The name is Gunn. James Gunn.
PART TWO: BURIED TREASURE
‘This story is set in and around Jamaica.
It is a contest of wits and strength between an American Secret Agent, Commander James Gunn, and an International free-lance spy of Chinese/German extraction – Dr. No.’[i]
It’s almost impossible to read the opening lines of Fleming’s outline of ‘James Gunn – Secret Agent’ and not get a thrill. Morgenthau’s various proposals were competent TV treatments, but in two sentences the concept suddenly feels much more alive. Fleming was right to recognise that the story was missing a central conflict, and he put it front and centre. Even without our recognition of the name Dr. No – appearing here for the first time ever – this has the Fleming touch.
It’s intriguing that despite Morgenthau’s ‘Commander Jamaica’ outline stating that the character could be British or American, Fleming nevertheless decided to make him an American. Perhaps this was to distinguish him from James Bond, but if so it seems odd that he opted to ditch ‘Commander Jamaica’ and create a new name for the character that is so similar to Bond’s. How would that have worked if the project had come to TV screens? Does that decision have implications now, as it means he in effect created a new protagonist – and therefore a different intellectual property? Could someone option this material and – leaving aside Dr. No – make films or TV series that compete with the Bond franchise?
But I’m jumping ahead too fast. Let me also set expectations a little. I am going to describe and comment on unpublished Ian Fleming material, but this is not another Casino Royale or You Only Live Twice. It’s 37 pages in total, 28 of which are a pilot episode, meaning they are the start of the story described in the other nine. ‘James Gunn – Secret Agent’ does not rival his best known work, but is perhaps better viewed as similar to his short stories, some of which were adapted from other unfilmed TV projects. This is forgotten and almost never read fiction by Ian Fleming. It sheds new light on the genesis of Dr. No, but also how Fleming crafted fiction in another form. Confined by the limitations of the TV format, the pilot script is heavy on dialogue – as a result, it spotlights how Fleming wrote action and suspense when not able to digress as he did in his novels. There are echoes of his previous work here, but also elements familiar from several future novels and at least one Bond film.
Fleming’s nine-page outline for the series keeps Morgenthau’s basic concept: an American secret agent is operating in Jamaica using a boat as his base, pretending he is looking for treasure. But Morgenthau’s proposal for ‘Commander Jamaica’ didn’t have any strong plot ideas, instead noting that the character ‘fulfills a variety of intelligence special assignments’.[ii] The ‘Captain Jamaica’ memorandum was a little more specific, saying that his mission in general is to inform the US Army of any security threats:
‘This would involve – to make a few random selections – shipments of arms, oil and other vital supplies; information about aircraft and other materiel; and matters involving political unrest in strategic areas.’[iii]
This is a classic case of telling not showing – when it comes to the crunch a TV series needs to decide which threats will feature, what kind of political unrest will be involved, and so on. That’s the hard work of creating a story. On this front, Fleming delivered, providing a unique high-stakes story idea with plenty of insider detail and excitement. The threat is also an immediate one: unlike in Morgenthau’s proposal, Fleming’s protagonist is not already in Jamaica as an agent-in-place, but sent there on a mission. In this way, Fleming shifted the concept for the series, from being a spy floating around Jamaica picking up any threats that come his way, perhaps one per episode, to a full story about a single large threat – so more akin to a feature film.
Turks’ Island, a dependency of Jamaica, is home to an Anglo-American station testing the latest prototypes of guided missiles. The missiles are regularly fired from the station, whereupon they self-destruct in mid-air in the Cuba Deep, one of the deepest areas of ocean in the world, so that no enemy power can salvage any of the rockets’ top-secret components. However, three of these missiles’ self-destruct mechanisms have recently failed, and the US destroyer tracking the tests has seen that they have gone off course and fallen outside the Cuba Deep. They suspect foul play, and the bearings suggest the interference is coming from somewhere in Jamaica. Turks’ Island Intelligence staff send one of their men to investigate. Enter Commander James Gunn.
