On 5 October 1962, the first James Bond film, Dr No, had its world premiere in London – and the thriller would never be the same again. The Bond films would become the most successful film franchise of all time, and almost single-handedly led to the ‘spy-mania’ of the Sixties.
As a result, nearly all discussion of Bond’s influence on the genre relates to the films. But long before Terence Young, Sean Connery, or John Barry stepped onto the scene, James Bond was a by-word for excitement, glamour and adventure. Fleming was not merely a moderately successful writer whose work only became famous via screen adaptation: by any usual standards, his books were a wide-reaching cultural phenomenon (which is partly why the film rights were attractive, of course). In Britain, Fleming’s novels were serialised as comic strips in the Daily Express from 1958 onwards, and the same year he became a talking point in the literary world when he was attacked as vulgar by the critic Bernard Bergonzi in the Twentieth Century and accused of being a purveyor of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ by Paul Johnson in the New Statesman.¹ In its review of Goldfinger on March 26, 1959, The Times noted that:
‘A new novel by Mr. Ian Fleming is becoming something of an event, since James Bond has now established himself at the head of his profession, a secret service agent who indeed plays for England but who has much in common with the highly sexed “private eye” on the other side of the Atlantic.’
A less frequently discussed indication of Fleming’s success is that, even before Dr No came to the screen, other thriller-writers were being influenced by Bond. Just over a month after Dr No’s premiere, on 12 November 1962, Len Deighton’s novel The IPCRESS File was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Although Deighton wrote the book before Dr No’s release, Bond was nevertheless on his mind, as Michael Spencer Howard revealed in his 1971 book on the publisher Jonathan Cape:
‘Having studied the James Bond phenomenon, Deighton had devised his own formula on which to base efficiently successful thrillers, and was determined to write five of them to prove it.’²
The IPCRESS File was an unexpected smash, and Deighton defected from Hodder to Jonathan Cape, who published the sequel, Horse Under Water, the following year. Deighton later said that this ‘enraged some people, who claimed I was now going to be trained as the successor to Ian Fleming, who Cape also published.’³ This was an understandable view: The IPCRESS File even closes with a mention of SMERSH, an organisation that had featured in Fleming novels but which would not appear on film until From Russia With Love in 1963 – the screenplay of which Deighton worked on.⁴
The mention of SMERSH can only plausibly be the influence of Fleming, because although the organisation existed in real life, it had had little in common with Fleming’s fantastic depiction of it, and its existence was barely known before the publication of Casino Royale. Deighton places the organisation’s headquarters in Moscow at 19 Stanislavskaya Street, whereas Fleming had it at 13 Sretenska Ulitsa. Despite the authoritative-sounding specificity, neither can be right, as the organisation was disbanded and handed over to the Main Administration of Counter-Intelligence (GUKR) of the MGB in 1946.⁵
Deighton was not the only thriller-writer to toy with the Bond formula prior to the films. The Mythmaker by Sarah Gainham, published in 1957, featured a young, handsome half-British, half-Hungarian agent called Christian Quest, known as ‘Kit’; the name is an obvious play on the tradition of gallant spies fighting for God and country. Gainham was the pseudonym of Rachel Terry, the wife of British journalist and MI6 asset Anthony Terry, a close friend and colleague of Fleming who had helped with the research for The Living Daylights. According to Andrew Lycett, Rosa Klebb was partly inspired by an anecdote Rachel Terry had told about a hideous female Russian agent who had operated in Vienna.⁶
Several moments in The Mythmaker, published the same year as From Russia With Love, appear to have been inspired by Fleming’s work, especially Casino Royale. Quest is a handsome, young, but somewhat arrogant novice in both the spy game and matters of the heart:
‘In Kit’s many small loves his main preoccupation had been to protect himself from involvement without losing his pleasure. A vulgar concern which was not his choice but simply the accepted attitude to love of nearly all young men of his kind, and the very worst preparation possible for the feelings that now filled him. Not only was Deli a member of his own world and therefore not to be trifled with without serious consequences, but he found with a momentary fear that only traces remained of his habitual self-defence against emotion, he was defenceless against her simply because she was unarmed and brave. Yet he could not at once give up the essentially hostile posture which had hitherto been his real attitude to the women he had desired and who had desired him. This fear and this reservation showed in his eyes after the first flash of recognition, and in answer to them a familiar smile of ironical understanding came into Deli’s eyes. Kit looked away from her, shamed that he had betrayed a coarse caution in a moment that could never return, and spoilt it for both of them.
‘Let’s dance,’ said Deli, still with the ironical smile.’’
Deli’s ironical smiles are reminiscent of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, and the passage as a whole echoes Bond’s changing attitude to women in that novel:
‘With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.
But with Vesper there could be none of this.’
