Patricia Holm - Later Career

Later Career

Holm's interests and involvement outside of Templar's inner circle are rarely touched upon. In "The Gold Standard" she is shown attending a party thrown by some friends, but her thoughts remain with Templar throughout and she is described as carrying a gun in a holster under her left arm. In "The Simon Templar Foundation" (a novella in The Misfortunes of Mr. Teal), Charteris describes her as having the same look in her eyes as Templar has (i.e. the look of someone converted to a cause) but her attempt at emulating Templar in that story (trying to divert Teal's attention away from discovering a piece of anti-Saint evidence) is unsuccessful. On a couple of occasions in the short story collection Boodle (a.k.a. The Saint Intervenes) Holm goes undercover as a secretary in order to help move Templar's plots along; in one of these stories, "The Loving Brothers", Holm adopts Templar's physical mannerisms and even mode of speech as she play-acts the role of a fired secretary.

Although she is reduced to a one-line cameo in what is arguably the most famous Saint novel, The Saint in New York, her presence is still felt at a crucial point in the book where Templar is tempted to fall in love with the troubled Fay Edwards. Instead, Charteris writes, Templar remembers that his heart belongs to someone else. (This doesn't stop him from kissing the woman several times, however.) In the very next novel, however, Saint Overboard, not only is Holm conspicuous by her total absence, but Templar explicitly falls in love with Loretta Page, the heroine of the book. By the next book, The Ace of Knaves, Templar is once again back with Holm and no reference to Page is made. Holm is absent once again from the next book, Thieves' Picnic and Templar briefly woos another heroine, but the following novel, Prelude for War places Holm back at the forefront again, described by Charteris as the one constant in Templar's life. She is nowhere to be found in 1939's short story collection The Happy Highwayman which sees Templar romancing several different women. The next book in the series, 1940s The Saint in Miami, makes Holm the instigator of the book's plot, but she otherwise spends much of the novel either "off-screen" or captured by the villains, awaiting Templar's rescue; meanwhile Templar romances a female British secret agent, with hardly a complaint from Holm. Holm subsequently disappears from the series for a number of years, being absent from the next few books, all of which were set in the United States.