Gunn is not in a cabin cruiser, but is furnished with a ‘U.S. Coastguard type cutter’. Behind secret bulkheads, this is fitted with a ship-to-shore radio telephone so he can keep in touch with Turks, as well as an echo-sounder, Asdic, and similar equipment. The cutter is also equipped with ‘an arsenal of weapons’, including a disguised Bofors gun and depth charges. The Governor of Jamaica has given Gunn a crewman and aide, Joe Montego, a tough, cheerful young undercover operative of the Jamaican Criminal Investigation Department. And they need a cover story for their very well-equipped craft: Gunn is posing as ‘an ex-U.S. Navy diver/adventurer’ who has poured his life’s savings into searching for Bloody Morgan’s gold.
Gunn brings the cutter to a point near a broken-down little banana port called Morgan’s Harbour, and discovers that the area is being terrorised by a criminal gang, ‘half Chinese and half Negro’, which has its fingers in all the local businesses, including cane cutting, the banana industry and the local bauxite mine. This gang is controlled by Dr No, whose operations have a land base off Galina Point, close to Morgan’s Harbour: a cave system built by the Arawak Indians and later developed by pirates. No has a lieutenant, a Chinese Negro known as ‘The Rattler’ because he is constantly rattling coins in his left hand, with whom he communicates by radio as well as by drum. No also occasionally directs the Rattler to carry out campaigns to terrorise the locals, including a wave of black magic that includes a replica of the ‘rolling calf’ monster.
That sounds like an early draft of the fake dragon Dr. No uses in the later novel, but a lot of this is also reminiscent of Live and Let Die, which had been published two years before: Mr Big uses both radio and drums, has a base within a cave in Jamaica, and creates fear among locals that voodoo and other local superstitions are real. The rolling calf is also mentioned in that novel:
‘Occasionally a pair of fishermen, or a group of giggling girls, would walk by down the beach on their way to the single tiny rum-shop at the point of the bay. No man walked alone for fear of the duppies under the trees, or the rolling calf, the ghastly animal that comes rolling towards you along the ground, its legs in chains and flames coming out of its nostrils.’
This first version of Dr. No is also reminiscent of Mr Big physically. In the 1958 novel, No is very clearly modelled on Sax Rohmer’s villain Fu-Manchu, ‘a very tall thin, figure’ with black Dali-esque eyebrows and mechanical pincers for hands. Not so here:
‘Dr No is an immensely fat and technically brilliant man of Chinese-German extraction (rather like an inimical Nero Wolf).’[iv]
It could be that this was a way for Fleming to disguise the character’s origins – thin becomes fat – or that he grafted on the Fu-Manchu characteristics when he came to write the novel later.
There is another, much more striking difference between this Dr. No and his later incarnation. In the novel, he operates from his base beneath the island of Crab Key, shielded by his guano extraction operation. But in this treatment, No has his land operations in the Galina Point cave system, the exit of which connects to a special craft:
‘Dr. No himself is permanently based under the sea in a submarine craft which has the approximate shape of a flying saucer.’
Made of steel and plexiglass, No’s craft skims the surface at tremendous speeds, operating with hydro-pulsors, which Fleming tells us are a water-jet system said to be currently used by Russian warships. These details sound authentic: Fleming might simply have read about it somewhere, but he was also very well connected with intelligence circles, and sometimes arranged journalistic cover for MI6 agents.[v]
The craft also travels at great speed under water, using a streamlined snorkel, and the mass of complicated machinery running it is serviced on the Galina Point shoreline by three black-suited engineers, all Chinese. A plexiglass dome covers the craft’s main cabin, which has extraordinarily luxurious fittings and furnishings, reminiscent of the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s books.
This, it perhaps goes without saying, is all very Ian Fleming. So much so that one thinks it must have been in one of his books. It isn’t. No villain or other Fleming character is permanently based in a submarine, let alone a high-tech luxury craft: a floating lair.
The closest to this comes in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me, which despite the title has nothing in common with Fleming’s novel of the same name. The villain of that film, the non-Fleming creation Karl Stromberg, operates from ‘Atlantis’, a massive underwater base disguised as a marine research laboratory. Stromberg is clearly part-inspired by previous Fleming villains, including Dr. No. In Fleming’s novel, Bond finds himself in No’s luxurious Crab Key lair looking at what he at first assumes to be an aquarium and then realises is the ocean itself: there’s a somewhat similar scene in the film The Spy Who Loved Me. In creating Atlantis, did the screenwriters simply extrapolate from the Crab Key base in Fleming’s novel – or had they read the James Gunn outline? Another possibility is that they were alerted to Jules Verne’s influence on Fleming and looked at his work for inspiration as a result. Or it’s a coincidence borne from these ideas coalescing over the years. Nevertheless, a villain’s floating lair appears to have its origins in the Fleming universe here.
