First look at Adam Rayner as the Saint

More classic crime gets an update this year with a new TV version of Leslie Charteris’ The Saint.

Adam Rayner plays thief/hero Simon Templar (the Saint) opposite Eliza Dushku’s Patricia Holm as his hacker-companion.

Here’s the trailer, released into YouTube this week:

Those with long memories will recognise former TV Saints Roger Moore and Ian Ogilvy.

I’ve never managed to get into the Saint in book form, an opinion shared by the novelist and critic Julian Symons, who summed up the Saint as follows:

The Saint is a compound of all the most obvious features of a romantic hero, put down in terms of cliché. He is ‘always immaculately dressed’, has ‘luxurious tastes’, and is a ‘connoisseur of food and wine’ […] For those, however, who can endure the Saint’s total invincibility and self-satisfaction, his adventures are lively and marked by some touches of humour.

Obviously there were many fans, as the series began with Meet the Tiger in 1928 and carried on until 1983 (Charteris stopped writing in 1963).

But anyway, I doubt there’s going to be many similarities between the stories and the show. This might be good; it’s more likely to be silly and noisy…

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Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.