Enemy Action
This is part of Blunt Instruments, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
He was the critics’ darling—until he wasn’t. Jeremy Duns investigates the literary assassination of Ian Fleming
It’s generally accepted today that writers of popular fiction can be worthy of serious analysis, and Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith and many others have received it in scores of essays, dissertations and books.
For a brief moment in 1953, Ian Fleming seemed poised to enter the ranks of such writers when his debut novel, Casino Royale, received a string of highly favourable reviews in Britain’s broadsheets and literary magazines.
The book had a lot of competition for the public’s attention, with dozens of other thriller-writers seeking a similar audience; only a clairvoyant could have predicted that this novel’s hero would become an iconic fictional character. Alan Ross perhaps came closest with his review in the Times Literary Supplement, noting how it had built on its antecedents in the genre:
‘Mr. Ian Fleming’s first novel is an extremely engaging affair, dealing with espionage in the Sapper manner but with a hero who, although taking a great many cold showers and never letting sex interfere with work, is somewhat more sophisticated. At any rate he takes very great care over his food and drink, and sees women’s clothes with an expertness of which Bulldog Drummond would have been ashamed. The main plot of Casino Royale deals with the attempt of a British agent to outgamble a Communist agent whose sexual predilections have cost him a lot of money and who must play for high stakes to make up the Party funds and carry out his programme. The game concerned is baccarat and the especial charm of Mr. Fleming’s book is the high poetry with which he invests the green baize lagoons of the casino tables. The setting in a French resort somewhere near Le Touquet is given great local atmosphere and while the plot itself has a shade too many improbabilities the Secret Service details are convincing. Altogether Mr. Fleming has produced a book that is both exciting and extremely civilized.’
Fleming cherished this review, perhaps partly because he had long been an admirer of the TLS, and knew that it awarded him significant literary status to be reviewed in it. The review is also perceptive about what Fleming was trying to do with the novel, as well as being highly flattering. Ross was right to point out that Casino Royale was an attempt to add sophistication to the heroic tradition Sapper was part of, but he could just as well have written of ‘the Sax Rohmer manner’, or ‘the Valentine Williams manner’, or a number of others—the novel isn’t especially in debt to Sapper. Ross might have mentioned Sapper simply because he was more familiar with his work than others in the genre: in his memoir Blindfold Games, published in 1986, he wrote that his ideals ‘had once been A.J. Raffles, amateur cracksman and cricketer—at least the initials were the same—The Saint and Bulldog Drummond, and even more so their originators.’
The reference might also have been a result of expectations. Ross, a poet, was a friend of Fleming’s wife, Ann, and Ian Fleming was well known in this circle as an elegant and fastidious dresser concerned with the finer things in life. He wrote the Sunday Times column Atticus and was a member of Boodle’s, the exclusive gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall, where he would sometimes sit and read thrillers quietly in a corner. The idea that Fleming had written a thriller in the Sapper mould with added flair and sophistication fitted the image of the man, even if it didn’t quite fit the novel, which had plenty of sophistication but was as endebted to American noir as the overall tradition of British thrillers. This misconception can be seen in the first published parody of James Bond. His Word His Bond by ‘Ixn Flxmxng’—in fact, Fleming’s colleague at ‘Atticus’, John Russell—appeared in The Spectator in December 1955:
‘Chapter XIX
YMCA Again!
The whole room smelt of the Mexican.
‘Take him away,’ said Bond, as he straightened his old Mauresque’s tie. ‘His igguda’s broken. It’s a trick I learned from the YMCA.’
The YMCA! Ensign Squarehead’s eyes narrowed at the mention of the Soviet Counter-counter-under-the-counter group.
‘Where’ll I put him, Boss?’
‘Down the lift-shaft,’ said Bond. The traffic would cover the scream.
As Squarehead made off with his twitching burden, Bond turned to the internal television apparatus.
‘Canteen,’ he said evenly, and one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen stood before him on the cazonated uviform frumpiglass screen.
‘Two double Martinis,’ said Bond, specifying the Old Fusty and a dash of Miss Dior.
As the woman bent over her blotter the sun sparked on her spectacles (‘f.9/34 Spitzer Weichmann lenses,’ Bond noted automatically). The wind from the open window stirred the blue ridge of her facial hair, there was pre-stressed concrete in the bridge of her nose, and her 1294 mm. bust lay like an unwrapped parcel on the top of her desk. She reminded him of something he’d once seen by Rembrandt, the artist.
One day he’d take her away from this filthy business. There’d be a seat for her on the racing tricycle that old W.O. Bentley had built for him with his own hands in the bad year before Munich. They’d pedal down N.63… And he’d see how she shaped.
‘Shaped?’ He was forgetting himself. ‘And get me something to eat.’
‘The usual, Commander?’ Her nostrils showed the admiration she felt, in spite of herself, for the trim, slim man with the pressurized waistcoat and the ankles of a gambler.
‘Hippo steaks,’ said Bond, ‘with a double portion of Mobiloil dressing. Those mussels you get for me from Danzig, with some chopped rhinestones. No béarnaise, of course, but some very fresh okapi trotters, boiled in Jordan water, and a carton of Old Hatstand crackers.’
The simple meal was nearly finished when the blood-red telephone went galloo-galloo.
‘B.,’ said the familiar voice; and Bond leant forward on his malleable inscuffated drabba-tested gros-point cuffs.
‘Would you know Blotkin-Plotkin if you saw him?’
‘The YMCA chief?’ said Bond. ‘The hunchbacked seven-foot negro with the long red beard and nine fingers to his right hand? I don’t think I’d mistake him.’
‘He’s in Surrey again. I told the PM I could count on you.’
All tiredness forgotten, Bond called to his aide.
‘Leatherhead, Squarehead,’ he said evenly.
The fight was on.’
Perhaps it’s unfair to give too much thought to an ephemeral piece of fun written more than six decades ago, but it’s striking just how wrong this parody gets James Bond. There are some great touches, such as the spot-on first sentence, which could almost be out of a Fleming novel, as well as Bond’s prissiness and the authoritative use of precise terms about the tiniest of matters. But it doesn’t read as though it has been written by someone who knows Fleming’s novels, or has even read them. The main reason most of it isn’t very funny is because it doesn’t seem anything like a Bond novel. Despite a few modern and even futuristic ideas, as a whole it feels more like a parody of thrillers from the Twenties or even earlier, with telephones going ‘galloo-galloo’. The inclusion of an aide/batman for the hero is completely out of character for Fleming: they were a staple of earlier thrillers, but there is no such figure in the Bond novels.
But all this was still a few years away, when Fleming was on the verge of best-sellerdom. In April 1953, he was just embarking on the journey. The reviews for Casino Royale in the TLS and several other well-respected publications were coups for a debut thriller, but they had come about in large part because Fleming was exceptionally well connected: he was a journalist at the country’s most prestigious newspaper, his brother Peter was a famous writer, and his wife was a noted literary hostess who had been married to the press magnate Viscount Rothermere. Casino Royale was also positively reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by the poet John Betjeman, another friend, but the most favourable review appeared, unsurprisingly, in the paper Fleming wrote for, the Sunday Times. Written by Cyril Ray under the pseudonym Christopher Pym, it also sought to put the debut thriller into context:
‘Here is a new writer who takes us back to the casinos of Le Queux and Oppenheim, the world of caviar and fat Macedonian cigarettes. But with how much more pace in the writing, how much less sentimentality in the tone of voice, how much more knowing a look!... From the first evocative words to the last savagely ironic sentence, this is a novel with its own flavour and its own startlingly vivid turn of phrase… If Mr Fleming’s next story has half the swiftness of this, as astringent an accent, and a shade more probability, we can be certain that here is the best new English thriller-writer since Ambler. One is pretty certain already.’
However, a backlash began to take shape the following year with the publication of his second novel, Live and Let Die, and the critical verdict on Fleming soon swung violently the other way, with his work being not just criticized but attacked, sometimes in the same publications in which he had earlier been praised. Fleming’s literary standing has been in decline ever since, and despite some stirrings over the decades, remains at a lower point today than it did on the publication of his first novel.
In the same period, his books and the films adapted from them have become increasingly popular with the public, leading to the curious situation whereby one of the most successful novelists Britain has ever produced, and the creator of a globally popular and enduring fictional icon, is largely looked down on in Britain today. Fleming is now rarely discussed in literary publications, and although the Bond novels are sometimes written about in respected newspapers and magazines, it is usually in terms that describe Fleming as a fantasist, a sadist and a purveyor of cheap pulp fiction.
For some publications over the years, bashing Fleming’s work has been a way to try to establish their literary credentials, because most of the coverage of James Bond has been related to the films. The phenomenal success of the Bond series has also made Fleming an attractive target for some. William Cook, writing in the New Statesman in 2004, summed up the situation:
‘Without the movies, [Fleming would] have sold fewer books, but he’d be taken far more seriously by the cognoscenti. Class-bound Britain rarely holds bestsellers in high regard, bestselling thrillers least of all. Raymond Chandler called Fleming the most forceful thriller writer in England. It’s high time he shared some of Chandler’s highbrow acclaim.’
This has yet to happen. Chandler, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, John Betjeman, Christopher Isherwood and several others praised Fleming, but there has been remarkably little serious criticism of his work since the Sixties. It could be, of course, that the reason for this is simply that his work is not worth taking seriously. But I think William Cook hit on a truth. Most criticism of Fleming today, such as it exists, simply recycles attacks on his work from the Fifties and Sixties that are not only outdated in terms of their moral objections, but were mostly written by critics with very scant knowledge of the thriller genre. In addition, some of those who have criticized Fleming over the years had very little knowledge of Fleming’s own work. Inconveniently for those with short deadlines and flexible principles, the Bond novels are often very different from the films, and surprisingly varied. If you only read, say, The Spy Who Loved Me, you would come away with a very different view of Fleming’s work than if you only read Casino Royale, or From Russia, With Love or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But if you express an opinion on a book, it only holds any weight if you’ve read it. And if you express an opinion on the entirety of an author’s work, that opinion is likewise only worth considering by others if you have in fact read the entirety of their work.
This might seem obvious, but criticism of Fleming’s work tends to be sweeping and the basic tenets of literary criticism have often been abandoned when approaching it. Having watched a couple of Bond films and read a few chapters of Goldfinger several years ago doesn’t give someone a good overview of Ian Fleming’s oeuvre, however prestigious the publication they write for or strongly they express themselves.
On top of all of these problems, some of the most influential articles about Fleming’s work have been highly unprofessional personal attacks disguised as literary criticism, and I feel they should be discounted by anyone seriously wanting to assess Fleming’s significance.
The first sign that Fleming’s pending membership of the literary club was in danger of being blackballed was a review of Live and Let Die by Hilary Corke in Encounter in August 1954. Corke was then a poet and lecturer in Medieval English Studies at Edinburgh University, and it is clear from his article, titled The Banyan Tree as it was paired with a review of Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, that not only did he know very little about thrillers, but that he intensely disliked them:
‘And whose little banyan is the detective story? If it is Poe’s, if we can lay this at his door as well as all the sadder excesses of French 19th century poetry, he has certainly as much to answer for as his two illustrious compatriots, Henry James and Mr. Eliot, put together.’
This is part of a review of an Ian Fleming novel, but it reads more like a condemnation of an entire genre, and is written in a tone so pious that it wouldn’t have been out of place in the Victorian era.
Corke loved Tutuola’s novel, but loathed Fleming’s. Bizarrely, he objected to the fact that Bond’s accomplice on his mission, American agent Felix Leiter, is not killed when attacked by a shark, but survives to play a role in the remainder of the book:
‘We do not want ex-faithful assistants about the place on crutches. The thriller deals in cruelty, not pity.’
Corke had two chief objections to Fleming’s work: firstly, that it was morally dubious, appealing ‘to a baser human instinct than the smudgy postcards hawked at the more central London tube-stations’, and secondly, that it was being acclaimed in quarters that should know better:
‘It is with a rather wry amusement therefore that I note what my contemporaries apparently have to say of Mr. Fleming’s previous essay in this vein: “Both exciting and extremely civilised” (The T…s L……y S……..t); “Thriller for an intelligent audience” (The N.w S…….n). Intelligence? Civilisation? Mr. Tutuola, have you a vacancy for me in that Bush of Ghosts?’