Fleming also gives Dr. No a female companion, which he doesn’t have in the novel. Pearl is a ‘beautiful half-caste Chinese girl’ and champion underwater swimmer: we will see her in several episodes in a black frogman’s suit. This anticipates Fleming’s 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, in which James Bond falls in love with a beautiful Japanese pearl diver, Kissy Suzuki.
One further character is unnamed: Dr. No is in contact with a middleman in Europe who acts as his broker with ‘the various unspecified foreign powers’ interested in obtaining prototypes of the guided missiles from No.
Fleming ends the main part of the outline by saying that this is the general background for the series: a running battle ‘in, under and around Jamaica’ which gives scope for ‘endless episodes’ featuring the missile tests and the pursuit by James Gunn of Dr. No ‘by destroyer, aircraft and perhaps by submarine’.
Following this are two and a half pages of notes, in which he expands on how some of the technical aspects could be done, and gives some location suggestions and a few snippets of further ideas: the series’ signature tune could be an obscure calypso number, ‘Mary Ann’, Pearl could be Dr. No’s ‘unwilling love slave’, and a pretty tourist called Storm could turn up and first be a nuisance to Gunn but later become an accomplice and love interest.
He also proposes that Gunn drive a ‘souped-up’ MG or other mark of British sports car – years later, of course, James Bond and souped-up sports cars would become completely entwined in the popular imagination with the Aston Martin DB5 in the film adaptation of Goldfinger. Fleming also suggests that The Rattler have his own car, a black limousine, possibly an old and faulty Auburn with exterior exhaust pipes and headlights that flicker off and on at night. In his 1962 essay ‘How To Write a Thriller’, Fleming wrote:
‘Real names of things come in useful: a Ronson lighter, a 4½ litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London. All are points to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.’[vi]
That is what he was doing here, and the outline shows the same attention to detail and loving affection for technical information and seemingly insider knowledge as in his novels. He points out that his suggestions for cars would give the hero and chief henchman recognisable identifiers, but of course they would also have had narrative benefits: Gunn could have used the souped-up parts of his car, and The Rattler’s headlights coming on and off could be a sinister touch and signal he is around.
In all, the outline is a major expansion of Morgenthau’s concept for the series, and although he re-used some of the ideas in Dr No, the set-up is still noticeably different. As noted, some of it echoes Live and Let Die, but a couple of those elements – Joe Montego/Quarrel and Bloody Morgan’s treasure – were in Morgenthau’s original proposal for the series, and look to have predated any knowledge of either Fleming or his work. The staunch local ally and buried pirate treasure were of course both staples of adventure stories. But the devil is in the detail, and Morgenthau’s initial idea of a supposedly dead agent living on a cabin cruiser with his radio transmitter and disguises below deck has transformed from something that felt like it could turn out as a somewhat campy afternoon kids’ show into a much more suspenseful and adult spy thriller. On the other hand, Morgenthau seems to have given Fleming some ideas: in 1961’s Thunderball, for example, villain Emilio Largo is supposedly looking for buried treasure in the Bahamas from his yacht the Disco Volante (‘flying saucer’ in Italian), but this is cover for his transporting of nuclear bombs.
Flemings’s 28-page script for the pilot episode opens with James Gunn bringing his yacht – not a cutter here – round to Morgan’s Harbour. From the brightly lit wharfside café Bloody Morgan’s, Joe Montego leaves his friends to take a dinghy out to meet the yacht. In conversation between the two men, we learn that Gunn is an American secret agent pretending to be a treasure-seeker – Montego says the cover story has largely been accepted by the locals but that Gunn could do with showing his face in the bar and buying some rounds so he doesn’t seem too mysterious.
Gunn retreats to his secret comms centre, where he delivers his daily report to the base at Turks’ Island. He relates that his cover seems solid and also that there is continued ‘terrorist activity’ by the gang from the bauxite mine.[vii] His Admiral comes on the line to tell him to stick to his mission to find out what is happening with the missiles and leave the gang alone. This is the fairly standard ‘you’re off the case’ trope: Gunn is mildly peeved at the dressing down, the viewer sees he is not just a yes-man, and of course the episode will end with it becoming clear that the gang and the sabotaged missiles are linked.
