"His money was made from war and the instruments of war. All those amazing millions...were the wages of death and destruction and wholesale murder. They were coined out of blood and dishonour and famine, and the agony of peaceful nations. Men—and women and children, too—were killed and tortured and maimed to find that money..."
— Simon Templar on Rayt Marius, "The Simon Templar Foundation"
Simon Templar has made a career out of duping and defeating those he names the "Ungodly." While most of these characters are everyday racketeers, murderers and thugs, a few of the Ungodly are irredeemably corrupt.
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Literature
Leslie Charteris's original stories
Examples
- Dr. Rayt Marius, the Mystery Millionaire, is the closest thing the Saint ever had to an Arch-Enemy. An arms trafficker, war profiteer, murderous Bad Boss, and veritable Diabolical Mastermind, Marius twice attempts to set off World War II so he can reap profits off of the death of millions. In his first meeting with the Saint, Marius manipulates the nationalistic ego of his country's Crown Prince in an effort to have him use a weapon of mass destruction called the "electron-cloud" against other countries. In contending with the Saint, Marius kidnaps and threatens his true love Patricia Holm, and then kills Norman Kent, one of the Saint's most loyal and virtuous companions. In his second attempt to set off global war, Marius takes to setting off tensions between countries in order to keep them at each other's throats, hoping to eventually spark this tension into an international conflict that will "drown Europe in smoking seas of blood". Here Marius attempts to kill the Saint and his gang; the Girl of the Week, Sonia Delmar; his duped pawn, Sir Isaac; and all of Isaac's innocent household servants, all to ensure the smoothest possible execution of his evil plan. Even after his death, Marius sets his clients from his arms-trafficking business upon Simon as one last posthumous act of spite. Described by Simon as poisoning the world with every breath he takes, Dr. Marius was the very worst breed of criminal Simon ever fought in his decades-long career.
- Once More the Saint's "The Death Penalty": Abdul Osman is a lecherous, corpulent Middle Eastern crime lord responsible for the "ruin and degradation of more human lives than can be imagined". Osman is the leader of a vice ring that stretches from Shanghai to Constantinople, dealing in everything from gambling dens, dope smuggling, and white slavery in miserable brothels. Osman cows a fellow crime lord named Galbraith Stride sheerly by being more vicious than him, unnerving Stride by casually offing a minion for outliving his usefulness, and he later demands Stride's stepdaughter as a Sex Slave as the price for Osman to stop blackmailing him. Osman also has a fancy for breaking people with horrible torture, usually favoring heroin withdrawal in combination with his whip, and keeping his shattered victims as his sadistic playthings; his "secretary" is a man named Clements whom Osman broke so thoroughly that Clements can't even bring himself to commit suicide to escape his torment.
- Prelude for War: Kane Luker was the only serious rival Rayt Marius ever had in the arms trafficking business, and one of the few villains in the original Charteris stories capable of matching the Mystery Millionaire in the sheer scale of his evil. A particularly icy and undiscriminating merchant of death, Luker gives armaments to both sides of bloody conflicts such as the Spanish revolution of 1934, while manipulating international concerns to keep them tense and on the edge of war. Luker plans to assassinate a prominent French politician and spark a bloody civil war in France, all in order to purge the current government and replace it with a cabinet of fascists on his payroll. Thereafter Luker seeks to spark the biggest, bloodiest war possible, anticipating that "millions of men, women, and children will be burned, scalded, blistered, gassed, shot, blown up, and starved to death" so he can rake in the profits "on a turnover of about five thousand pounds per corpse". Luker viciously arranges for the death of anyone posing a threat to his schemes, even insisting on personally strangling one of his victims to death, and he attempts to make Simon watch as he flogs his female companion until she dies.
- The Saint in Miami: Captain Heinrich Friede, one of the chief Nazi secret agents in America, is the series' first introduction to the Nazi cruelty that would come to define the darker tone of the Saint's adventures for the next half-decade. A sickeningly racist man who desires for the eradication or enslavement of all those not of "Aryan" blood, Friede is undercover to alienate American sympathy from the Allies. To do this, Friede has an unarmed tanker bombed, killing over a hundred American seamen in one fell swoop, then kills another young man and plants evidence on his body to make the Americans think the British were responsible for the attack. Friede has a retinue of American Nazi sympathizers, all of whom he treats horribly; when his financier Lawrence Gilbeck tries to get out of the scheme on his yacht the Mirage, Friede intercepts him, massacres the entire crew of the Mirage, and threatens Lawrence back into line by promising to torture and kill both him and his daughter if they ever set foot out of line again. Later on, Friede murders a rich playboy he's conned into working with him, admitting he was just another pawn in a long series of such that Friede has used and disposed of.
