II. Two Traitors
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Ian Fleming was an aficionado of thrillers, and his ambition to write his own was informed by decades reading the genre. When he finally sat down to do so, he was keen to update some of its stuffier conventions. In a letter to The Manchester Guardian in 1958, he explained how even the name of his hero was intended to move things on:
‘One of the reasons why I chose the pseudonym of James Bond for my hero rather than, say, Peregrine Maltravers was that I wished him to be unobtrusive. Exotic things would happen to and around him but he would be a neutral figure—an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department.’[1]
Nevertheless, there were old-fashioned elements to his work. Fleming was not a plagiarist, but he sometimes used other authors’ characters or plot ideas as springboards. When asked in October 1963 what writers had influenced him, he pointed to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, adding almost parenthetically:
‘I suppose, if I were to examine the problem in depth, I’d go back to my childhood and find some roots of interest in E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sax Rohmer. Perhaps they played an important part.’[2]
This is what his brother might have called a ‘purple whale’. Hammett and Chandler were influences on his prose style, but they also had great cachet for Fleming, who wanted to be as up-to-date and hard-boiled. Oppenheim and Rohmer were both rather forgotten and fusty English thriller-writers, but their influence on his work was far greater. Rohmer’s ‘Oriental mastermind’ Dr Fu Manchu was the inspiration for Dr Julius No, while Oppenheim’s glamorous spies were precursors to his hero in a way Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade never were, as Fleming obliquely acknowledged through Gala Brand’s musing about James Bond in Moonraker:
‘Well, at any rate she had put him in his place and shown him that she wasn’t impressed by dashing young men from the Secret Service, however romantic they might look. There were just as good-looking men in the Special Branch, and they were real detectives, not just people that Phillips Oppenheim had dreamed up with fast cars and special cigarettes with gold bands on them and shoulder-holsters.’
Oppenheim and Rohmer were nevertheless largely indirect influences, predecessors who had helped establish the formula of the thriller. But Fleming sometimes drew on other authors’ work much more extensively, working directly from scenes, adding dozens of new elements and ideas, as well as his own glittering prose style, to transform them into something fresh and new. But the original can sometimes still be seen peeking through.
An example of this can be found in Chapters 5 and 6 of Thunderball, in which we are introduced to one of Fleming’s most famous villains, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The opening description of Blofeld, and his effect on others, is modelled on a similar passage in Sapper’s first Bulldog Drummond novel, published in 1920. We first meet Sapper’s nemesis Carl Peterson at a hotel in Switzerland, where he is in disguise as a French count:
‘To even the most superficial observer the giver of the feast was a man of power: a man capable of forming instant decisions and of carrying them through...
And if so much was obvious to the superficial observer, it was more than obvious to the three men who stood by the fire watching him. They were what they were simply owing to the fact that they were not superficial servers of humanity; and each one of them, as he watched his host, realised that he was in the presence of a great man.’
In Thunderball, Fleming described Blofeld in similar terms, punched up several notches:
‘Any man seeing No. 2, for that was the chairman’s number of the month, even for the first time would have looked at him with some degree of the same feelings, for he was one of those men—one meets perhaps only two or three in a lifetime—who seem almost to suck the eyes out of your head. These rare men are apt to possess three basic attributes—their physical appearance is extraordinary, they have a quality of relaxation, of inner certainty, and they exude a powerful animal magnetism. The herd has always recognized the other-worldliness of these phenomena and in primitive tribes you will find that any man singled out by nature in this fashion will also have been chosen by the tribe to be their chief. Certain great men of history, perhaps Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, among the politicians, have had these qualities. Perhaps they even explain the hypnotic sway of an altogether more meagre individual, the otherwise inexplicable Adolf Hitler, over eighty million of the most gifted nation in Europe. Certainly No. 2 had these qualities and any man in the street would have recognized them—let alone these twenty chosen men. For them, despite the deep cynicism ingrained in their respective callings, despite their basic insensitivity towards the human race, he was, however reluctantly, their Supreme Commander—almost their god.’
In both cases, the super-villain is introduced by discussing the effect of his mere presence on others, a decisive force that is noticeable to anyone, but which to his fellow criminals is evidence of a great man or, in Fleming’s inflation, makes him almost a god.
But while this passage owed a debt to Sapper, the basic idea and structure of these chapters draws much more directly on a far more obscure source: The Outlaws of the Air, a novel by George Griffith published in 1894. Griffith had been a successful author in his day, but by the time Fleming sat down to write Thunderball in 1960, basing it partly on his aborted film script with Kevin McClory and others, this book was very obscure. However, in 1957, its opening scene had been extracted in The Spy’s Bedside Book by Graham Greene and his brother Hugh. Along with work by E Phillips Oppenheim, William Le Queux, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene himself, the anthology also included excerpts from Casino Royale, Moonraker, and From Russia, With Love. Fleming reviewed The Spy’s Bedside Book in The Sunday Times in November 1957, using it to get down some of his own thoughts about the bleak realities of the espionage world that, he argued, too rarely seemed to feature in spy fiction:
‘Here, it seems to me, is the stuff of a great novel which no one has attempted and whose fringes have been only touched on by Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.