*
Hilary Corke’s complaint that Fleming’s work was immoral and that the literary establishment had lowered itself by praising it would become the rallying cry of others who wanted to keep Fleming out of the literary club. These cries became increasingly shrill in the next few years, as Fleming’s books became increasingly popular.
In March 1958, the critic and poet Bernard Bergonzi wrote a long essay about Fleming’s work in the prestigious journal The Twentieth Century. In that essay, The Case of Mr Fleming, Bergonzi both quoted and agreed with Hilary Corke’s 1954 review of Live And Let Die in Encounter, from which he also seems to have taken many of his cues; like Corke, the thrust of his argument was that Fleming’s work was unwholesome, with Bergonzi stating that ‘the erotic fantasies in which Bond is continually involved are decidedly sinister’, that the character was a ‘hardened amorist’ and that critics who took Fleming’s work seriously were making a grave error:
‘It is interesting to recall that the New Statesman described this book as a ‘thriller for an intelligent audience’ and that a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘both exciting and extremely civilized’ (my italics: one would like to know what this gentleman considers even moderately barbarous).’
It is also interesting to recall that Bergonzi has quoted the precise same phrases from the same two reviews of Casino Royale as Hilary Corke.
As examples of the ‘sado-masochistic note’ in Fleming’s work, Bergonzi also referred to the fate of Felix Leiter, as Corke had done:
‘An American Secret Service colleague of Bond’s gets thrown into a tank containing a man-eating shark (he reappears two books later with two artificial limbs and a lot of plastic surgery on his face), and Bond evens the score subsequently by kicking the man responsible into the same tank…’
Corke had objected to Leiter being seriously injured in Live and Let Die and then reappearing in the novel on the grounds that the thriller ‘deals in cruelty, not pity.’ But Bergonzi cited Leiter’s injuries and subsequent reappearances as evidence of sado-masochistic tendencies and barbarity in Fleming’s work. This is self-serving logic, and can be twisted whichever way one wants in order to make Fleming come off poorly. If Leiter had died of his injuries instead, both critics could have pointed to it as evidence of sadism in the novels. If he had died peacefully in his sleep, Corke could have claimed that the thriller deals in cruelty, not mundanity.
Bergonzi went on to claim that there was a ‘total lack of any ethical frame of reference’ in Fleming’s novels. To illustrate this, he quoted a passage from Casino Royale in which Bond longs for Vesper physically. He didn’t mention that Bond is changed by the events of the book, having fallen in love with Vesper and considered proposing to her, nor that Bond and Mathis argue about ethics at great length in the novel. Instead, he made much the same objections as Hilary Corke had done, in similar terms:
‘Mr Fleming, I imagine, knows just what he is doing: but the fact that his books are published by a very reputable firm, and are regularly reviewed—and highly praised—in our self-respecting intellectual weeklies, surely says more about the present state of our culture than a whole volume of abstract denunciations.’
Bergonzi’s essay was well-written and elegantly scornful—and everyone enjoys a good literary dust-up. ‘Reputable’ and ‘self-respecting’ intellectuals who didn’t much appreciate that Fleming’s novels were selling well and being praised by some of their colleagues now had something to crow about: Fleming had finally been cut down to size, and his work had received a public kicking. Others soon joined in, but in doing so they overstepped the bounds of legitimate literary criticism and veered into personal abuse.
On March 31 1958, The Manchester Guardian, as it then was, ran an unsigned article on Bergonzi’s article:
‘Ever since George Orwell analysed the social significance of Greyfriars School, increasing attention has been paid to “popular” literature by those eager to spot trends in contemporary British life. The latest patient on the operating table is Mr Ian Fleming’s secret service hero, James Bond (or 007). In a recent article in the “Twentieth Century” Mr Fleming, whose book “Dr No” is published to-day (by Jonathan Cape at 13s 6d), is taken severely to task. His books are said to contain a cunning mixture of sex, sadism, and money snobbery, and their popularity to be a bad symptom of the present state of civilisation in this country…’
The article went on to defend Fleming from the charges, but claimed that what was more ‘sinister’ in his work was ‘the cult of luxury for its own sake’, taking him to task for presenting an ‘advertising agency world’ to his readers.
Fleming responded to this charge in a letter to the newspaper, which was published on April 5:
‘I am most grateful for the scholarly examination of my James Bond stories in your leader columns on Monday but, since this follows close upon a nine-page inquest in “The Twentieth Century,” I hope you will forgive a squeak from the butterfly before any more big wheels roll down upon it.
It is true that sex plays an important part in James Bond’s life and that his profession requires him to be more or less constantly involved in violent action. It is also true that, as in real spy-life, when the villain gets hold of Bond, Bond is made to suffer painfully. What other punishment for failure would be appropriate—that Bond should receive an extra heavy demand note from the Inland Revenue, or that he should be reduced in his Civil Service rank from principal officer to assistant principal? But, as you, sir, put it “What is more sinister is the cult of luxury for its own sake—and the kind of luxury held up for the reader’s emulation. The idea that anyone should smoke a brand of cigarettes not because they enjoy them, but because they are ‘exclusive’ (that is, because they cost more) is pernicious and it is implicit in all Mr Fleming’s glib descriptions of food, drink, and clothes.”
I accept the rebuke, but more on the score of vulgarity, than on the counts you recite. I have this to say in extenuation: 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.
But to create an illusion of depth I had to fit Bond out with some theatrical props and, while I kept his wardrobe as discreet as his personality, I did equip him with a distinctive gun and, though they are a security hazard, with distinctive cigarettes. This latter touch of display unfortunately went to my head. I proceeded to invent a cocktail for Bond (which I sampled several months later and found unpalatable), and a rather precious though basically simple meal ordered by Bond proved so popular with my readers, still suffering from war-time restrictions, that expensive, though I think not ostentatious, meals have been eaten in subsequent books.
The gimmickry grew like bindweed and now, while it still amuses me, it has become an unfortunate trade-mark. I myself abhor Wine-and-Foodmanship. My own favourite food is scrambled eggs, (in “Live And Let Die” a proof-reader pointed out that Bond’s addiction to scrambled eggs was becoming a security risk and I had to go through the book changing menus) and I smoke your own, Mancunian, brand of Virginia tobacco. However, now that Bond is irretrievably saddled with these vulgar foibles, I can only plead that his Morland cigarettes are less expensive than the Balkan Sobranie of countless other heroes, that he eats far less and far less well than Nero Wolfe, and that his battered Bentley is no Hirondelle.
Perhaps these are superficial excuses. Perhaps Bond’s blatant heterosexuality is a subconscious protest against the current fashion for sexual confusion. Perhaps the violence springs from a psychosomatic rejection of Welfare wigs, teeth, and spectacles and Bond’s luxury meals are simply saying “no” to toad-in-the-hole and tele-bickies.
Who can say? Who can say whether or not Dr Fu Manchu was a traumatic image of Sax Rohmer’s father? Who, for the matter of that, cares?—Yours &c.,
Ian Fleming’
This letter is vintage Fleming. Its length suggests he felt it was necessary, but he was doubtless also aware that to complain about criticisms of one’s work, even if they are ludicrous and unwarranted, is frowned on in Britain, and so the tone of the letter is studiedly self-deprecating and airy. He also slyly manages to show just how ignorant of the genre the criticisms are, pointing out that trappings such as fancy cigarettes were common in the thriller and mentioning the Saint’s luxury car.
It was a well-executed reply, but Fleming’s suspicion that there might be more big wheels rolling down on his work was to prove correct. By the time The Manchester Guardian had published his letter, a new attack was already hitting the newsstands. Paul Johnson’s review of Dr No in the New Statesman upped the ante Bergonzi had already upped from Corke. As Fleming would write in Goldfinger: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’
*
Johnson’s article was memorably titled Sex, snobbery and sadism, a phrase that looks to have been adapted from The Guardian’s article on Bergonzi of March 31. The title alone has served as a handy three-pronged weapon for over half a century for journalists and critics to brandish as ‘evidence’ against Fleming. But Johnson’s article should not be taken seriously as a piece of literary criticism: it ranks as one of the most vitriolic and unprofessional literary pieces published in Britain in the 20th century.
Johnson classified the three elements of the title as Dr No’s basic ingredients, and said they were ‘all unhealthy, all thoroughly English’:
‘the sadism of a school boy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.’
Johnson showed here that he knew very little about thrillers. Let’s take the sadism first. One wonders what Johnson would have written if he had reviewed, say, Sax Rohmer’s novel The Devil Doctor, in which Fu-Manchu has one of the protagonists placed in a wire cage in order to torture him. That was published in 1916 and, as in Fleming’s novels, it is not the protagonists who are sadists, but the villains. A fight between good and evil is, after all, more effective if the evil is vividly and demonstrably so. The sadism and unambiguous evil of Fleming’s villains help provide precisely the ethical framework Bergonzi claimed was missing in his work, but which is in fact central to it.
And it is not as if scenes such as Rohmer’s mentioned above had fallen from favour by 1958 and Fleming was reviving them: these had been hallmarks of the thriller for over half a century, and were common currency throughout that time. In Dennis Wheatley’s best-selling thriller Come Into My Parlour, published in Britain in 1946—12 years before Dr No—the heroine is captured by Gestapo chief Grauber and forced to watch the torture of another woman strapped to a chair with electrodes.
Johnson’s second putative ingredient was sex. It is true that Dr No contained more sex than most literary novels published in Britain in the 1950s, but it was commonplace in thrillers. It is partly because of the influence of Johnson’s review that it sounds odd to say that there wasn’t all that much sex in Fleming’s work for the time, but the Bond novels are mild in comparison with the works of Dennis Wheatley or Peter Cheyney. They’re also mild in comparison to some passages in the work of Paul Johnson. Here’s an excerpt from his 1959 novel Left of Centre:
‘Henry found his gaze straying to her round and rosy bottom, which rose and fell gently to the rhythm of her breathing. What to do? Henry pondered in the doorway... “There’s nothing more calculated, old man, to excite a woman than a good hard slap on her behind. None of your playful taps, mind. A real stinger. They come up foaming at the mouth.”
Dora’s bottom invited him. Here was his chance, at one blow, to reassume his masculine, paramount role in their relationship. Draining his glass and setting it down decisively on the dressing table, he advanced purposefully over Dora’s sleeping form and brought his hand down with tremendous force.’
The final ‘ingredient’ is also very telling: in accusing Fleming of snobbery Johnson sneered that the snobbery wasn’t quite sophisticated or metropolitan enough: ‘the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult’. This is snobbery in itself, as was the article as a whole, because it was not so much an objection to Fleming’s work—none of the elements Johnson excoriated were in the least remarkable in a thriller at the time—as an objection that the work was being taken seriously by the literary establishment and high society.
This is clear from the next part of the essay, in which Johnson abandoned any remaining pretence that he was writing a serious piece of literary criticism:
‘This novel is badly written to the point of incoherence and none of the 500,000 people who, I am told, are expected to buy it, could conceivably be giving Cape 13s. 6d. to savour its literary merits. Moreover, both its hero and its author are unquestionably members of the Establishment. Bond is an ex-Royal Navy Commander and belongs to Blades, a sort-of super-White’s. Mr Fleming was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and is married to a prominent society hostess, the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere. He is the foreign manager of that austere and respectable newspaper, the Sunday Times, owned by an elderly fuddy-duddy called Lord Kemsley, who once tried to sell a popular tabloid with the slogan (or rather his wife’s slogan) of ‘clean and clever’. Fleming belongs to the Turf and Boodle’s and lists among his hobbies the collection of first editions. He is also the owner of Goldeneye, a house made famous by Sir Anthony Eden’s Retreat from Suez. Eden’s uneasy slumbers, it will be remembered, were disturbed by (characteristically) giant rats which, after they had been disposed of by his detectives, turned out to be specially tamed ones kept by Mr. Fleming.’
Everything following the word ‘moreover’ is not literary criticism but personal attack.
