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GOLDEN_FROG

                                             March 31, 2021

An episode of the Roger Moore version of
"The Saint", "The Golden Frog" (1965,                 There's a short story by
Season 3, Episode 19) is so much like                 that name collected in
one of the Leslie Charteris stories I                 "Señor Saint" (1959), 
presume it's actually based on one,                   which carried stories
though I don't remember reading it:                   from 1954-55.

   Simon Templar arrives in a South American
   country named San Carlos,  because a friend
   of his has been scammed out of a lot of money.
   The con-artists are still hanging around (?)       There's a bunch of other
   and Templar steps in acting like a plausible       mildly amusing stuff
   sucker and-- you'll be surprised to hear--         about comically inept
   turns the tables on them.                          would-be revolutionaries
                                                      planning a coup--
      There's nothing particularly interesting
      about that fact-- I note it because it's           You know those silly
      one of the many places my memory and/or            Latin American
      perception don't stand up to the kind of           countries, it's always
      careful, detailed scholarship subjects of          something there...
      this importance deserve.

      I thought that the Saint as a
      con-man-that-cons-con-men was too edgey
      for television, and instead they made
      him some sort of independently wealthy
      gentleman adventurer-- in the *later*
      stories, The Saint is something like
      that-- after he secures a pardon for his
      criminal career, and presumably has
      amassed a pile of illegal if not quite
      ill-gotten gains.

      And in this story, though the Saint is
      primarily motivated by a desire to retrieve
      the money lost by a friend of his, if
      I remember the figures right, doing the math
      implies there's a few extra thousand dollars
      which the Saint might simply have pocketed.


         So despite having seen all of these episodes
         as a kid, and read all of the stories some
         time later, I hadn't noted that there was this
         much similarity between any of them.

              In this one, The Saint trots out
              his standard alias "Sebastian Tombs".



                  But then, I don't think they ever
                  did an episode about the Saint as
                  assassin for hire:

                    "The Saint in New York" (1935)


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