Seduced from the drab truth by the emotive lushness of espionage, most writers of spy fiction (or spy fact for the matter of that) choose the easier and more profitable thriller approach and, with the exception of the three I mention above, it is only the best of the others—Buchan, George Griffith, and O. Henry—who can be reread except as a joke. They do date so terribly, these fairy stories of our teens—their language, their steam-age wars, their moustaches, their exclamation marks! Even their gimmicks lack the high seriousness with which the thriller writer should approach his subject. One shivered pleasurably at Khokhlov’s explosive cigarette lighter, but, surely, even in those days of other smoking habits William Le Queux’s explosive cigar which blew the Privy Councillor’s face off must have made our fathers chuckle rather than shiver.’[3]
This is a peculiar review in several ways. Fleming had a somewhat conflicted relationship with Graham Greene, and it could be his insistence on ‘the high seriousness with which the thriller writer should approach his subject’ is mickey-taking, or perhaps a kind of passive-aggressive swipe at Greene editing a collection of excerpts that were largely from the more fantastic end of the spy fiction spectrum, including Fleming’s work—he had used Khokhlov’s explosive cigarette lighter as inspiration in From Russia, With Love. But it’s the mention of Griffith that is especially striking in terms of what would follow. It’s pretty odd for Fleming to have placed John Buchan in the same category of writer tackling the ‘drab truth’ of the spy world as Maugham, Ambler and Greene himself, but it is downright bizarre to have also placed in this category O. Henry, a well-known short story writer excerpted in the book but not in any way known as a spy writer, and George Griffith, also excerpted, but a science fiction novelist long out of favour, whose novels had dated and were filled with ‘steam-age’ wars. Part of the reason the Greenes had included these writers was for the fun of finding spyish bits popping up in unexpected places.
The excerpt they used from Griffith’s The Outlaws of the Air—which is preceded by one from Peter Fleming’s Invasion 1940—follows ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’, Max Renault, through the streets of London as he makes his way to a secret meeting of ‘Autonomie Group Number 7’, the anarchist terror group he heads. The group’s headquarters are in the building of the ‘Social Club and Eclectic Institute’, all of whose genuine and law-abiding members have long since gone home. As he enters the premises, Renault greets the four men and three women seated around a table, then draws a gun on one of the men, Victor Berthauld, and accuses him of being a traitor:
‘Berthauld sat for a moment speechless with fear. Then, with an imprecation on his lips, he leapt to his feet. Not a hand was moved to restrain him, but as he rose to his full height, Renault’s arm straightened out, there was a crack and a flash, and a little puff of plaster reduced to dust leapt out of the angle of the wall behind him; but before the bullet struck the wall, it had passed through his forehead and out at the back of his head, his body shrank together and collapsed in a huddled heap in his chair, and Max, putting his pistol back into his pocket, said, just as quietly as before:
“It’s a curious thing that even among eight of us we must have a traitor. I hope there aren’t any more about. Take that thing down to the cellar, and then let us get to business; I’ve something important to tell you.”’[4]
In Thunderball, we are taken inside a meeting of the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion at the Paris headquarters of its front organization, the Fraternité Internationale de la Resistance Contre l’Oppression. Unlike Renault, Blofeld deliberately accuses the wrong man first, and the method of execution is different—he is electrocuted in his chair rather than shot.
The corpse is also left in the room rather than being cleared away, which is rather nastier, but the idea of this scene is unmistakeably the same as Griffith’s: a terrorist organization meets around a table at its front headquarters and the ruthless leader kills one of the group’s member on the spot on suspicion of treason, thereby setting a chilling example for the others. In both scenes, the traitor is a Corsican, which set alongside all the other similarities seems too unusual a choice to be coincidental. What makes it unmistakeable, though, is that Griffith’s traitor is named Berthauld, while Fleming’s is Borraud. A Corsican traitor being killed in a scene so similar in conception, with a two-syllable surname starting with the same letter and ending with the same phonetically pronounced syllable is the smoking gun, if needed, that Fleming worked from Griffith. So much so that it seems Fleming was deliberately pointing to it: the name ‘Borraud’ said in an English accent sounds like ‘borrowed’, which reads like a dry admission he had borrowed it from Griffith.
That might sound implausible, but there are other examples of Fleming placing markers about his influences in his novels to head off any criticism he had worked too closely from them. A couple of weeks after the release of the first Bond film, Dr No, in October 1962, I.T.V. broadcast a programme examining the Fleming phenomenon and putting it into context:
‘Before Bond came Bulldog Drummond, who saved the country from foreign subversion in a score of “Sapper” novels. He has a DSO from World War I, a lethal straight left, a plus handicap at golf. He had also had a topping wife called Phyllis who kept getting captured. His principle enemies were Carl and after Carl’s death Irma Peterson, but for Drummond all foreigners were suspect, whether Dagos, wops, huns or Russkies.’[5]
It’s highly likely that Fleming would have watched this, as it was a nationally broadcast television programme about his work that was also promoting the first film adapted from it. If so, he might well have flinched at the mention of Drummond’s nemesis Carl Peterson. At any rate, Fleming decided to embrace the similarity spotted by the programme. In On Her Majesty’s Service, published in April 1963, he had Blofeld disguise himself as a count, and gave him a partner named Irma. The message was clear: ‘Oh, I am well aware of the similarity, thank you, it’s a deliberate homage.’ Any complaint about the proximity of Blofeld to Peterson in Thunderball would now be undercut by the surfeit of even more unmissable similarities in the later novel. I think the mention of Griffith in his Sunday Times review of The Spy’s Bedside Book might have been for similar motives: if any reader were to spot the similarity between these scenes—as Graham Greene might well have done—Fleming would have been able to point out he was simply trying out his own spin on a writer who he had already stated in print he rated as one of the great practitioners of spy fiction.