Johnson ended with the same melodramatic and unfounded complaint made by both Corke and Bergonzi, that the literary establishment was shockingly at fault for praising work that was symptomatic of the decline of society as a whole. Johnson went even further than Corke and Bergonzi, in fact, suggesting that Fleming’s works might even somehow have contributed to such a decline:
‘Bond’s warmest admirers are among the Top People. Of his last adventure, From Russia, With Love, his publishers claim, with reason, that it ‘won approval from the sternest critics in the world of letters.’ The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘most brilliant’, the Sunday Times ‘highly polished’, the Observer ‘stupendous’, the Spectator ‘rather pleasant’. And this journal, most susceptible of all, described it as ‘irresistible’. It has become easier than it was in Orwell’s day to make cruelty attractive. We have gone just that much farther down the slope. Recently I read Henri Alleg’s horrifying account of his tortures in an Algiers prison; and I have on my desk a documented study of how we treat our prisoners in Cyprus. I am no longer astonished that these things can happen. Indeed, after reflecting on the Fleming phenomenon, they seem to me almost inevitable.’
The implication that the success of Fleming’s thrillers had any bearing on torture taking place in Algiers and Cyprus is absurd, and not borne out by any sensible reading of Fleming’s novels as a whole, let alone just Dr No.
But Johnson’s article did the trick: it was so vicious that it became news elsewhere. On May 11 1958, V.S. Pritchett reported on it in his column in The New York Times:
‘There has been some violent criticism in the serious press of a very different kind of writer, Ian Fleming… Paul Johnson, writing in the New Statesman, and with the Algerian atrocities in mind, thinks the taste for sadistic thrillers has a political side to it…’
The attacks on Fleming intensified after his death, when he could no longer respond to them. There’s a revealing entry in Malcolm Muggeridge’s diaries from 1961. On June 7 of that year, the British writer and broadcaster flew to Hamburg for a meeting with editors at Stern, after which he sampled the city’s nightlife, which he found ‘singularly joyless’:
‘Germans with stony faces wandering up and down, uniformed touts offering total nakedness, three Negresses and other attractions, including female wrestlers. Not many takers, it seemed, on a warm Tuesday evening. Had the feeling that all this had been set up in place of the rubble out of habit. It was there before, so put it back.
Dropped into a teenage rock-and-roll joint. Ageless children, sexes indistinguishable, tight-trousered, stamping about, only the smell of sweat intimating animality. The band were English, from Liverpool, and recognized me. Long-haired; weird feminine faces: bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones. In conversation rather touching in a way, their faces like Renaissance carvings of saints or Blessed Virgins. One of them asked me: ‘Is it true that you’re a Communist?’ No, I said; just in opposition. He nodded understandingly; in opposition himself in a way. ‘You make money out of it?’ he went on. I admitted that this was so. He, too, made money. He hoped to take £200 back to Liverpool.’
It is characteristic of Muggeridge that he should happen to step into a nightclub in which The Beatles were starting their career—his diaries are filled with such encounters, with figures such as A.A. Milne, Graham Greene, Kim Philby, George Orwell, Enoch Powell, Somerset Maugham and many others. It’s also unsurprising that The Beatles recognized him, as he was a well-known figure in Britain at the time, with memorable facial features. As he acknowledged to one of the band (Lennon?), he was ‘in opposition’. When television and radio programmes discuss burning topical issues, the producers usually try to make sure that they have a cross-section of views. If everyone agrees on an issue, discussion of it is dull, and can also be seen as unfair. However, it’s sometimes hard to find someone who is prepared to express a more unpopular view, or even holds it. Luckily, there is a pool of professional disagree-ers, or people who are ‘in opposition’. Such people can usually be relied upon to take a contrary view to the popular one, be available to turn up at the studio on time, be articulate and provide compelling programming. They often drive their fellow guests into apoplexy, and large sections of the audience as well.
Muggeridge was a genius at this: he often took the opposite view from everyone else, and presented it caustically and memorably. He was one of the best-known journalists and critics of his time, and a powerful voice in British cultural life: he was the host of several BBC programmes, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, and the editor of Punch. A few weeks before bumping into The Beatles in Hamburg he had interviewed Oswald Mosley, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, for Granada Television, and talked to the sculptor Henry Moore at a meeting of the Tate Gallery Brains Trust.
In 1932, Muggeridge travelled to Moscow. He went there a Communist, but his experiences in the Soviet Union changed his mind. To his credit, he was one of the first Western journalists to report on the famine in the Ukraine, and he continued to do so even when it was politically inexpedient for him. He left the Soviet Union shortly after several British engineers were arrested on charges of espionage by the Soviet government and The Manchester Guardian downplayed his reports about the subject. He left before their trial began, and so did not meet Ian Fleming, who had been sent out by Reuters to cover it. But the two men met 20 years later. In late 1952, Muggeridge was offered the job as editor of Punch, which he accepted. Shortly afterwards, he had lunch with his wife Kitty and an old acquaintance, Lady Rothermere, who had recently divorced her husband to marry Fleming. Muggeridge noted in his diary:
‘Ian gave me a slight pang by saying there had been talk of making me Editor of the Sunday Times. Ian definitely a slob, and difficult to see why Ann fell for him.’
I think it’s possible there’s a link between those two sentences. Fleming worked for The Sunday Times, and had just told Muggeridge that he may have had the opportunity of editing it. This was a much more prestigious job than the editorship of Punch, but it was too late for Muggeridge to do anything about it. But, thanks to Fleming, he would always know he had missed out. Muggeridge may have held the bearer of the news responsible, especially if Fleming had told him it maliciously, or if Muggeridge felt he had. Despite claiming to have had just a ‘slight pang’ at hearing this, Muggeridge was not always entirely forthright in his diaries, and it may be that this perceived slight festered over the years. Muggeridge met Fleming on many subsequent occasions, but perhaps this first unfavourable impression of him hardened. It may not have been improved by Fleming’s increasing success.
There’s no harm in disliking or envying Ian Fleming, of course: plenty of people did. But I think it’s clear that on account of his personal animosity towards Fleming Malcolm Muggeridge repeatedly attacked his work in public, using his considerable reputation as a critic to make it all the more damaging.
While at The Sunday Times, Fleming had suggested in an editorial meeting that the paper commission a series of essays on the seven deadly sins, with well-known authors each tackling a different sin. In 1962, this idea was used, and Fleming arranged for the essays to be published in book form in the United States. He also wrote a foreword for it, in which he explained the genesis of the book:
‘The project was outside my own sphere of action on the paper and I heard nothing more of it until I had left the Sunday Times to concentrate on writing thrillers centred round a member of the British Secret Service called James Bond. So I cannot describe what troubles the Literary Editor ran into in his endeavours to marry the Seven Deadly Sins to seven appropriate authors. So far as I can recall, the marriages I myself had suggested were closely followed, except that I had suggested Mr Malcolm Muggeridge to write on the theme of Anger on the grounds that he is such an extremely angry man.’
W.H. Auden wrote on anger instead, but it’s not clear whether Muggeridge was asked or not. Muggeridge viewed himself as a noble iconoclast and famously had a thin sense of humour, so he may have viewed the request to write an essay on anger as a sleight. Had Fleming proposed this as a genuine brainwave, the famously caustic Muggeridge let loose on the topic of anger, or had it been a dig? We don’t know, but while Fleming’s post-mortem of the idea in the foreword to the book is amusing, it might not have seemed so to Muggeridge. As we’ll see, he was indeed an extremely angry man. And before long, Ian Fleming would be a target for his anger.
Two years later, Ian Fleming died. Four months after his death, in December 1964, the American men’s magazine Esquire published an article by Muggeridge in the regular book column he wrote for it:
‘By curious coincidence, I decided to read my first James Bond book (You Only Live Twice, New American Library, $4.50) with a view to writing about it in this column, just about a week before Fleming died. Indeed, I was actually mulling the piece over in my mind when I heard on the radio that he was dead. Though we were never exactly friends, I used to see quite a bit of him at one time.’
Despite admitting to having read just one of Fleming’s 12 Bond novels, in the long article that follows Muggeridge attacked Fleming’s work as a whole, as well as the man himself:
‘He knew the requisite ingredients for a dish to set before (his readers)—money, sex and snobbishness, beaten into a fine rich batter, with plenty of violence to make it rise in the pan; then served hot and flambé with Sade flavoring, and washed down by a blood-red wine. A true chef, he dished up himself, flushed with bending over the oven. That flush which so often comes to the rich and the avid! I suppose in poor Fleming’s case it was due to the heart condition of which he died, but somehow I always saw it as the pigment with which he colored in Bond.’
The first part of this passage is a dramatic rephrasing of the charges made against Fleming in 1958 by Johnson and Bergonzi, and as it can only be based on the one Bond novel Muggeridge had read, has to be discounted. The latter part of the passage is personal, and rather unpleasant considering Fleming had only died in August. With the lead-in times required by magazines like Esquire, Muggeridge had probably written this several weeks or perhaps even months before December.
This passage also comes after six long paragraphs in which Muggeridge was at pains to show that, while he was ‘never exactly friends’ with Fleming, they were well acquainted. He explained how he had known Ann, who been married to Lord Rothermere ‘before going off with Fleming, or Bond as he already was in embryo’:
‘Bond had a sort of private apartment at the top of the house where he kept his golf clubs, pipes and other masculine bric-a-brac. We would sit up there together sipping a highball; like climbers taking a breather above a mountain torrent whose roar could still faintly be heard in the ravine below.
This was before the Bond series began, but I well remember his telling me about his plans for writing the first one (Casino Royale), which he deliberately intended to be exciting, successful, lucrative and, as he scornfully remarked, not in the least “literary”. Well, as it turned out, he achieved his purpose to a fabulous degree. The Bond books have so far provided excitement for some eighteen million readers and heaven knows how many film-goers; they have certainly proved successful, and lucrative, and no one (except, perhaps, Kingsley Amis) could possibly contend that they were “literary”.’
Muggeridge was, of course, in no position to judge whether Fleming’s novels were literary or not, as by his own admission he had only read one. Fleming was sometimes self-deprecating about his literary worth, but it’s clear from his conversation with Raymond Chandler on the BBC and elsewhere that he had a firm understanding of how thrillers could aim higher, and wished to do so himself. In his 1962 article How To Write A Thriller, for example, he wrote:
‘I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “thrillers designed to be read as literature”, whose practitioners have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these writers.’
Next, Muggeridge attacked the consumer ethic in the Bond novels:
‘Partly, too, though, Fleming really was Bond, who truly represented all his hopes and desires. He wanted Bond to be this rusé chap who knew what was what, where to go for what. Bond in Bond Street. (Was that, by the way, the derivation of the name? I never asked Fleming, but it might well be so, Bond Street being the repository of the very expensive, very English haberdashery, etc., nowadays sold almost exclusively to Americans.)’
Having admitted he had read only one Bond novel and that he was an acquaintance of Fleming, Muggeridge felt qualified to state that Bond ‘truly represented’ all Fleming’s hopes and desires. He also had the cheek to criticize Fleming for creating a character with good taste who knew where to find the best things in life in an article in Esquire, a magazine largely dedicated to such pursuits. Note the way he switched between scorning Fleming for wanting Bond to know ‘where to go for what’ and then does the very same thing himself, informing his American readers that Bond Street is the place to go if you want expensive English haberdashery. He then condescended to the same readers by suggesting the street wasn’t quite what it used to be because it had taken to selling ‘almost exclusively to Americans’. This is snobbery.
Muggeridge also seems to have been pleased with himself for spotting a possible connection between Bond and Bond Street, wondering whether that might have been the derivation of the character’s name. It wasn’t—Fleming took the name from the author of Birds of the West Indies—but if Muggeridge had read On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he might have found an intriguing discussion of the topic there. It’s in the chapter titled ‘Bond of Bond Street?’.
After boasting that he once attended an MI6 meeting at the Garrick Club at which Fleming had been present, Muggeridge went on to claim that Fleming may have been ‘the last true fan’ of the British Secret Service and a ‘valiant chronicler’ of its activities. And yet when he finally gets around to ‘reviewing’ You Only Live Twice in the piece, Muggeridge is disappointed that the portrait of MI6 is not valiant, with Bond’s mission to get a look in at Japanese cipher traffic that the Americans already have access to, ‘or something like that’:
‘It’s all rather a muddle, and scarcely in the highest tradition of Secret Service fiction.’