- The Saint Goes West's "Arizona": Dr. Ludwig Julius is a truly sadistic Nazi commissary who covets a ranch in Arizona for the cinnabar beneath it. Dr. Julius' main problem is that the ranch is owned by a land baron named Don Morland; to break Don into "legally" turning over the land, Julius decides to destroy Don's life so he has no other choice. First he kills Don's brother, then one of his innocent ranch hands, then he drags Don, his daughter Jean, and Simon Templar into the cinnabar mine beneath the ranch. There, Dr. Julius forces Simon, at gunpoint, to flog Don with a quirt while Jean is Forced to Watch, under the alternative of instead having Jean herself stripped and tortured by a thug whom Julius gloats used to work at Dachau. Don still refuses to sign over the ranch, so Dr. Julius decides to have him sent off to a concentration camp in Germany so he can break Jean into signing the deed in her father's name. All of this is so Julius can extract mercury from the ranch's cinnabar mine, in order to make weapons of war with which "thousands of men will be killed and cities will be blasted" for the glory of his deranged ideology.
- Call for the Saint's "The King of the Beggars": Laura Wingate is a wealthy, harmless-seeming socialite who moonlights as the leader of a particularly vicious Protection Racket targeting beggars. Under the logic of picking one cent from one-hundred pockets every day, Laura targets homeless panhandlers solely because they're easy pickings, having anyone who refuses to split their meager earnings with her beaten half-to-death. After having multiple beggars tortured and many more pressed beneath her thumb, Laura graduates to murder when she has a blind old man beaten and shot to make an example out of him, then later on drugs a mook who ratted on her to Simon with scopolamine, tortures him, then finally shoots him as well. After the curtain is pulled, Laura tries to arrange the death of Simon, actress Monica Varing, and Simon's friend Hoppy Uniatz, planning to frame the former two as a murder-suicide and the latter as a robbery gone wrong.
Other Stories
Examples
- Capture the Saint, by Burl Barer:
- Dexter Talon, alias Tex Nolan, is a Dirty Cop who miraculously survived a purge of other similar corrupt cops from the Seattle PD two decades ago. Talon has used all that time to indulge in his favorite vice: the serial rape of young boys and girls, each of whom he takes perverse keepsakes off of to savor. A cowardly little snake who finds himself pressed beneath the thumb of master blackmailer Salvadore Alisdare after an encounter with a 14-year-old prostitute, Talon works up the courage to shoot Alisdare dead. After this, Talon considers an opportunity to clean his hands of his sins and make himself a new man-—an opportunity he rejects, instead asserting to himself he is and forever will be "a crooked cop and predatory pedophile". Talon is the kind of criminal that Simon despises most; a bottom-feeder who hunts vulnerable children just because they're "easy prey".
- Salvadore Alisdare is a connoisseur of seafood, serial blackmailer, dealer of hard methamphetamine, and worst of all, a producer of child pornography. Alisdare extorts people like Talon through their involvement in these awful affairs, blackmailing Talon specifically with illicit photos he took with Talon and an underage sex worker named "Buzzy". Talon isn't the only one; Alisdare allows other scumbags to rape Buzzy as well, all while she's kept too drugged up to resist.
Comics
Examples
- Issue #19's "The Rescue of President Carden": Heinrich Himmler himself makes enemies with the Saint when the latter helps out the Slovenian resistance during World War II. Himmler orders twenty innocent hostages executed for every Nazi killed, resulting in dozens of men, women, and children being killed by Himmler's SS thugs. Himmler vows to break the Slovenian spirit of resistance no matter what it takes, from threatening the life of one of their most famous aviators, to sending the Slovenian President to a concentration camp to suffer torture.
- Issue #21 story: Kapitän Gunther is a notorious Nazi U-boat captain first seen being adulated by Hitler himself for having killed so many women and children. Gunther soon after demonstrates his reputation by sinking an unarmed merchant ship carrying thousands of innocent refugees to Canada, specifically ordering the lifeboats targeted to Leave No Survivors. One of the worst war criminals in Hitler's jackboot army, Gunther plans to assassinate both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to deliver a devastating blow to the Allies.
