I watched the fourth episode of the Saint, involving a plot dating back to the French Resistance in the Second World War. Simon meets an old friend from those times, who remembers him being part of the Resistance himself. "You were very brave, and so very young," he says.
At which point I spluttered: "Young? He must have been about ten!"
So I started thinking about it. "Twenty years ago" in 1962 would just about have worked to make Simon a young teenager during the War - but what was he doing in Occupied Paris?
Leslie Charteris is no help at all on the origins of the Saint - I don't think he ever mentions the Saint's family, and besides, the Saint of the books was an adult in the 1920s, when men were men and cars had running boards.
But for the Saint of the TV series - could he have been living in Occupied Paris because his mother was French? I've always been led to believe that the Saint was English, but cosmopolitan, and there is no way anyone English could have been living in Paris at that time. I doubt very much that Simon was ever in any sort of armed forces, and he would have been too young to be a spy.
So now I have the image in my mind that he was the kid who hung around with the men of the Resistance, running errands for them. Which would be why he wasn't present at 'The Drop', the incident when the villain of the piece betrayed the Resistance and 27 out of 30 of them were killed. We also meet all three of the survivors in the episode.
It works for me, anyway.
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