Having set up a straw man, he is disappointed to find it doesn’t exist. After mentioning that he has ‘no intention’ of reading any further Bond novels, although he did ‘turn over the pages of Thrilling Cities’ (which he didn’t find thrilling), Muggeridge ended his article with a final attack on the man himself:
‘Like so many of his class he never grew up; a Peter Pan of the bordellos; a gentleman junkie and Savile Row beat; a Blade of Blades.’
Five months later, on May 30 1965, The Observer in Britain published another article on Bond by Muggeridge. Nominally a review of Kingsley Amis’s book The James Bond Dossier, it recycled and reworked much of the Esquire article. Muggeridge had delivered on his promise in Esquire not to read any further Bond novels, which he now boasted about:
‘With his accustomed Eng. Lit. expertise, Mr Kingsley Amis has produced, in his The James Bond Dossier, a primer which will enable anyone of average intelligence to reach O-level standard without having to open a single Fleming book—a dispensation for which I am profoundly grateful.’
It’s a tenet of literary criticism that it is unacceptable to review work you haven’t read. Muggeridge joked about it, and encouraged other ‘students’ of Bond to use Amis’ book as a shorthand ‘cheat sheet’ to mug up on Fleming’s novels instead of reading them.
Worse, Muggeridge clearly hadn’t even bothered to read Amis’s book! Although he was supposed to be reviewing it, he didn’t mention a single specific thing about its contents. The James Bond Dossier was an extended argument for Fleming’s gifts as a writer and his right to a place in the canon, and Amis explicitly took on the absurdly misplaced moralizing of earlier attacks, which Muggeridge now echoed without even realizing Amis had already countered them.
Muggeridge also mentioned Mickey Spillane, on the grounds that he was also a very successful writer who ‘may be said to work in the same genre’ as Fleming. After noting a few superficial similarities between the jacket designs of Fleming and Spillane’s novels—very superficial, as they were both thriller-writers—Muggeridge sarcastically asked whether readers might expect ‘a detailed comparison between their two oeuvres one day from Mr Amis’. But Amis directly compared Fleming to Spillane in the second chapter of his book, and made it clear he didn’t feel Spillane was worth much further consideration. Muggeridge might have taken his own advice, and used Amis’ book as a cheat-sheet—but even that seems to have been too much effort. Instead, he chose once again to make several blanket statements condemning the novels:
‘In so far as one can focus on so shadowy and unreal a character, [Bond] is utterly despicable: obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, toward whom sexual appetite represents the only approach…’
Other than the claim he has pretentious tastes, none of these charges are true. Bond is not a sadist: his enemies are. Obsequious to his superiors? Bond is frequently resentful of authority in Fleming’s work, for example drafting his resignation letter in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and countermanding a direct order in The Living Daylights. In the latter story, Bond’s mission is to assassinate a Soviet sniper, who turns out to be a woman. Despite her being a stranger to him, an enemy agent, and one of his colleagues being dependent on her being put out of action, Bond cannot bring himself to kill her in cold blood. That’s far from callous or brutal. The story ends with Bond saying that if M were to sack him he would thank him for it. No doubt some women Bond comes into contact with in the novels would regard him as a cad, but he doesn’t simply have sex on his mind: he falls in love with at least two women, one of whom he marries.
After recycling his misleading synopsis of You Only Live Twice, Muggeridge ended the article—in for a penny—with yet another personal attack on Fleming the man, saying that he felt a ‘pang’ on hearing of his death, not, like Amis, because it meant that there would be no new Bond adventures, but because ‘it seemed a pity that Fleming’s life should have been expended on peddling dreams so unillumined’:
‘I thought of his Thunderbird car and other props, of the exaggerated impression of shirt-cuff he always created, of the indifferent drinks he so elaborately mixed and the inaccurate travelling lore (set forth so unthrillingly in “Thrilling Cities”) he so eagerly purveyed; of his woebegone left eye, and of Mr Connery and the monstrous regiment of girls. Alas! Yet (as Dr Johnson justly observes) why alas, since life is such?’
This article prompted an extremely stern letter to the editor of The Observer from the usually even-tempered Peter Fleming, who was Ian’s elder brother, ward of his literary estate and a best-selling writer himself:
‘Sir—The curiously unpleasant article about my brother to which you gave such prominence last week was a rewrite of a similar piece which Mr Muggeridge contributed to the American magazine Esquire several months ago. I assume you did not see the original version. If you had, there are various grounds on which you might have thought twice about publishing the stuff.’
He went on to detail several problems with the article. He pointed out that The Observer had stated that they had invited Muggeridge, who ‘had strong views on the subject’ to comment on ‘the whole Bond cult’. But in the Esquire version of the article, Muggeridge had stated that he had only read one Bond novel and had no intention of reading any more. Peter also pointed out that Muggeridge had laden his article with personal abuse, crediting his brother with ‘squalid aspirations’ in The Observer piece and calling him a ‘Peter Pan of the bordellos’ in Esquire. And, he noted, Muggeridge had been remarkably sly in his attack:
‘There is one significant aspect in which the two versions of the diatribe differed, and which might have jeopardized Mr Muggeridge’s chances of promotion from the back pages of Esquire to the front page of The Observer Weekend Review. To an American public Mr Muggeridge was prepared, and indeed appeared anxious, to reveal that he knew my brother well, was a great friend of his wife’s and had frequently enjoyed their hospitality; from British readers, who sometimes have finicky views about what is decent and what is not, he shrewdly concealed these facts.
To vilify publicly, within a few months of his death, a friend from whom he had received nothing but kindness is not the sort of thing that it would occur to many of us to do; nor would a reputable literary critic pontificate at length about a writer with whose work he was almost totally unacquainted. But Mr Muggeridge’s standards of conduct have always been idiosyncratic, and for him, I imagine, the only abnormal feature of this shoddy transaction is that it has—thanks to The Observer—brought him two handsome fees instead of one.’
Muggeridge’s response in the newspaper was shameless, claiming that Peter Fleming had only pointed out ‘minor discrepancies’, painting himself as a victim and completely misrepresenting the two pieces he had written. He concluded:
‘I shall not take up the various abusive references to myself except to say that my purpose was to separate Ian Fleming whom I liked from Bond whom I abominate. Clearly, Colonel Fleming did not appreciate the endeavour.’
This sounds reasonable if you haven’t read Muggeridge’s articles: it suggests that Peter Fleming was simply over-reacting and sticking up for his brother. But far from trying to separate Ian Fleming from Bond, Muggeridge had gone out of his way to claim in Esquire that they were one and the same: ‘Partly, too, though, Fleming really was Bond, who truly represented all his hopes and desires.’ He even referred to Fleming as Bond in the piece. And it’s hard to see why he would abominate a fictional character that appeared in just one novel he had read. As a result of Muggeridge’s article and reply, Peter Fleming never contributed to The Observer for the rest of his life.
Despite this public rebuke, Muggeridge, rather astonishingly, went on to publish further versions of this article. Around a month later, on July 11, The Los Angeles Times published another review of The James Bond Dossier by Muggeridge. Billed as an exclusive, it was in fact a very light rewrite of the Esquire and Observer articles. And Muggeridge published yet another version of the same article in the August-September 1965 issue of The Critic. This time it was titled ‘The Late Mr Fleming’, and under his byline read:
‘British author, critic, former member of the British Secret Service and friend of the late Mr. Ian Fleming.’
Muggeridge might have provided this biographical snapshot himself. If so, I think the message in mentioning he was formerly in intelligence is clear: ‘I used to be a spy, so I know how things really are, not like they are in these silly books.’ And the purpose in saying he was a friend of Fleming would be to add: ‘But I knew Ian rather well, so I have a right to say I disliked him and his work intensely.’
A version of the article was also contained in a 1966 American anthology of his work, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, under the title The Century of the Common Bond.
*
Muggeridge’s article, in all its forms, was a baseless attack on Fleming’s work. If it had been a review of You Only Live Twice, it would have been a shoddy one: from his description of it I doubt he even read that novel all the way through. But he attacked the entirety of Fleming’s work, and in doing so rekindled and inflated all the old Corke/Bergonzi/Johnson nonsense, spreading it to millions more readers and entrenching it even further. Muggeridge set out to give the literary establishment more ammunition to damn Ian Fleming—for good measure, he added in as many personal insults he could think up.
In 2010, newspapers and websites around the world reported on an interview Muggeridge conducted with John le Carré on the BBC in 1966, which had been dug up from the archives and put online. In that interview, le Carré made some disparaging comments about Ian Fleming’s work—as did Muggeridge. In fact, Muggeridge goaded le Carré into insulting Fleming. Le Carré has since admitted that he felt ashamed of his behavior in the interview, telling the Radio Times: ‘I was putting on a performance and so was the Mugg. We were two fakes performing, that was the long and short of it.’ He also called Muggeridge ‘the last of TV’s upper-class, bogus, intellectual pontificators, exuding piety and superior knowledge, and adoring his canonisation.’
Muggeridge had a talent for making memorably scathing remarks, and his supercilious outrage sold newspapers and made for good television. He is still regarded in some circles as one of the pre-eminent critics of the 20th century (especially if you happen to be writing an article in which you agree with one of his conclusions), but I think John le Carré was right about him. He was a fake, and he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a critic. It is not acceptable that Muggeridge behaved this way because his target was a popular novelist, or because it was ‘only Ian Fleming’, who wasn’t much good anyway—that view is partly a result of attacks such as this. Muggeridge’s admission in print that he had only read one Bond novel discredits his literary criticism as a whole, just as a student’s body of work is discredited if it is found they have not read a work they have written about.
Under the guise of friendship and knowledge, and using his considerable reputation and reach, Malcolm Muggeridge repeatedly published and broadcast his views on his distaste for Fleming’s work. He was a prolific writer and tackled a huge number of subjects, but this was a ruthlessly pursued vendetta, a campaign to damage Fleming’s literary standing and ensure that others looked down at it as much as he must have done Fleming the man. He loaded into his articles every variation of the attacks that had previously been made on Fleming’s work and personality, amplifying them by using even more vicious phrasing for maximum impact.
And his campaign worked. Hilary Corke’s review has been forgotten, while Bernard Bergonzi’s essay is often footnoted but the contents rarely discussed. Paul Johnson’s review is still frequently cited in articles about Ian Fleming, mainly because of the title and because it was so extreme as to be noteworthy. But Muggeridge’s views were more extreme still, and have been cited over the years in Time, The Washington Post, Life, The Baltimore Sun, The Times, The Sun, The Chicago Tribune and many other publications: he and Johnson’s view of Fleming’s work has become the dominant view of it. You still hear people proclaiming loudly at parties that James Bond is a sadistic misogynistic snob in the books. In my experience, people who say or write this usually haven’t read much or any of Fleming’s work. Instead, they’ve read a few chapters of Diamonds Are Forever years ago—or have read the views of others. It’s much easier to read a couple of articles and make your mind up that way than to bother to read Fleming’s novels. But it’s not an opinion that means much.
On seeing The Beatles in Hamburg in June 1961, Muggeridge felt they were ‘bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones’. Today, we recognize that sentiment for what it was: a man then in his late fifties not equipped to understand an emerging form of popular culture, let alone recognize that it might contain the seeds of great art. Muggeridge’s views of Ian Fleming are as archaic as his view of The Beatles, and should be taken even less seriously, as it seems his opinion of The Beatles had no personal agenda but was simply based on listening to them perform.
*
In 1965, Kingsley Amis laid down a challenge in The James Bond Dossier for Fleming to be seen in a similar light to other great practitioners of popular fiction. It is now over half a century since the attacks on Fleming’s work began, and yet some still give weight, consciously or not, to the sanctimonious moralizing of critics who were both ignorant of the thriller genre, and in at least one case of Fleming’s own work.
I think it’s high time to consign the essays by Corke, Bergonzi, Johnson and Muggeridge to the dustbin, and reassess Ian Fleming’s standing as a writer of popular fiction—by giving his work the professional critical analysis it deserves.