Examples
- "Hell" arc: Professor Zoran is an unusual Outside-Genre Foe for the Saint: a Mad Scientist with an army of technically-living zombies. On a warped quest to find out the secret of immortality, Zoran subjects hundreds of innocent people to experiments meant to make them live forever. Inevitably, the process utterly destroys their minds, leaving them empty shells that Zoran reconditions to be his mindlessly obedient slaves. In a particular display of cruelty, Zoran orders one of these "zombies" to cut his own throat open to demonstrate to the Saint how thoroughly he controls them. Zoran also subjects the Girl of the Week to a drug that leaves her a prisoner in her own body, helpless to resist his commands but torturously aware of every second she's kept under the drug's influence.
- "Valdor" arc: Prince Hugo, the "most unscrupulous man in all of Valdor", usurps the throne of his country by assassinating his noble cousin Prince Paul. To rid himself of Paul's daughter Elaine, the last legitimate heir to the throne, Hugo attempts to bomb a commercial airliner filled with people just to get rid of her, a disaster only narrowly prevented by the Saint. Hugo also has his own Secret Police, which he uses to disappear any dissidents into a Hellhole Prison, where they will be tortured and inevitably executed.
- "Honolulu" arc: Mr. Langley is a wicked communist who dupes a man named John Scott into finding a prime spot for a triumvirate of atom bombs in Hawaii. When Scott tried to cut himself loose from the scheme in horror, Langley cheerfully forced the man to jump off a hundred-foot-cliff at gunpoint, and attempts to do the same to the man's daughter and the Saint when they find out his lair. Langley intends for nothing less than the complete destruction of Pearl Harbor, seeking to finish what the Japanese started in World War II, and he's only too gleeful to imagine the death of hundreds of thousands as the nukes hit.
Radio Dramas
1947-1951 series, starring Vincent Price
Examples
- "The Death of the Saint": Carl Bruder, alias "Victor", was Hitler's heir apparent and second-in-command of the Third Reich during The Holocaust. Bruder cheated the hangman at Nuremberg by faking his own death so he could reappear in America, having all connections to his Nazi past erased, missing only an inconspicuous wine glass with his fingerprints on it. To reacquire the glass, Victor effortlessly slips back into his old sadistic tendencies. He murders a Russian agent while the latter is bound and gagged, personally tortures the Saint, and gleefully muses that he may well end up torturing both the Saint and the Girl of the Week to death, musing "dying from a bullet is rather pleasant compared to some other ways!"
- "Simon Minds the Baby": Fitz Alexander is a crooked boxing manager who fixes fights by threatening the loved ones of his opponents. When Simon's friend and pro boxer Joe Collins threatens Fitz's claim to the championship title, Fitz has Joe's baby son Donny kidnapped and threatens to do him harm if Joe doesn't throw the fight. Fitz dupes Joe's ex-wife into working with him, then after she realizes she's been tricked into kidnapping her own son, Fitz icily has her murdered. After Simon rescues baby Donny and Joe wins the fight, Fitz corners them and decides to kill them all out of nothing but pique, even throwing away his one chance at a getaway to do so. Plainly derided by the otherwise snarky and carefree Saint as a "sick" and "very twisted" man, Fitz is easily the most spiteful killer Simon ever fought in the Lighter and Softer radio dramas.
Television
Examples
- "The Covetous Headsman": Henri Flandin betrayed his own loyal comrades in La Résistance in the heat of World War II; all for cold hard cash, Flandin set up all but three of thirty soldiers to be wiped out in an ambush during a routine ammo pickup. Decades later, Flandin changes his name to "Georges Olivant" and uses his blood money to buy his way into a wealthy lifestyle. Unsatisfied even with this, "Olivant" tracks down the son and daughter of another war veteran, Eli Brione, and tries to steal their birthright to enrich himself even more. "Olivant" stabs Charles Brione in the heart, threatens to kill Valerie Brione as well, and when the three survivors from his double-cross finally corner him, Flandin goes out shooting rather than admit any culpability in the massacre he caused.
- "The King of the Beggars": The Contessa Dolores Marcello is every bit as contemptible as her literary counterpart Laura Wingate. Dolores married a generous millionaire just for his money, admitting that for as devoted as he is to her she couldn't care less about him beyond abusing his wealth and resources behind his back. Dolores masterminds a Protection Racket that targets vulnerable, homeless beggars, forcing them to turn over half their earnings to a proxy lest she have them viciously tortured—or even killed, as one poor blind man who becomes the victim of a hit-and-run learns—-by her sadistic thugs. Dolores is ruthless in silencing every witness to her scheme, having a mook who says too much for his own good gunned down and personally attempting to lock the Saint and an innocent actress in a Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere to die.
