been done as a period piece -- in the 1920s -- in which he would not have starred -- but he couldn't get the finance.
There were some excellent BBC radio adaptations done of three of the books -- again, I think this was in the 1980s -- and two were released on CD and all three (I believe) are now officially available online.
They were excellent and totally faithful to the character Charteris created.
D.C.
The Saint books that are reprints of short stories will be recognisable to anyone who has watched the Roger Moore TV version as the TV scripts were pretty much exactly the short stories plots!
ReplyDeleteSpringwell bought the Tudor Rose moulds, This is the first time I've seen their version of the Routemaster Bus but they did the Austin FX3 taxi, the VW Beetle and the Jeep. Also the three toy boats including the tugboat, RNLI Lifeboat and a tanker. They were all sold as beach toys around 20 years ago
Springwell, of course Terran. I couldn't recall the name. I have to say it was just their sticker on the base of that bus, which may have covered something else. I bought their tugboat on the Baltic coast about 10 years ago!
Delete