Selected Bibliography
The works of Ian Fleming
The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson, Companion Book Club, 1966
Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett, Phoenix, 1996
The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis, Signet, 1966
Peter Fleming by Duff Hart-Davis, Oxford, 1987 edition
‘His Word His Bond’ by ‘Ixn Flxmxng’ (John Russell), The Spectator, 23 December 1955, p12
‘Novel Man’, William Cook, New Statesman, 28 June 2004
‘The Banyan Tree’, Hilary Corke, Encounter, August 1954
‘The Case of Mr Fleming’, Bernard Bergonzi, The Twentieth Century, March 1958
‘The Exclusive Bond’, The Manchester Guardian, March 31, 1958
Letter from Ian Fleming, The Manchester Guardian, April 5, 1958
‘Sex, snobbery and sadism’, Paul Johnson, New Statesman, April 5, 1958
‘London Literary Letter: A Report on Writers and Writing’, V.S. Pritchett, The New York Times, May 11, 1958
Like It Was: A Selection from the Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, selected and edited by John Bright-Holmes, Collins, 1981
The Seven Deadly Sins by Various, William Morrow, 1962
‘How to Write a Thriller’, Ian Fleming, Show, August 1962
‘Books’, Malcolm Muggeridge, Esquire, December 1964
Review of The James Bond Dossier, Malcolm Muggeridge, The Observer, May 30, 1965
Letter from Peter Fleming, The Observer, June 6, 1965
‘The Late Mr Fleming’, Malcolm Muggeridge, The Critic, August-September 1965
‘New Dossier Tells All on James Bond’, Malcolm Muggeridge, The Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1965
‘I dislike Bond... He’s a gangster’, Vincent Graff, Radio Times, August 21-27, 2010
Agents of Influence
This is part of Blunt Instruments, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In his review of From Russia With Love in April 1964, the critic Colin Bennett wrote of the film’s opening sequence:
‘Our James makes his pre-credit appearance this time in the dark of a Marienbad garden, where he is neatly strangled by a blond Russian killer. (The gimmick used to keep him alive could only have been more effective if it had not also been used in Adrian Messenger.)’¹
Alan Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad, released in 1961, explored the nature of memory and dreams against the backdrop of an elegant château and its grounds.
Last Year at Marienbad
John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger, released in 1963, featured George C Scott as a retired MI5 agent investigating a series of apparently accidental deaths; several famous actors, including Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, appeared heavily disguised by make-up, which they removed at the end of the film to reveal themselves. The opening scene of From Russia With Love concludes with the revelation that the dead James Bond is in fact another man wearing a mask, and we realize we have witnessed a gruesome murder by an organization training to kill 007.
Bennett was right on at least one of his observations. In 1991, the director of From Russia With Love, Terence Young, discussed the film’s opening scene:
‘This was entirely stolen. I’d just seen a very pretentious picture called L’année dernière à Marienbad, where everybody was wandering down moonlight paths with sculptures and Christ knows what, so we put Sean in there…’²
Despite feeling Resnais’ film was pretentious, Young was nevertheless influenced by it. As well as drawing us into an opulent and elegant world, the opening scene of From Russia With Love is also, like Last Year At Marienbad, puzzling, eerie and dream-like. Dreams often consist of compelling and vivid episodes: we’ve all woken feeling as though we have just experienced some amazingly intricate adventure in which we were pursued by unseen forces, one person suddenly became another, and so on.
The opening of From Russia With Love has something of that feeling and, as with a dream, it’s only after it’s over that we realize it didn’t make any sense. If an organization wanted to train to kill James Bond, they probably wouldn’t go to the trouble and expense of creating incredibly lifelike masks to put on sacrifical human targets. And why stalk someone who looks like Bond through the gardens of a country house when, judging from the rest of the film, they have no intention of trying to trap Bond in such a place? But even if we recognize these logical flaws, they don’t overly bother us. This is clearly not the sort of training exercise any organization would undertake in real life, but it’s not meant to be a realistic portrayal of espionage. It’s a fantasy, and it uses dream logic – or film logic.
The opening of From Russia With Love helped establish the often fantastic atmosphere of the Bond films, and proved influential in its own right – Mission: Impossible, which made its debut on American television two years later, frequently featured lifelike masks being peeled off by secret agents, in a kind of repeated variation of the shock that comes at the end of this scene.
Another film some critics felt was influenced by Last Year At Marienbad was Inception, released in 2010. In an interview with The New York Times, director Christopher Nolan discussed this perception:
‘Everyone was accusing me of ripping it off, but I actually never got around to seeing it. Funnily enough, I saw it and I’m like, Oh, wow. There are bits of “Inception” that people are going to think I ripped that straight out of “Last Year at Marienbad.”
Q. What do you think that means?
A. Basically, what it means is, I’m ripping off the movies that ripped off “Last Year at Marienbad,” without having seen the original. It’s that much a source of ideas, really, about the relationships between dream and memory and so forth, which is very much what “Inception” deals with.’³
Several other critics felt that Inception was heavily inspired by the James Bond films. Nolan confirmed to Empire that it had been:
‘This is absolutely my Bond movie… I’ve been plundering ruthlessly from the Bond movies in everything I’ve done, forever. I grew up just loving them and they’re a huge influence on me. When you look at being able to construct a scenario that’s only bound by your imagination, I think the world of the Bond movies is a natural place your mind would go.’⁴
In particular, Nolan confirmed the influence of the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:
‘I think that would be my favorite Bond. It’s a hell of a movie, it holds up very well. What I liked about it that we’ve tried to emulate in this film is there’s a tremendous balance in that movie of action and scale and romanticism and tragedy and emotion. Of all the Bond films, it’s by far the most emotional. There’s a love story. And Inception is a kind of love story as well as anything else...’⁴
Influence, then, can be hard to pin down and at several removes, or it can be hard to miss. Colin Bennett was right that From Russia From With Love was directly influenced by Last Year At Marienbad – Terence Young confirmed it. We don’t know whether or not The List of Adrian Messenger was also an influence. Critics who felt Inception was directly influenced by Last Year At Marienbad were wrong, but those who felt there were references to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service were right. In the latter case, the similarities are not just thematic, but precise. As in the finale of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the characters in Inception storm a clinic that is built like a fortress and is positioned on a snowy mountainside. The accompanying music, costumes and other details all make the connection explicit.
An even clearer example of influence occurs later in From Russia With Love, in the scene in which James Bond is chased across a barren stretch of country by a low-flying helicopter. He tries to head for shelter, but as the helicopter passes over him he flattens himself on the ground. Terence Young also confirmed that this was a ‘steal’ from the famous crop-dusting scene in North By Northwest², but we hardly need proof: common sense tells us it must be.
The situation is somewhat similar when one looks at Ian Fleming’s novels. In some cases, we know what Fleming’s influences were because he commented on them in interviews or in writing. In others, we can guess he was inspired by certain works, but have no confirmation of it. Our guess might be a very plausible one, but still be incorrect. But sometimes the level of correspondence is so high that proof is not needed, and common sense will do.
But why focus on influence at all? Does it make any difference who was inspired by whom? Not always, no. We can just sit back and enjoy the story. If it works, who cares what inspired it? But if we want to examine Ian Fleming’s place in the literary canon, his influences matter, and by looking at them we can place his writing in a literary as well as cultural context.
There are also degrees of influence. The scene with the helicopter chasing Bond in From Russia With Love is a direct and unmistakable reference to North By Northwest. The opening scene, on the other hand, is relatively lightly influenced by Last Year At Marienbad.
Influence can be more general still. Inception features a scene in which the protagonist, Cobb, is being chased through the streets of Mombasa by men shooting at him. He finds a side street and runs down it. He slams against a wall and realizes it is part of a narrower alleyway, which he quickly decides to head down to evade his pursuers. But as he makes his way down the alleyway it narrows further and further, until it becomes impossibly tight, the walls seeming to close in on him. Cobb pushes against them desperately as the men behind him gain ground, and finally manages to squeeze his way through into another street.
I don’t think this is inspired by anything in particular. It’s simply a convention that is often seen in thrillers, and I doubt anyone would be able to trace its origins. And as well as being a thriller convention, it is also, of couse, a classic anxiety dream moment, which is no doubt why Nolan used it. Thrillers often echo dreams: many a synopsis proclaims that the protagonist is ‘plunged into a nightmare’. In a 1965 interview for French television, Alfred Hitchcock described North By Northwest in these terms:
‘Everything seems real in a dream: you are glad to wake up because it’s so real. So you take a dream idea like [North by Northwest]. It’s a nightmare… and you make it real. The audience are looking at a nightmare, and crazy things are happening. But it must be real.’⁵
Inception features dreams that echo films – the scenes inspired by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – but I think the narrowing alleyway scene in Mombasa is a feedback loop: a dream sequence reminiscent of thrillers reminiscent of dreams… Where you start the loop can change your interpretation of the film. Great thrillers don’t simply recycle conventions in a mechanistic working through of plot: they use them to tap into deeper concerns and emotions. I think one purpose of this scene may be to suggest (or perhaps implant) the idea that, just as cinematic and fictional conventions often echo our dreams, perhaps our dreams are also affected by fictional archetypes.
Influence can flow in unexpected directions, which make it harder to untangle. Sexton Blake and other characters in the penny dreadfuls led to the likes of Dan Dare – the success of which probably influenced the ongoing Sexton Blake series.
The same can be said of James Bond. Once Bond became successful, several characters that predated Fleming’s novels – including Sexton Blake – were either repackaged or completely updated to jump on the bandwagon. This can be seen with Jean Bruce’s OSS 117, Leslie Charteris’ The Saint, Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond and many others. Roger Moore played The Saint before he played James Bond; coupled with that TV series’ increased aping of the Bond films, the impression is that Simon Templar is a character imitative of James Bond, when the reverse may be true.
Influence is not always cut and dried, and can be difficult to trace, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Exploring it sensibly can open up our perceptions of what individual works have to say, and how fiction works in broader terms.
All of which brings me to White Eagles Over Serbia. Published by Faber in Britain in July 1957, this was ‘an adventure story for the young’ by the acclaimed novelist Lawrence Durrell. After four months in the jungles of Malaya, Colonel Methuen returns to his London club and is looking forward to a fortnight’s fishing in Ireland when he is summoned by Dombey, his chief in the British intelligence unit known to a few highly placed officials as Special Operations Q Branch. Peter Anson, the military attaché in Belgrade, has been found in the mountains near Novi Pazaar with a bullet through his head. Anson was investigating the underground Royalist movement in the country: Methuen’s assignment is to go out and discover what happened to him. But before he sets off for Serbia, Methuen gets prepared:
‘In the armoury at Millbank he presented his service order and was allowed to play about with pistols of every calibre and shape. Henslowe, the artificer, followed him about benevolently, showing him his wares with absurd pride. “You never turned in that Luger you borrowed, Colonel Methuen,” he said reproachfully. “I have to answer for it to the War Office.”
Methuen apologized. “It’s lying in a swamp somewhere,” he explained, and was immediately given an elaborate form to fill up with a description of how the weapon had been lost. “Just put L on D (lost on duty),” said Henslowe sorrowfully. “Now you say you want one with a silencer.”
“Small,” said Methuen. “Pocketable.”
“There’s a new point three eight,” said Henslowe regretfully, but with the air of a haberdasher finding the right size of neck and wrist for a man of unusual shape. “Only for heaven’s sake bring it back! You see,” he added, “it’s still on the experimental list. First time they’ve fitted a silencer of this pattern to a point three eight. It’s a sweet weapon, werry sweet.” He pronounced the word “weepon”. He found the pistol in question and pressed it upon his visitor, holding it by the barrel. It was small but ugly looking. “The balance is not all it might be, sir. But it’s a werry sweet weapon.”
They tried it downstairs on the miniature range. “It’ll do me very well,” said Methuen. “I must say it hardly makes any noise at all.”
“Just a large sniff, sir. Like a man with a cold.”
“Send it up to me,” said Methuen, and Henslowe inclined his head sorrowfully with the air of a man who is glad to serve but who feels that he is in danger of losing a much-cherished possession. “You won’t leave it in a swamp, will you, sir?” Methuen promised faithfully not to. “It’s hard when we get so few nice things these days.”
“I know.”’⁶
Dr No, published the following year, features some of the same conventions as White Eagles Over Serbia, such as the secret agent sent overseas to investigate the mysterious death of a colleague. In an early scene, M calls in MI6’s Armourer, Major Boothroyd, to assess Bond’s choice of weapon for his forthcoming mission:
‘M’s voice was casual. “First of all, what do you think of the Beretta, the .25?”
