Recently I was reminded of one of Leslie Charteris’ Saint novellas, collected in The Ace of Knaves (occasionally AKA The Saint in Action) in 1937. I already had an EPUB of it but hadn’t read it in years, so I opened it up and was confronted with…

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

…and a copyright of 2014, which I thought was a neat trick, considering it was published in 1937 by a man who died in 1993.

And who or what is Interfund (London), the alleged owner of this copyright?

I don’t remember how much or little this annoyed me the last time I read it. This time, though, I spent a few minutes digging into Interfund (London), and…

Oh. They’re landlords. Or they were landlords, since they were reportedly dissolved in 2018. And Charteris’ widow, Audrey Long, was attached to the company from a couple years after her husband’s death until her own death in 2014.

There’s that date again.

I could start making some educated guesses at this point. Long doesn’t have any profession listed anywhere except acting, as far as I can tell, so there’s a better-than-even chance that she didn’t have the acumen to manage intellectual property rights in this benighted age. (Or at least she didn’t think she did.) So she went to some random company that also wasn’t in the IP business, but… I would point out how similar IP management and landlording are, but thousands of people have done that already. She didn’t just sell them the Saint IP; she joined the company a couple years after Charteris’ death and brought the IP with her.

Another educated guess: if the company went under in 2018, they can’t have been doing all that well in 2014. Landlords don’t often go under quickly, unless they overextend themselves right before a recession or otherwise take stupid risks.¹

I couldn’t find a specific cause of death for Long, but she was 92, so her business partners probably saw it coming. And either right before or just after her death, they hired someone to move a few commas or something around before rushing out a new edition of the Saint books.

And changing the copyright date, in the hopes that “their” “asset” would stay theirs for decades longer.

Yeccch.

This is a lot like the Eiffel Tower thing, where the “rightsholders” got a separate copyright on the lights and extended the time in which they can shake people down for photographing it. Except it’s worse; the lights undoubtedly took more effort, for one thing, The lights were originally done for a primarily artistic reason as well (or at least for “restoration” of the tower’s original symbolic value or something), even though the tower’s rightsholders have repurposed them as a perpetually renewable nuisance to street photographers and tourists.

Interfund, on the other hand, broke no sweat at all, other than paying a movie historian (probably not much) to write a foreword. And I’m going to ignore their vague handwaving at “a fluent experience for modern readers” and go with the much more likely explanation that their unnoticeably minor edits were intended purely as a copyright trap.

And it didn’t even work. The older, untrapped copies are still around, and the first of them went up on Gutenberg earlier this year. Plus, y’know, book piracy is ridiculously easy; in the course of researching this post, I accidentally found a copy of the book in question (and what looks, at first glance, like the rest of the series) freely available on the Net.

Ask any Saint fan: there are crooks, there are despicable crooks who it’s more important and satisfying to oppose, and then there are stupidly despicable crooks who don’t even offer a challenge and just get scraped off of a shoe.

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1. From early 2016 until it went under, Interfund’s only listed officer was Charteris and Long’s grandson, writer Kevin Higgins. This doesn’t suggest a lot of income from the property rental side of the business.