In the hint of Quest’s ‘real’ attitude to women – an ‘essentially hostile posture’ – he may also have been a subtle portrait of Ian Fleming. Rachel Terry thought that Fleming was ‘highly intelligent and accomplished’, but that his emotional age was ‘pre-puberty’⁷. A couple of years after she wrote The Mythmaker, Fleming tried to seduce her on a trip to Berlin, when she had been estranged for her husband. She had been tempted, finding Fleming ‘tall, good-looking, highly presentable and with the slightly piratical air given by his broken nose’, but turned him down⁷. In The Mythmaker, Quest is described as having a ‘narrow, aquiline handsome face with an arrogant but humorous expression, a mobile mouth and quick hazel eyes of unusual beauty’.
Quest travels to Vienna to find Otto Berger, a servant of Hitler’s thought to have escaped the Bunker in Berlin and hidden a cache of platinum and precious stones to be used to fund a neo-Nazi revival: the book ends with a chase through the Alps. In Fleming’s Moonraker (1954), the chief villain is Hugo Drax, revealed to have been a Nazi who survived the end of the war. Drax’s chief accomplice is called Krebs, the same name as Hitler’s last chief of staff in the Bunker.⁸
In the 1960s and 1970s, neo-Nazi revivals would become fertile ground for British thriller-writers. One lesser known example is The Testament of Caspar Schultz by Martin Fallon, published by Abelard-Schulman in the United Kingdom on May 18, 1962, nearly five months before the world premiere of Dr No. Fallon was an early pseudonym of Harry Patterson, a writer who would later become famous under another pseudonym: Jack Higgins.
While Gainham’s book was a literary thriller with a few gentle nods to Fleming’s work, The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a full-bodied homage. In the first chapter, British agent Paul Chavasse is summoned in the early hours by telephone to see his superior, who works out of a building carrying the legend ‘Brown & Company – Importers & Exporters’ on a polished brass plate outside:
‘He went up the curving Regency staircase and passed along a thickly carpeted corridor. The only sound was a slight, persistent hum from the dynamo in the radio room…’
Chavasse briefly admires the Chief’s assistant, Jean Frazer, whose tweed skirt is of a ‘deceptively simple cut that moulded her rounded hips’, before going in to see his boss:
‘The room was half in shadow, the only light the shaded lamp which stood upon the desk by the window. The Chief was reading a sheaf of typewritten documents and he looked up quickly, a slight frown on his face.’
All of this seems to be a shorthand version of the openings of several Fleming novels, such as this passage in From Russia With Love (1957):
‘As Bond put on his coat and went out into the corridor, banging the door behind him, he had a feeling of certainty that the starter’s gun had fired and that the dog days had come to an end. Even the ride up to the top floor in the lift and the walk down the long quiet corridor to the door of M’s small office seemed to be charged with the significance of all those other occasions when the bell of the red telephone had been the signal that had fired him, like a loaded projectile, across the world towards some distant target of M’s choosing. And the eyes of Miss Moneypenny, M’s private secretary, had that old look of excitement and secret knowledge as she smiled up at him and pressed the switch on the intercom.
‘007’s here, sir.’
‘Send him in,’ said the metallic voice, and the red light of privacy went on above the door.
Bond went through the door and closed it softly behind him. The room was cool, or perhaps it was the Venetian blinds that gave an impression of coolness. They threw bars of light and shadow across the dark green carpet up to the edge of the big central desk. There the sunshine stopped so that the quiet figure behind the desk sat in a pool of suffused greenish shade.’
Stylistically, these two passages are very different: Fleming almost fetishised physical detail, whereas Higgins prioritises pace. However, the content is very similar, and the character of Chavasse is also like Bond in many respects: a handsome, ruthless, highly professional British secret agent who speaks several languages, is an expert at judo, and so on. The clearest indication that Higgins had Fleming in mind, however, is the following passage:
‘‘There are men like me working for every Great Power in the world. I’ve got more in common with my opposite number in SMERSH than I have with any normal citizen of my own country. If I’m told to do a thing, I get it done. I don’t ask questions. Men like me live by one code only – the job must come before anything else.’ He laughed harshly. ‘If I’d been born a few years earlier and a German, I’d probably have worked for the Gestapo.’’
Again, SMERSH was not well known before Fleming’s use of it in Casino Royale and subsequent novels, and it was a division of Soviet intelligence mainly dedicated to interrogating suspected traitors. Like Fleming (and Deighton), Higgins treated it as though it were a still-operational and central part of Soviet intelligence.
Paul Chavasse is a half-British half-Breton secret agent. His mission in the novel is to find Caspar Schultz, a survivor of Hitler’s Bunker who has written a book naming the leaders of a neo-Nazi movement in Germany. In Higgins’ original draft, the testament’s author was Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, but at his publishers insistence he changed this to the fictional Schultz.