“Ladies’ gun, sir.”
M raised ironic eyebrows at Bond. Bond smiled thinly.
“Really! And why do you say that?”
“No stopping power, sir. But it’s easy to operate. A bit fancy looking too, if you know what I mean, sir. Appeals to the ladies.”
“How would it be with a silencer?”
“Still less stopping power, sir. And I don’t like silencers. They’re heavy and get stuck in your clothing when you’re in a hurry. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to try a combination like that, sir. Not if they were meaning business.”
M said pleasantly to Bond, “Any comment, 007?”
Bond shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t agree. I’ve used the .25 Beretta for fifteen years. Never had a stoppage and I haven’t missed with it yet. Not a bad record for a gun. It just happens that I’m used to it and I can point it straight. I’ve used bigger guns when I’ve had to – the .45 Colt with the long barrel, for instance. But for close-up work and concealment I like the Beretta.” Bond paused. He felt he should give way somewhere. “I’d agree about the silencer, sir. They’re a nuisance. But sometimes you have to use them.”
“We’ve seen what happens when you do,” said M drily. “And as for changing your gun, it’s only a question of practice. You’ll soon get the feel of a new one.” M allowed a trace of sympathy to enter his voice. “Sorry, 007. But I’ve decided. Just stand up a moment. I want the Armourer to get a look at your build.”
Bond stood up and faced the other man. There was no warmth in the two pairs of eyes. Bond’s showed irritation. Major Boothroyd’s were indifferent, clinical. He walked round Bond. He said “Excuse me” and felt Bond’s biceps and forearms. He came back in front of him and said, “Might I see your gun?”
Bond’s hand went slowly into his coat. He handed over the taped Beretta with the sawn barrel. Boothroyd examined the gun and weighed it in his hand. He put it down on the desk. “And your holster?”
Bond took off his coat and slipped off the chamois leather holster and harness. He put his coat on again.
With a glance at the lips of the holster, perhaps to see if they showed traces of snagging, Boothroyd tossed the holster down beside the gun with a motion that sneered. He looked across at M. “I think we can do better than this, sir.” It was the sort of voice Bond’s first expensive tailor had used.’⁷
Boothroyd recommends Bond use a Walther PPK 7.65 mm. or Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight Revolver .38, and gives a lot of information about both. In May 1956, gun enthusiast Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote to Fleming suggesting that Bond change weapons from the ladylike Beretta to a Walther PPK. Fleming replied that he appreciated the advice and proposed changing Bond’s weapon in the next book he wrote, adding ‘I think M. should advise him to make a change’.⁸ He didn’t specify that he would create an armourer character, or name him after Boothroyd, but the idea seems a natural enough way to introduce the change.
But there are still some intriguingly close similarities between these two scenes. Both Henslowe the artificer and Boothroyd the armourer are condescending towards the agent they are fitting out: Henslowe has ‘the air of a haberdasher finding the right size of neck and wrist for a man of unusual shape’, while Boothroyd speaks in ‘the sort of voice Bond’s first expensive tailor had used’. This seems natural now, but upper-class Brits discussing lethal weapons as though they are bespoke clothing items is a convention we usually date to the Bond series, and particularly the films. In some ways, Durrell’s scene is more reminiscent of a Bond film than Fleming’s: Methuen’s nonchalance about having lost his previous weapon while conducting his most recent mission and Henslowe’s anxiety that he might lose the costly experimental weapon he is now giving him would become staples of the scenes between Bond and Q in the films.
Durrell’s reference to ‘Special Operations Q Branch’ may appear to be a reference to Fleming, as ‘Q Branch’ had been mentioned in passing in several earlier Bond novels. But in Durrell’s novel it is not the name of a technical department, as it is in Fleming and would later be in the Bond films, but of an intelligence unit – so more like the Double O Section. After the Second World War, MI6 established a section called Q Branch for the administration of stores and equipment, which was run by ‘an experienced army quartermaster colonel with the designation Q’.⁹ Fleming might have known this through his own contacts in the organisation, as might Durrell, who had worked for British intelligence in Belgrade in the early Fifties.¹⁰
Fleming started writing Dr No in January 1957, but it wasn’t published until in March 1958, several months after White Eagles Over Serbia. Fleming might, then, have read Durrell’s novel as he was writing or editing Dr No. I think it’s plausible it might have been on his radar. As well as having worked in several countries as a British diplomat and intelligence officer, Durrell was a well-established poet, novelist and travel writer, and this was a well-reviewed adventure story about the British secret services, a throwback to the sorts of novel Fleming had enjoyed as a boy. Durrell was one of the closest friends of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was also a friend of Fleming’s, and who had written part of his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, at Fleming’s house in Jamaica in 1948.
But all this is speculation. As far as I know, Ian Fleming never mentioned Lawrence Durrell’s book as an inspiration in any interviews or correspondence, and the similarities between the scenes, while numerous, are not close enough to be a ‘smoking gun’, with or without experimental silencer. It might simply be coincidence or, perhaps more likely, that Durrell and Fleming were both inspired by similar scenes in earlier thrillers. I’m not aware of any prior to 1957 that involve a weapons expert picking out a pistol for a secret agent’s forthcoming mission, but there are lots of thrillers I haven’t read or seen. Suggestions gratefully received.
Regardless of whether Fleming was aware of it, the scene in White Eagles Over Serbia tells us several things. Most obviously, it tells us that Ian Fleming did not create this particular convention, which we might otherwise have thought he did. Durrell might not have originated it, either, but we know Fleming didn’t. It also shows how influence diverges and takes new shapes. Durrell’s scene was itself a variation of a more general and well-established convention, that of ‘preparing before setting off for an adventure’. Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, for example, published in 1903, opens with Foreign Office official Carruthers being contacted by an old acquaintance, Davies, and asked to join him on a sailing trip. Carruthers duly runs around London collecting equipment Davies has specified he bring along. This can be seen in several early British adventure stories involving exploration. Durrell’s and Fleming’s scenes are a more specific version of that convention; a secret agent being assigned a weapon by an expert. Ie, not just a man being shot at, but a man being shot at from above by a low-flying craft while he runs across barren countryside.
White Eagles Over Serbia is a love letter to the British adventure story, but while the plot is reminiscent of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, the romance is occasionally sprinkled with a dry and melancholic tone more akin to Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. The same could be said of the Bond novels, but both sets of influences are much weaker. Durrell and Fleming were drawing on some of the same influences, but developed a very different mixture.
Finally, these two scenes might be an example of influence turning inward on itself. The armourer Major Boothroyd didn’t appear in any other Fleming novels, but he did appear in a similar scene to this in the film of Dr No. In subsequent films, he was played by Desmond Llewellyn, and became known as Q. Instead of simply being an armourer, he was now head of Q Branch, which is mentioned but never seen in Fleming’s novels, and responsible not just for providing Bond with weaponry but a range of ingenious equipment. The convention took on a new form with the films, then, and hundreds of thrillers followed with dotty inventors kitting out spies with outrageous gadgets.
In 1968, Lawrence Durrell published Tunc, a novel that featured as its protagonist Felix Charlock, an inventor who works for the sinister international conglomerate Merlin, sometimes known as ‘The Firm’. Charlock goes on the run; trying to bring him back is Merlin’s shadowy director, Julian, who Charlock has never seen. The sequel, Nunquam, published in 1970, opens with Charlock in a luxurious but anonymous sanatorium-prison in the Swiss Alps. He is released by The Firm and finally meets Julian, for whom he builds a lifelike robot, a perfect replica of a beautiful dead actress with whom Julian is obsessed. The robot also rebels, wreaking havoc and destruction.
Several critics detected similarities between these two novels and the Bond series. Kirkus wrote of Tunc that ‘the plots criss-cross round a gigantic international “firm” called Merlin (somewhat like a spectre in the Bond dream World)’ [sic], referring to S.P.E.C.T.R.E., while France’s Journal de l’année wrote that in Nunquam Durrell wanted to simultaneously evoke James Joyce and James Bond. Reviewing the same novel in The Observer, Benedict Nightingale noted: ‘There are times when one wonders if one isn’t reading some unholy coupling of Swinburne and Ian Fleming’.¹¹
Perhaps these novels were influenced directly by Bond or perhaps, as with Inception and Last Year At Marienbad, by other thrillers that were influenced by Bond. But it may also be that Lawrence Durrell influenced Ian Fleming directly in 1957, only to be influenced by Fleming himself a decade later.
Notes
1. ‘Thrills and Tricks’ by Colin Bennett, The Age, April 25 1964.
2. From Russia With Love audio commentary, Criterion Collection, Laserdisc, 1991.
3. ‘A Man and His Dream: Christopher Nolan and ‘Inception’’ by Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times, June 30 2010.
4. ‘Crime Of The Century’ by Dan Jolin, Empire, July 2010.
5. ‘Hitchcock s’explique’, Cinéma Cinémas, directed by André Labarthe, 1965.
6. White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell (Faber, 1957), pp27-28.
7. Dr No by Ian Fleming (Pan, 1965), pp18-19.
8. Letter from Ian Fleming to Geoffrey Boothroyd, May 31 1956. See ‘Letters to The Armourer’ by ‘SiCo’, Absolutely James Bond, September 12 2004. Available at: http://jamesbond.ajb007.co.uk/lettersupdate
9. MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 by Keith Jeffery (Bloomsbury, 2010), pp644-645.
10. British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 by Richard James Aldrich (Routledge, 1992), p81.
11. Kirkus Reviews, March 25 1968; Journal de l’année (Larousse, 1971), p228; ‘Dance of Seven Veils’ by Benedict Nightingale, The Observer, March 22 1970.
Gardens of Beasts
This is part of Blunt Instruments, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
The 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale has its share of influences. Most obviously, the opening scene is reminiscent of the film Dr No, in which a seated Bond coolly shoots Professor Dent from the shadows. This scene was also shot in such a way as to evoke Cold War-era spy films such as The IPCRESS File and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Later in the film Bond runs through the streets of Venice, and there’s a deliberate reference to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now as he catches sight of Vesper’s red coat. Many have also pointed out that the film’s tougher, more realistic action scenes seem to have been stylistically inspired by the Jason Bourne films. And finally, the decision to ‘reboot’ the series showing Bond as a newly minted Double O agent was probably helped along by the enormous commercial success of Batman Begins, which presented the origins of that character with a darker edge following films many had felt veered too close to fantasy.
This sounds like a lot of influences when listed, but for film-makers and film-goers alike they are easily absorbed. In Agents of Influence, I discussed Inception, a film some critics felt had been influenced by Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad, but which director Christopher Nolan claims not to have seen beforehand. But would it surprise us to learn that Nolan had seen The Matrix, The Godfather, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Strangers on a Train, The English Patient, The Third Man and dozens of other films, and that they might in some ways have been an influence on his work? Of course not, and one could no doubt add many more films to the list, for Nolan or any other major film director working today.
I also discussed a scene in the film of From Russia With Love in which James Bond is chased across barren countryside by a low-flying helicopter. Terence Young, the director of From Russia With Love, has confirmed that this was inspired by the scene in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant’s character Roger Thornhill is attacked by a crop-duster. This would have been clear even if Young had not confirmed it, despite the scene in From Russia With Love featuring a helicopter rather than a crop-duster, because the two scenes share several precise and unusual elements. It would be easy to cite scenes in thrillers in which a character is shot at by villains while running away from them: that’s a very basic similarity. It would be much harder to cite scenes in which a man is being persistently shot at by an aircraft that swoops down on him while he runs across a barren landscape. And all such scenes would, I suspect, have been filmed after North by Northwest, and be directly or indirectly inspired by it. There’s no line in the sand about this sort of thing, but sometimes – as in this case – common sense tells us when something is directly influenced by something else.
The influence of North by Northwest on this scene in From Russia With Love is fairly unimportant when we’re sitting back and watching the film – but it’s crucial if we want to assess the importance of the scene in modern cinema. If a critic were to claim that this scene was the most inventive and suspenseful action scene ever to have been filmed, omitting any reference to the Hitchcock film that inspired it, they would be completely mischaracterizing its place in the genre.