- "The Sign of the Claw":
- Dr. Julius, the series' adaptation of The Saint in Miami's Dr. Ludwig Julius, is a terroristic Diabolical Mastermind whose modus operandi is to rove from country to country, gleefully inciting "incidents" to agitate pre-existing wars and conflicts so he can profit off of the resulting bloodshed. Among other such "incidents", Dr. Julius prolonged The Vietnam War when it was just about to conclude at a peaceful resolution, and incited terrorism in the Congo to profit off the death of thousands. Julius's latest goal is to provoke a bloody war in Southeast Asia and hand the region back to greedy colonists. To advance this, Julius kidnaps the daughter of a farmer whose land would make the perfect launching pad for this war, and forces him to cooperate under the threat of her life.
- Max Valmon appears at first to be a friendly old British farmer and a cheerful neighbor of the Victim of the Week, fellow farmer Mr. Morland. Valmon is in reality a frothing pro-colonial racist who, in the words of the Saint, "makes Simon Legree look like Santa Claus." Valmon tries to scare Morland off of his property by murdering the man's brother and his innocent employees, framing the deaths on animal attacks and terrorist activity, and he also promises to devastate the livelihood of any employees who choose to continue working for Morland, no matter how many innocent families suffer. Valmon allies himself with Dr. Julius to foment a bloody war in Southeast Asia, all so he can topple the current government and return the region to British colonizers, and he threatens to kill Morland's daughter if he doesn't let Valmon use his property as a prime launching pad for the war. Valmon's only motivation for all of this atrocity is all just to return himself to the pampered lifestyle he was used to with the British in control.
- "Locate and Destroy": "Henry Coleman", real name Hans Kroleg, was Hitler's deputy minister of mines in Nazi-occupied Poland, and a war criminal of the worst degree who buried alive 5,200 Polish Jews—"mostly women and children"—in one of his mines and then left them to die. After the end of the war, Hans changed his name and hid himself among everyday people, marrying a woman that he values only for her ability to prop up his fake identity. Kroleg ruthlessly silences anyone who might expose his terrible history; he kills all but one of a group of Israeli agents on his tail, and when he learns one of his own men tipped off the agents about his criminal past, Kroleg has the mook dragged off to a dark mine and tortured to death.
- "The Armageddon Alternative": Frederick Boiler is a brilliant but irredeemably narcissistic nuclear physician. Stymied after being rejected for a job he wanted, Fred begins to target the professor who rejected him for the most over-the-top revenge possible. He almost single-handedly builds a working atomic bomb in his own garage—helped only by a getaway driver, whom Fred poisons with radium after he's worn out his use—and threatens to nuke London unless his sadistic terms are agreed to: He wants the professor's daughter guillotined on live TV and all of London Forced to Watch. To prove he's not bluffing, Boiler sets off six smaller bombs all throughout the city, killing and maiming hundreds of people. When it becomes clear London won't cave to his demands, Fred decides to commit Murder-Suicide with the entire population of London, sneering when Simon genuinely offers to help him turn over a new leaf: "If I'm going, I'm going in glory!"
TV Movies starring Simon Dutton
Examples
- The Brazilian Connection: Dr. Ian Lester is one of the uppermost members of a baby trafficking ring that stretches from Brazil to America all the way to Europe, and he lacks the redeeming qualities of most of his cohorts, including his boss Mrs. Cunningham. Lester has babies kidnapped from their mothers and sold abroad to would-be adoptive parents, all while Lester lies through his teeth about the origins of each baby, assuring every buyer with a knowing smile that the babies were "abandoned" or voluntarily given up by the victims of his thefts. When his cohort accidentally dies attempting to kill the Saint, Dr. Lester apathetically uses his death to frame the Saint, threatening an innocent man into testifying as a witness to "murder". Dr. Lester is also happy to kill anyone who stands in the way of his schemes, such as a Brazilian cop who gets too close to the truth.