Chavasse delivers his speech about SMERSH to Israeli agent Mark Hardt in a first-class sleeper compartment, in a scene that is highly reminiscent of Fleming’s From Russia With Love (1958). In that book, SMERSH’s dossier on James Bond described him as ‘a dangerous professional terrorist and spy’, a neat alternate look at our hero. Higgins took this further. James Bond would never say of himself that he had more in common with a member of SMERSH than with British citizens, let alone that had he been born a German earlier he would probably have joined the Gestapo. Higgins was using Chavasse to play off and comment on Fleming’s creation. He’s an answer to a writer’s musing: Are all Germans and Russians bad? And: What would a real secret agent’s motivation be? Traditionally in thrillers of this kind, it is duty, either in the form of love of country or God or, sometimes, a woman. Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond started his career because he found peacetime dull, but he was nevertheless highly patriotic. For Chavasse, however, the job comes before anything else, and he recognises that he might have been attracted to the work whatever his nationality, and whatever the cause. This is an elaboration of a point made by Fleming in Casino Royale, in which Bond worries that Le Chiffe was right when he had said Bond’s game of ‘Red Indians’ is over:
‘‘This country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.’’
The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a lean, sparsely written thriller, with one dominating theme: the conflict between conscience and the desire for adventure. At several points in the book, Chavasse is troubled by his own nature. He tells Israeli agent Anna Hartmann that he was recruited into intelligence work after bringing the relative of a friend out of Czechoslovakia:
‘‘I’d discovered things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the Czechoslovakian business I realized that in some twisted kind of way I’d enjoyed it. Can you understand that?’
‘I’m not really sure,’ she said slowly. ‘Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in the face each day?’
‘I don’t think of that side of it,’ he said, ‘any more than a Grand Prix motor racing driver does.’’
And he repeats what he told her colleague:
‘‘I’m a professional and work against professionals. Men like me obey one law only – the job must come first.’’
While the use of this idea is rather heavy-handed in The Testament of Caspar Schultz, Higgins clearly felt it was important, developing it in five further novels featuring Chavasse. In The Keys of Hell (1965), for instance, on a mission in Albania, he says to another beautiful young woman he has fallen in love with:
‘‘If I’d been born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the Gestapo. If I’d been born an Albanian, I might well have been a most efficient member of the Sigurmi. Who knows?’’
This concept eventually became one of the major themes of his work. In The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975, Higgins did not simply have the hero remark how similar he is to a German – the heroes are German. In a 1987 interview, Higgins related how one publisher was not best pleased when he heard the premise of the book, telling him:
‘‘You can’t possibly expect the public to go for a book about a bunch of Krauts trying to kidnap Winston Churchill. You don’t have any heroes – these people are Nazis, for God’s sake!’’⁹
But the public did go for it; The Eagle Has Landed was Higgins’ breakthrough, and has sold over 50 million copies to date. Part of its appeal is precisely the friction of rooting for characters who were traditionally cast as antagonists. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of The Jackal and Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, two other landmark British thrillers of the post-war period, also featured highly professional yet strangely empathetic antagonists. Higgins’ other major success has been with the character Sean Dillon, a former IRA assassin who is periodically used by British intelligence.
In peacetime Britain, when the justification for what SMERSH would classify as terrorist actions was less cut and dried than it had been during the war, there was a need for a new type of motivation for fictional secret agents. Higgins hit on the idea of an agent being driven not by traditional causes such as King, God or country, but by an addiction to the chase itself, a love of the profession. Chavasse’s other concern – the broader picture of human nature that allows him to empathise with the enemy and recognise himself in it – became a major theme of Higgins’ work.
Another writer who was influenced by Fleming was Geoffrey Jenkins, a South African who had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times in the ’40s. In his first novel, A Twist of Sand (1959), we are introduced to Geoffrey Peace, a former Royal Navy submarine captain now involved in distinctly shadier business. A flashback to the war gives us another echo of a Bond/M scene:
‘The Admiralty looked bleak and cold in the late London spring; chill it seemed to me after being used to the friendly bite of the Mediterranean sun. Bleaker still looked those eyes over the top of the desk. They reminded me somehow of Rockall, the lonely isle in the Atlantic – they only changed their shade of greyness, sometimes stormy, sometimes still, but always grey and bleak with the chill of the near Arctic.’
During the war, as Jenkins would have known, Fleming worked at the Admiralty, and M is frequently described as having ‘frosty, damnably clear, grey eyes’ in For Your Eyes Only.
Jenkins’ next book was The Watering Place of Good Peace (1960). The hero, Ian Ogilvie, is a Scot who was crippled by a shark, also while in the Royal Navy. He joins an organisation constructing anti-shark barriers ‘a fast car, a pretty girl, and half a dozen drinks’ after his accident. The plot features opium smuggling and a villain called John Barrow who is using a submarine to find uranium. Ogilvie also swims through the wreck of a ship with a beautiful woman who is naked but for goggles and scuba gear. Many of Jenkins’ subsequent novels featured such tips of the hat to his former mentor. After Fleming’s death, Jenkins was commissioned to write a Bond novel – Per Fine Ounce – but it was never published.¹⁰
Many thriller-writers have been influenced by Ian Fleming, but most have probably come to his work through the films. But Deighton, Gainham, Higgins, and Jenkins were all influenced by him before the first Bond film was released. Fleming was an influential thriller-writer in his own right, and James Bond a character that inspired his peers even before his transition to the silver screen.