When Ian Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale in January 1952, he was familiar with many thrillers that had come before. He had been reading thrillers since he was a young boy, and in articles, interviews and the novels themselves showed that he had a wide knowledge of the genre, as well as a passion for and deep understanding of it. Literary criticism of Fleming’s work has tended to focus on a very narrow band of inspirations, but the reality, I think, is that he was influenced by dozens of other writers, not just three or four.
And just as Terence Young and others were sometimes directly influenced by thrillers that had gone before, so was Fleming. He often drew on other authors’ work, adding dozens of new elements and ideas, as well as his own glittering prose style, to transform them into something else entirely. But the original can sometimes still be seen peeking through.
Dr No, published in 1957, features perhaps the best known and most cited example: the titular character is widely recognized as emulating Sax Rohmer’s villain Dr Fu-Manchu. There’s no proof of this – such things are usually difficult, if not impossible to prove – but Fleming named Rohmer as an influence on his work several times and both characters are Oriental masterminds with grand plans to shift the balance of power in the world. Physically, they are also described in similar terms:
‘“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”’1
And from Dr No:
‘Bond’s first impression was of thinness and erectness and height. Doctor No was at least six inches taller than Bond, but the straight immovable poise of his body made him seem still taller. The head also was elongated and tapered from a round, completely bald skull down to a sharp chin so that the impression was of a reversed raindrop, or rather oildrop, for the skin was of a deep almost translucent yellow.
It was impossible to tell Doctor No’s age: as far as Bond could see, there were no lines on the face. It was odd to see a forehead as smooth as the top of the polished skull. Even the cavernous indrawn cheeks below the prominent cheekbones looked as smooth as fine ivory. There was something Dali-esque about the eyebrows, which were fine and black, and sharply upswept as if they had been painted on as makeup for a conjurer. Below them, slanting jet black eyes stared out of the skull. They were without eyelashes. They looked like the mouths of two small revolvers, direct and unblinking and totally devoid of expression. The thin fine nose ended very close above a wide compressed wound of a mouth which, despite its almost permanent sketch of a smile, showed only cruelty and authority.’2
Several shared precise and unusual elements – and common sense – have led to many critics noting the similarities between Dr No and Dr Fu-Manchu. Fleming first came across Rohmer’s character at his prep school, Durnford’s, where he and the other boys were read stories by the headmaster’s wife every Sunday evening. According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, the favourites among the boys were The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner and, ‘towards the end of Ian’s time, Bulldog Drummond’. Of these, Fleming ‘preferred the populist works of Sax Rohmer, who opened up a more fantastic world with his “yellow devil” villain Dr Fu Manchu.’3 (Literary tastes at English boarding schools move at a slow pace, it seems, as I was also read Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond and Moonfleet at prep school in the 1980s, while The Prisoner of Zenda and similar 19th-century adventure stories were staples of the library at my public school.)
The influence of juvenile fiction on Fleming is rarely discussed, even though the two writers who are most often cited as his major inspirations, Sapper and John Buchan, were first read by him at school, and mainly appeal to schoolboys. James Bond, of course, also appeals to a good many teenage boys. Fleming acknowledged the influence, though, mentioning his schoolboy reading in several interviews. He also acknowledged it privately: in April 1953, when Somerset Maugham wrote him a letter praising Casino Royale, Fleming replied thanking him profusely for ‘the kind things you say about these leaves from a Cosh-boys own paper’.4 This was an ironic – and telling – reference to The Boy’s Own Paper, a monthly publication that had been launched in the 19th century to provide thrilling adventures for teenage boys, and which was still going strong at the time. A ‘cosh-boy’ was a slang term for a delinquent teenager.
Fleming was being falsely modest, but he was also making an interesting point: his debut novel was much more violent and adult in themes than Boy’s Own stories, but it nevertheless recognizably related to that tradition. In 1950, The Times reported on a small experiment.5 For seven years, one Martin Parr studied the reading habits of 150 boys who attended a club in Shoreditch, aged between 14 and 18 and drawn from grammar schools, central schools and senior schools. This was a very small sample, but I think it’s nevertheless revealing about the climate leading up to the publication of Casino Royale. Some of the more popular authors included Jules Verne, John Buchan, Baroness Orczy, Robert Louis Stevenson, GW Henty, Rider Haggard, Erskine Childers, Dorothy Sayers, Mark Twain and Sydney Horler. But the most popular were Arthur Conan Doyle, Richmal Crompton, Sapper, Peter Cheyney, WE Johns and, ‘the king of books’, Leslie Charteris’ The Saint series.
Some of these writers’ creations have endured: Sherlock Holmes, Biggles, The Saint, Huckleberry Finn and Lord Peter Wimsey are all seen as iconic characters of popular fiction, even if the books are not as widely read as they once were. Others rest in the drawer marked ‘forgotten favourites’, and among these I would include Bulldog Drummond, Raffles, Just William and Allan Quatermain – adventures featuring these characters are read by few today, but their names are still widely recognized, as is their influence. Some of the others, such as Sydney Horler’s Tiger Standish, have all but vanished from the popular lexicon.
Fu-Manchu is, I think, a forgotten favourite. Many are familiar with the character today, but few have read Sax Rohmer’s novels. But we know Fleming did, and that they were among his favourites as a boy. Rohmer was born Arthur Ward, and worked as a civil servant and songwriter before becoming a novelist. The Rohmer pseudonym and the character Fu-Manchu both made their first appearance in The Story-Teller in October 1912, in a story called The Zayat Kiss. This was the first installment of The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, as it was called when published in book form on June 26 1913. There had been similar villains before: Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola, for example, and the criminal masterminds of the penny dreadfuls such as Count Ivor Carlac, one of Sexton Blake’s deadliest foes – indeed, the critic Julian Symons later dismissed Rohmer’s novels as ‘penny dreadfuls in hard covers’.6
But there was nevertheless something about Rohmer’s ruthless Oriental villain that captured readers’ imaginations, and Fu-Manchu would go on to feature in dozens of stories, films and radio shows. Imitators sprung up very quickly. On June 28 1913, just two days after the first Fu-Manchu adventure was published in book form, The Union Jack began a new Sexton Blake series, The Brotherhood of the Yellow Beetle, in which the detective battled a Chinese mastermind called Prince Wu Ling. Sexton Blake had himself originated in a similarly opportunistic manner, appearing a week after Sherlock Holmes had appeared to die in The Strand. In The Brotherhood of the Yellow Beetle, Wu Ling sends Blake and others poisonous yellow beetles to cause them harm, just as Fu-Manchu sends Sir Denis Nayland Smith and others centipedes.
Rohmer is one of the few writers Fleming named as an influence on his work. Another is Henry ‘Sapper’ McNeile, whose Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond novels he had also been read at Durnford’s. Drummond, a tough former soldier looking for adventures in peacetime, battled several villains, but the first and most impressive of them was Carl Peterson, a suave master of disguise assisted by a mysterious woman called Irma, who sometimes posed as his daughter but who seemed more like his mistress. Fleming’s master-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld was also assisted by a woman called Irma. Even had Fleming not acknowledged Sapper as an influence, this is too unusual a name for a character with such a position plausibly to be anything other than a direct reference to Sapper’s novels.
Sapper has won out in the field of literary criticism and is today the most frequently cited influence on Fleming’s work. John Buchan comes a close second, followed perhaps by Dornford Yates, with Rohmer trailing a distant fourth, usually only mentioned in passing and in reference to Dr No. Sapper is often stated as a major influence on Fleming without much explanation given as to how he was, and I think this has become something of a conditioned response. Kingsley Amis and OF Snelling both discussed him as a major influence so, runs the logic, he must have been. He certainly was an influence, but I think over time the extent of it has been exaggerated, and that Fleming was influenced much more directly and pervasively by several other writers, among them Rohmer. In fact, I suspect that several of the elements in Sapper’s work that Amis and others felt had influenced Fleming can be traced to Rohmer. Here’s a passage from The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, Rohmer’s first novel, published in book form in 1913:
‘I stifled a cry that rose to my lips; for, with a shrill whistling sound, a small shape came bounding into the dimly lit vault, then shot upward. A marmoset landed on the shoulder of Dr. Fu-Manchu and peered grotesquely into the dreadful yellow face. The Doctor raised his bony hand and fondled the little creature, crooning to it.
“One of my pets, Mr. Smith,” he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully so that they blazed like green lamps. “I have others, equally useful. My scorpions – have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No? But Mr. Nayland Smith will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon! And we must not forget my black spiders, with their diamond eyes – my spiders, that sit in the dark and watch – then leap!”’7
Later in the novel, Fu-Manchu shows off his poisonous mushrooms:
‘“This is my observation window, Dr. Petrie, and you are about to enjoy an unique opportunity of studying fungology. I have already drawn your attention to the anaesthetic properties of the lycoperdon, or common puff-ball. You may have recognized the fumes? The chamber into which you rashly precipitated yourselves was charged with them. By a process of my own I have greatly enhanced the value of the puff-ball in this respect. Your friend, Mr. Weymouth, proved the most obstinate subject; but he succumbed in fifteen seconds.”
“Logan! Help! HELP! This way, man!”
Something very like fear sounded in Weymouth’s voice now. Indeed, the situation was so uncanny that it almost seemed unreal. A group of men had entered the farthermost cellars, led by one who bore an electric pocket-lamp. The hard, white ray danced from bloated gray fungi to others of nightmare shape, of dazzling, venomous brilliance. The mocking, lecture-room voice continued:
“Note the snowy growth upon the roof, Doctor. Do not be deceived by its size. It is a giant variety of my own culture and is of the order empusa. You, in England, are familiar with the death of the common house-fly – which is found attached to the window-pane by a coating of white mold. I have developed the spores of this mold and have produced a giant species. Observe the interesting effect of the strong light upon my orange and blue amanita fungus!”
Hard beside me I heard Nayland Smith groan, Weymouth had become suddenly silent. For my own part, I could have shrieked in pure horror. FOR I KNEW WHAT WAS COMING. I realized in one agonized instant the significance of the dim lantern, of the careful progress through the subterranean fungi grove, of the care with which Fu-Manchu and his servant had avoided touching any of the growths. I knew, now, that Dr. Fu-Manchu was the greatest fungologist the world had ever known; was a poisoner to whom the Borgias were as children – and I knew that the detectives blindly were walking into a valley of death.
Then it began – the unnatural scene – the saturnalia of murder.
Like so many bombs the brilliantly colored caps of the huge toadstool-like things alluded to by the Chinaman exploded, as the white ray sought them out in the darkness which alone preserved their existence. A brownish cloud – I could not determine whether liquid or powdery – arose in the cellar.
I tried to close my eyes – or to turn them away from the reeling forms of the men who were trapped in that poison-hole. It was useless:
I must look.
The bearer of the lamp had dropped it, but the dim, eerily illuminated gloom endured scarce a second. A bright light sprang up – doubtless at the touch of the fiendish being who now resumed speech:
“Observe the symptoms of delirium, Doctor!” Out there, beyond the glass door, the unhappy victims were laughing – tearing their garments from their bodies – leaping – waving their arms – were become MANIACS!
“We will now release the ripe spores of giant empusa,” continued the wicked voice. “The air of the second cellar being super-charged with oxygen, they immediately germinate. Ah! it is a triumph! That process is the scientific triumph of my life!”
Like powdered snow the white spores fell from the roof, frosting the writhing shapes of the already poisoned men. Before my horrified gaze, THE FUNGUS GREW; it spread from the head to the feet of those it touched; it enveloped them as in glittering shrouds...
“They die like flies!” screamed Fu-Manchu, with a sudden febrile excitement; and I felt assured of something I had long suspected: that that magnificent, perverted brain was the brain of a homicidal maniac – though Smith would never accept the theory.
“It is my fly-trap!” shrieked the Chinaman. “And I am the god of destruction!”’8
It’s not hard to see the influence on Ian Fleming here: a megalomaniacal super-villain wields great knowledge in a sadistic and elaborate fashion, and the scene is described in vivid, baroque and frightening prose. There are no passages in the works of John Buchan, Dornford Yates or Leslie Charteris remotely like this. There are passages somewhat like this in Sapper – because Rohmer was one of Sapper’s chief influences.