- Fear in Fun Park (aka The Saint in Australia): Nick Chan is a ruthless Chinese extortionist who has a man garroted to death after he fails to pay back one of Nick's crooked loans. Nick's real evil comes in the form of his brothel, staffed entirely by young women who have been duped into lives of miserable prostitution and kept drugged up so they're too addled to resist. Nick hits his lowest when he has a child abducted for his brothel, subjecting her to a horrible Rape Discretion Shot and vowing that he'll squeeze out any trace of resistance so he can mold the kid into a servile prostitute. The child prostitute eventually hangs herself to escape her situation, which finally prompts Nick's long-abused secretary—a woman who clawed her way into Nick's good graces after ten years of abuse—to shoot him dead.
- Wrong Number: Irma Davos is introduced as the lover and Bastard Understudy of Georges Millas, a washed-up Arms Dealer seeking to reestablish himself in the arms market. Having learned everything she can from Millas, Irma seizes the chance to get rid of him the instant his would-be clients rule him a loose end, shooting him dead even as he begs for his life. Irma moves onto seducing the genocidal terrorist Peter Lang, who wants to incite global chaos by selling twenty nuclear warheads to be used on twenty different targets around the world. Irma is only too willing to murder innocent people, in one instance threatening the wife of an associate who gets cold feet. Ultimately, Irma proves even worse than Lang; after Lang genuinely falls in love with her, Irma betrays him, shoots him in the gut, and dismisses him as a "little gray man" who fell at her feet and paid the price for it. Driven by nothing but pure mercenary greed, Irma intends on selling Lang's nukes herself, regardless of how many thousands or millions of people die for the sake of her payday.
1997 film & associated works
Film
- Ivan Tretiak is a Russian oil magnate who fancies himself the next Josef Stalin. Tretiak willingly causes a gigantic oil shortage and plunges all of Moscow into a deep freeze during the winter, resulting in scores of innocent people freezing to death on the streets and thousands more suffering. Tretiak hopes to use the anger he's fomented to Make the Bear Angry Again, hoping to discredit and frame his political rival Karpov and then ride the fallout into the President's seat, all while ordering the murders of anyone who could threaten him.
Burl Barer's novelization
Examples
- Ivan Tretiak is even viler in this adaptation than he is in the film. An oil magnate whose "ambitions fill cemeteries", Tretiak plunges Moscow into an energy crisis in a plot to discredit and eventually murder his political rival President Karpov, letting dozens of people freeze to death on the streets so he can ride their anger into the President's seat. Along the way, Tretiak dispatches his loose cannon of a son, Ilya, to kill Simon Templar and anyone else in his way, resulting in a slew of dead bodies. A horrible employer as well, Ivan beats a corrupt cop on his payroll to death for letting Simon escape, and shoots his Reluctant Mad Scientist in the face for trying to escape his cruelty. As "sentimental as a rabid Doberman", Ivan intends to drag Russia back into a hellscape of "kangaroo courts, concentration camps [and] firing squads" that will rival the worst brutalities of the Stalinist regime, all so he can be on top.
- Ilya, Ivan's son, is a Methedrine-addicted Neo-Nazi with a loose trigger finger. Ivan's chosen enforcer whenever he needs somebody to die, Ilya has a sadistic streak that surpasses even his father's. While chasing Simon Templar, Ilya kills innocent bystanders one after another, whether for giving him lip or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. After Ivan's scheme goes south, Ilya impulsively kills numerous Rosgvardiya soldiers and sets off a firefight that endangers a huge crowd of people. Finally, Ilya murders his own father Ivan, hoping to escape and one day slime into the Presidency himself after the dust settles.
Jonathan Hensleigh's 1995 script (link
)
- Gregor Tretiak, the prototype for Ivan Tretiak, is every bit as evil as he would be in the final product. Tretiak is Moscow's most powerful crime lord, masterminding gambling, prostitution, and drug-running throughout the city. Tretiak plans to frame President Karpov for his own crimes so he can replace Karpov with his own pet candidate, Romanov; to stoke up support for Romanov and undermine Karpov, Tretiak masterminds bloody riots all throughout the city which kill dozens of people. Tretiak plans to consolidate his power by stealing a formula for cold fusion from Dr. Russell, hiring the Saint for this job while planning on killing him the second it's done. After Simon turns on him, Tretiak spitefully has Russell poisoned to death by his chief killer Ilya. Finally, when Tretiak's scheme goes up in flames, Tretiak causes a bloody firefight just to distract from his own escape, and he attempts to kill every single one of his own remaining minions so he can slither away from the consequences and vanish.
