The Adventures of the Saint
The Character Behind the Show
Simon Templar wasn't your typical radio detective. He didn't carry a badge, he wasn't bound by department procedure, and he didn't particularly mind bending the law when the result seemed worth it. He operated somewhere between the gentleman adventurer and the outright criminal — always on the side of the victim, never reliably on the side of convention. Leslie Charteris had introduced the character in his 1928 novel Meet the Tiger, describing Templar as "aged twenty-seven, tall, dark, keen-faced, deeply tanned and with blue eyes," and the Saint had already become a fixture in print, film, and popular culture by the time radio got hold of him in the mid-1940s. Charteris himself was particular about how the character was handled, and he owned the radio scripts outright — a rare arrangement that gave him unusual control over the Saint's voice across every medium.
The radio version leaned into the image that five George Sanders films for RKO had already established: Templar was suave, quick-witted, and equally at home at the wheel of a fast car, in an airplane, or on horseback. He was a dapper dresser with a taste for fine restaurants, a patron of the arts, and a man whose single reliable irritant was being interrupted while dining. That last detail turned out to be endlessly useful for writers — because the Saint got interrupted at dinner constantly, and those interruptions reliably dropped him into plots involving jewel thieves, embezzlement, or murder. Brian Aherne, who played the role in the 1945 CBS summer run, put it simply: the Saint was "a sort of superman. He's never at a loss in any situation, and can get himself out of any scrape, and always quite legitimately."
Five Runs, Four Actors, Six Years
The Adventures of the Saint had one of the more complicated broadcast histories in radio. It ran five separate times across three networks between January 1945 and October 1951, with four different actors in the lead role.
The first run opened on NBC on January 6, 1945 — though according to Billboard, the actual first broadcast went out January 4 on seven Western stations, with the more widely cited date reflecting the Eastern-region Saturday-night airing at 7:30 p.m. Edgar Barrier played Templar, with Bromo Seltzer as sponsor. It ran thirteen weeks, through March 31. No recordings from this run survived for review, so the supporting cast and production crew remain largely unknown.
That summer, the show moved to CBS as a replacement for Jack Carson, with Campbell Soups picking up the tab. Brian Aherne stepped into the role, and Louise Arthur played Patricia Holm, the companion drawn from the Charteris novels. William N. Robson produced. The run lasted the contracted thirteen weeks, from June 20 through September 12. Billboard had speculated at the time that if the show pulled acceptable ratings it might stay on permanently — but it went off when the summer ended. Charteris, for his part, went on record praising Aherne's interpretation, saying he "would have been just as good on film."
The third run — July 9, 1947 through June 30, 1948 — was confined to the CBS West Coast network and originated from KNX, the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, with Lever Brothers as the sponsor. This is where Vincent Price first took on the role. Tom Conway had actually been the first choice for the part; when Conway turned it down, Price stepped in. Conway would eventually get his chance, but not for another four years.
Price carried the character into the fourth run as well, when The Saint moved to Mutual beginning July 10, 1949. That run started as a sustaining program — Mutual used it, according to Billboard, as a "trial summer run to showcase show for fall bankrolling" — before Ford Motors came on as sponsor. The Mutual run aired Sundays at 7:30, with Merrill Ross announcing.
The fifth and final run began June 11, 1950, on NBC, initially serving as a summer replacement for The Phil Harris–Alice Faye Show. Price stayed with it, and the show settled into its longest continuous run. The Sunday time slot shifted to 4:30 in October 1950, then to 4 o'clock in July 1951. Price remained in the role until May 20, 1951, with Tom Conway taking over for 22 weekly episodes through the October 14, 1951 finale — the last radio Saint.
Vincent Price and What He Brought to It
Price's version of Simon Templar arrived in the wake of Jack Webb's Pat Novak for Hire, at a moment when detective radio was straining hard for the clever quip. The Saint shared some of that DNA with Richard Diamond, though the consensus at the time was that neither show matched Pat Novak's outrageous dialogue — Richard Breen's writing for that show set a standard for the form. What Price brought was something different: the ability to take an ordinary line and make it work beyond what it deserved on the page. His cultivated real-life persona — an art collector, a trained cook, a Yale-educated man who had studied art history at the Courtauld Institute in London — aligned almost perfectly with the character's published traits. When Price's Saint complained about a ruined dinner or delivered a dry aside about a jewel thief's taste in neckwear, it came from somewhere.
Price reportedly found one aspect of the role reliably tiresome: coming up with new and unique ways to get knocked out, which the scripts required with some regularity. A Billboard review of the first episode of the final NBC run in June 1950 called much of the script "confusing and slow-paced" and described Price as "frightfully dull" — a notice that might have killed a less established show. The series lasted longer in that NBC run than in any of its previous incarnations, which suggests the audience had its own view of the matter.
An unexpected episode in September 1950 briefly introduced a fourth actor to the role. Barry Sullivan filled in for two episodes while Price was reportedly delayed in Paris; his first outing, "The Ghost that Giggled," aired September 17, 1950. After Sullivan's second episode, NBC cancelled the show — but audience response was strong enough that the network brought Price back for roughly two dozen more episodes before the character finally passed to Conway.
The Production That Supported It
The NBC run assembled a capable ensemble around Templar. Lawrence Dobkin played Louie, a Brooklyn cab driver who kept the Saint streetwise while getting him across town. John Brown played Inspector Fernack and Ken Christy played Hoppy. The supporting cast drew from the working core of Hollywood radio — Lurene Tuttle, Harry Bartell, Tony Barrett, Barney Phillips, Dan O'Herlihy, Peggy Webber, Ted von Eltz, and Jerry Hausner all appeared across the run. James L. Saphier produced, with Helen Mack and Thomas A. McAvity directing. Louis Vittes and Dick Powell wrote the scripts, Harry Zimmerman handled the music, and Don Stanley announced.
The show's signature sound was a haunting whistle accompanied by footsteps, pitched to suggest a lone figure on a deserted street at night. It was spare and effective — the right kind of atmospheric shorthand for a character who operated in the margins between lawful and otherwise.
Tom Conway and the Close of the Run
Tom Conway's connection to Simon Templar ran deeper than it might appear. Conway was born Thomas Charles Sanders in St. Petersburg, Russia — the older brother of George Sanders, who had played the Saint in five RKO films. When both brothers moved to Hollywood, they tossed a coin to decide who would change his last name; Tom lost and became Conway. He had already played Sherlock Holmes on radio in the 1946–1947 season of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes before taking over as the Saint in May 1951. His 22 episodes closed out the radio series.
The character didn't stay off the air for long. The ITV series The Saint, produced by ITC under Lew Grade, premiered October 4, 1962, with Roger Moore in the role for six series totaling 118 episodes — 71 in black-and-white, 47 in color — and aired in more than 60 countries. Moore had actually tried to acquire the production rights himself before becoming a co-owner of the production alongside Robert S. Baker. Ian Ogilvy followed in Return of the Saint (1978–1979), and Val Kilmer took the role in a 1997 feature film.
Charteris's ownership of the radio scripts created one unusual footnote. A 1945 episode scripted by science fiction writer Henry Kuttner became the basis for "The Masked Angel," published in the Winter 1947 issue of Mystery Book Magazine under Charteris's name — one of the stranger examples of radio content feeding directly back into print fiction. Burl Barer's comprehensive study The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film, and Television (McFarland, 1993) documented the franchise's full arc across all media and earned Barer the 1994 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.