Gunn and Montego visit the bar as the latter had suggested, and almost immediately encounter the gang and their leader, The Rattler – he throws a knife into the bullseye as Gunn plays darts. Gunn leaves the bar and a fight ensues, with everyone from the bar coming out to watch. Gunn seriously injures The Rattler with an uppercut, before the other two men drag him back into their saloon and they drive away at the sight of the police.
Gunn returns to the yacht for the night, first sending Montego off to get a drum of oil from a local gas station. The Rattler’s saloon is there. They spot Montego, cosh him, then drive off through the night with him as prisoner, on their way to the bauxite mine.
Gunn wakes at four o’clock in the morning and sees the empty bunk next to him – Montego was only meant to be gone half an hour. He takes the revolver from under his pillow and dresses. With the gun between his teeth, he slips over the side of the yacht and swims to shore. At the wharf, he finds the shed with his Sports MG in it and tears up the hill to the garage. After a little pressure, the attendant tells him what happened and points him to the bauxite mine.
We now switch between two scenes. The Rattler doesn’t believe Gunn’s cover story and is torturing Joe Montego. When he realises he won’t get any answers, he places Montego in one of the mine’s scoops heading for a crusher. Fleming alternates between Gunn’s increasingly desperate efforts to figure out what is happening and Montego’s inexorable progression towards a grisly death. Finally there is a firefight and Gunn manages to pick him out in the nick of time. The episode ends with both men relieved, but with Gunn determined to find out more about the gang.
It’s a fun, fast-paced read. Tonally, it’s pulpy in places, with terse dialogue and two short, sharp action sequences: the bar scene and ensuing fight and the later firefight at the mine both feel a little reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, albeit somewhat simplified. The episode has no obvious ‘bumps’, and dispels the vague notion that I had at least that perhaps Fleming was simply not cut out for writing for TV or film. Overall, it seems like it might be a little too short to fill a half-hour, and one yearns for Dr. No to make an appearance, but of course this is simply setting the scene for the series as a whole and too much plot can’t be revealed in a pilot episode.
Despite Fleming commenting on the lack of a feminine interest earlier to Morgenthau when discussing his original concept, there are no female characters at all in Fleming’s pilot episode script.
James Gunn is barely described, but is clearly very much on the lines of James Bond: a tough, capable secret agent. There is no indication in his dialogue that he is American, and he sounds pretty much exactly like the Bond of Fleming’s books. The closing scenes in which Gunn swims ashore, gun in teeth, and then races across the Jamaican landscape in his sportscar to save his friend, are especially easy to imagine on screen.
The script feels closer to Morgenthau’s initial brief than Fleming’s nine-page outline for the series as a whole, and perhaps also skews more towards a younger audience. Nevertheless, someone has circled several phrases in what could be indications of potential trouble-spots: ‘Negro-Chinese’, ‘damn’, and the word ‘bastard’ in a line from Gunn to one of The Rattler’s men he has injured: ‘Where’s Joe Montego? What have you done with him? Give, you bastard or I’ll blow your brains out.’
Scriptwriting is a different discipline from novel-writing, but on this short amount of material it seems that Ian Fleming was well up to to the task. Both the outline and pilot episode feature many of the hallmarks of his novels: they’re imaginative, vivid and packed with intriguing and, for want of a better word, ‘cool’ ideas and details.
But, of course, the series was never made. On 3 December 1956, Morgenthau wrote to Fleming to apologise for not getting back to him sooner and informing him that the project had run aground:
‘After having talked with a number of television network officials, film distributors and agencies, we have finally decided not to attempt to make films in Jamaica.’[viii]
He regretted that it had come to this, as he still thought Fleming’s material could provide the basis for ‘a tremendously exciting and successful show’ and that he had been looking forward to working with him.
But it was not to be. The project returned briefly two years later when CBS’ head of programmes, Hubbell Robinson, approached Fleming about the possibility of a James Bond TV series. Fleming returned to the James Gunn material and came up with 13 episodes, one of which was related to a separate idea about casinos.[ix] Those scripts have not been published, either. Perhaps they are also sitting in a folder somewhere, unread and forgotten. Perhaps at some point technology will speed things up and there will be a way for any researcher or enthusiast interested in reading such material to do so at ease. In the meantime, we keep looking for buried treasure.