Sapper’s first novel, Bulldog Drummond, was published in August 1920, and was swiftly followed by several more in the series. Sapper’s greatest villain, Carl Peterson, was directly inspired by Fu-Manchu. Not his physical appearance, which is never fully established and which constantly changes, along with his identity: we never even learn his true name. But although Peterson is not a bald Oriental mastermind, his plots and the methods he uses against Drummond and his friends are unmistakably those of Fu-Manchu. In The Si-Fan Mysteries, published in 1917, Fu-Manchu tries to kill Nayland Smith and Petrie by sending them a ‘Flower of Silence’, a Burmese specimen whose blooms contain a hollow thorn that releases poison, tying the tongue of victims before killing them. Smith and Petrie then visit their friend Sir Lionel Barton at his home, where they encounter more peculiarities:
‘In turn, Graywater Park had been a fortress, a monastery, and a manor-house. Now, in the extensive crypt below the former chapel, in an atmosphere artificially raised to a suitably stuffy temperature, were housed the strange pets brought by our eccentric host from distant lands. In one cage was an African lioness, a beautiful and powerful beast, docile as a cat. Housed under other arches were two surly hyenas, goats from the White Nile, and an antelope of Kordofan. In a stable opening upon the garden were a pair of beautiful desert gazelles, and near to them, two cranes and a marabout. The leopards, whose howling now disturbed the night, were in a large, cell-like cage immediately below the spot where of old the chapel altar had stood.’9
They discover that Barton has been drugged by Fu-Manchu, and escape with his servant Kennedy through a passageway beneath the park:
‘Now my sight was restored to me, and looking back along the passage, I saw, clinging to an irregularity in the moldy wall, the most gigantic scorpion I had ever set eyes upon! It was fully as large as my open hand.
Kennedy and Nayland Smith were stealthily retracing their steps, the former keeping the light directed upon the hideous insect, which now began running about with that horrible, febrile activity characteristic of the species. Suddenly came a sharp, staccato report... Sir Lionel had scored a hit with his Browning pistol.
In waves of sound, the report went booming along the passage. The lamp, as I have said, was turned in order to shine back upon us, rendering the tunnel ahead a mere black mouth – a veritable inferno, held by inhuman guards. Into that black cavern I stared, gloomily fascinated by the onward rolling sound storm; into that blackness I looked… to feel my scalp tingle horrifically, to know the crowning horror of the horrible journey.
The blackness was spangled with watching, diamond eyes! – with tiny insect eyes that moved; upon the floor, upon the walls, upon the ceiling! A choking cry rose to my lips.
“Smith! Barton! for God’s sake, look! The place is alive with scorpions!”
Around we all came, panic plucking at our hearts, around swept the beam of the big lamp; and there, retreating before the light, went a veritable army of venomous creatures! I counted no fewer than three of the giant red centipedes whose poisonous touch, called “the zayat kiss,” is certain death; several species of scorpion were represented; and some kind of bloated, unwieldy spider, so gross of body that its short, hairy legs could scarce support it, crawled, hideous, almost at my feet.
What other monstrosities of the insect kingdom were included in that obscene host I know not; my skin tingled from head to feet; I experienced a sensation as if a million venomous things already clung to me – unclean things bred in the malarial jungles of Burma, in the corpse-tainted mud of China’s rivers, in the fever spots of that darkest East from which Fu-Manchu recruited his shadow army.’10
There are many scenes like this in Rohmer’s work, and they are echoed in Dr No, where James Bond has to go through No’s ‘killing ground’, and discovers a cage filled with scuttling animals:
‘What was it? Bond listened to the pounding of his heart. Snakes? Scorpions? Centipedes?’11
They turn out to be giant tarantulas. Rohmer’s influence can also be seen in You Only Live Twice, which features a ‘Garden of Death’ filled with toxic plants, snakes, scorpions and spiders, and poisonous fish in its ponds.
Like Fu-Manchu, Sapper’s Carl Peterson also has a fondness for deadly animals, as Bulldog Drummond discovers:
‘He felt his way along the hall, and at length his hand touched the curtain – only to drop it again at once. From close behind him had come a sharp, angry hiss...
He stepped back a pace and stood rigid, staring at the spot from which the sound had seemed to come – but he could see nothing. Then he leaned forward and once more moved the curtain. Instantly it came again, sharper and angrier than before.
Hugh passed a hand over his forehead and found it damp. Germans he knew, and things on two legs, but what was this that hissed so viciously in the darkness? At length he determined to risk it, and drew from his pocket a tiny electric torch. Holding it well away from his body, he switched on the light. In the centre of the beam, swaying gracefully to and fro, was a snake. For a moment he watched it fascinated as it spat at the light angrily; he saw the flat hood where the vicious head was set on the upright body; then he switched off the torch and retreated rather faster than he had come.
‘A convivial household,’ he muttered to himself through lips that were a little dry. ‘A hooded cobra is an unpleasing pet.’’12
Peterson doesn’t have a pet marmoset, but like Fu-Manchu he keeps a primate: a gorilla (with which Drummond grapples).
Many of Rohmer’s stories featured attempts on people’s lives in locked rooms. The heroes, usually Nayland Smith and an associate, investigate, only to find they are targeted in the same way. In The Quest of The Sacred Slipper, a novel that doesn’t feature Fu-Manchu, the narrator is attacked with a blowpipe:
‘What looked like a reed was slowly inserted through the opening between door and doorpost! It was brought gradually around… until it pointed directly toward me!
I seemed to put forth a mighty mental effort, shaking off the icy hand of fear which held me inactive in my chair. A saving instinct warned me – and I ducked my head.
Something whirred past me and struck the wall behind.
Revolver in hand, I leapt across the room, dashed the door open, and fired blindly – again – and again – and again – down the passage.
And in the brief gleams I saw it!
I cannot call it man, but I saw the thing which, I doubt not, had killed poor Deeping with the crescent-knife and had propelled a poison-dart at me.
It was a tiny dwarf! Neither within nor without a freak exhibition had I seen so small a human being! A kind of supernatural dread gripped me by the throat at sight of it. As it turned with animal activity and bounded into my bathroom, I caught a three-quarter view of the creature’s swollen, incredible head – which was nearly as large as that of a normal man!
Never while my mind serves me can I forget that yellow, grinning face and those canine fangs – the tigerish, blazing eyes – set in the great, misshapen head upon the tiny, agile body.
Wildly, I fired again. I hurled myself forward and dashed into the room…’13
This novel was serialized in the magazine Short Stories between November 1913 and June 1914, and was published in book form in 1919. A very similar scene occurs in Bulldog Drummond, in which the hero is ambushed in his room at the Ritz:
‘The light flashed out, darting round the room. Ping! Something hit the sleeve of his pyjamas, but still he could see nothing. The bed, with the clothes thrown back; the washstand; the chair with his trousers and shirt – everything was as it had been when he turned in. And then he heard a second sound – distinct and clear. It came from high up, near the ceiling, and the beam caught the big cupboard and travelled up. It reached the top, and rested there, fixed and steady. Framed in the middle of it, peering over the edge, was a little hairless, brown face, holding what looked like a tube in its mouth. Hugh had one glimpse of a dark, skinny hand putting something in the tube, and then he switched off the torch and ducked, just as another fly pinged over his head and hit the wall behind…
He listened for a moment, but no movement came from above; then, half facing the wall, he put one leg against it. There was one quick, tremendous heave; a crash which sounded deafening; then silence. And once again he switched on his torch... Lying on the floor by the window was one of the smallest men he had ever seen. He was a native of sorts, and Hugh turned him over with his foot. He was quite unconscious, and the bump on his head, where it had hit the floor, was rapidly swelling to the size of a large orange. In his hand he still clutched the little tube…’14
Fu-Manchu usually favours dacoits – Burmese assassins – to do his dirty work, having them place insects, spiders or poison in the rooms of his enemies:
‘Every nerve in my body seemed to be strung tensely. I was icy cold, expectant, and prepared for whatever horror was upon us.
The shadow became stationary. The dacoit was studying the interior of the room.
Then it suddenly lengthened, and, craning my head to the left, I saw a lithe, black-clad form, surmounted by a Yellow face, sketchy in the moonlight, pressed against the window-panes!
One thin, brown hand appeared over the edge of the lowered sash, which it grasped – and then another. The man made absolutely no sound whatever. The second hand disappeared – and reappeared. It held a small, square box. There was a very faint CLICK.
The dacoit swung himself below the window with the agility of an ape, as, with a dull, muffled thud, SOMETHING dropped upon the carpet!
“Stand still, for your life!” came Smith’s voice, high-pitched.
A beam of white leaped out across the room and played full upon the coffee-table in the center.
Prepared as I was for something horrible, I know that I paled at sight of the thing that was running round the edge of the envelope.
It was an insect, full six inches long, and of a vivid, venomous, red color! It had something of the appearance of a great ant, with its long, quivering antennae and its febrile, horrible vitality; but it was proportionately longer of body and smaller of head, and had numberless rapidly moving legs. In short, it was a giant centipede, apparently of the scolopendra group, but of a form quite new to me.
These things I realized in one breathless instant; in the next – Smith had dashed the thing’s poisonous life out with one straight, true blow of the golf club!
I leaped to the window and threw it widely open, feeling a silk thread brush my hand as I did so. A black shape was dropping, with incredible agility from branch to branch of the ivy, and, without once offering a mark for a revolver-shot, it merged into the shadows beneath the trees of the garden. As I turned and switched on the light Nayland Smith dropped limply into a chair, leaning his head upon his hands. Even that grim courage had been tried sorely.’15
In Sapper’s The Final Round, published 14 years after this passage, Bulldog Drummond receives an equally unpleasant gift from Peterson:
‘With the paper-knife he prised open the lid, and even he gave a startled exclamation when he saw what was inside. Personally it filled me with a feeling of nausea, and I saw Toby Sinclair clutch the table.
It was a spider of sorts, but such a spider as I have never dreamed of in my wildest nightmares. Its body was the size of a hen’s egg; its six legs the size of a crab’s. And it was covered with coarse black hair. Even in death it looked the manifestation of all evil, with its great protruding eyes and short sharp jaws, and with a shudder I turned away.’16
Peterson has also sent a female of the species, which Drummond bashes with a poker. Both these scenes may have been in Fleming’s mind for the scene in Dr No in which Bond wakes to find a centipede crawling over him:
‘What had woken him up? Bond moved softly, preparing to slip out of bed. Bond stopped moving. He stopped as dead as a live man can. Something had stirred on his right ankle. Now it was moving up the inside of his shin. Bond could feel the hairs on his leg being parted. It was an insect of some sort. A very big one. It was long, five or six inches – as long as his hand. He could feel dozens of tiny feet lightly touching his skin. What was it? Then Bond heard something he had never heard before – the sound of the hair on his head rasping up on the pillow. Bond analysed the noise. It couldn’t be! It simply couldn’t! Yes, his hair was standing on end. Bond could even feel the cool air reaching his scalp between the hairs. How extraordinary! How very extraordinary! He had always thought it was a figure of speech. But why? Why was it happening to him? The thing on his leg moved. Suddenly Bond realized that he was afraid, terrified. His instincts, even before they had communicated with his brain, had told his body that he had a centipede on him…’17
This scene is a virtuoso piece of writing from Fleming, with his powers of description at full throttle. He takes this rather stale convention and prolongs the visceral reaction for much longer than Rohmer or Sapper. Their prose is vivid, occasionally even chilling, but this is a rare example of suspense in Fleming, with time almost seeming to slow down, and his eye zooming in on every hair of the centipede’s legs as it traverses across Bond’s body. In the film adaptation, ironically, the centipede became a spider, the latter being thought more visually impressive.
Fleming drew on the work of both Sapper and Rohmer in Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. The master-villain of those three novels, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, is directly inspired by both Carl Peterson and Dr Fu-Manchu. Like Peterson, he changes identity and appearance, transforming himself into the Comte de Bleuville and Dr Shatterhand (Peterson poses as the ‘Comte de Guy’ and many others). Like Peterson, he is a highly organized criminal trying to alter world events primarily for profit; and like Peterson he makes use of biological warfare to do it, among other schemes. These are specific similarities, but they were not all that unusual in thrillers before Fleming. The combination of them is more telling, and coupled with Blofeld having a female accomplice called Irma this confirms Sapper as a direct source. I suspect Fleming called her that to make the inspiration more obvious, and perhaps to pay tribute to Sapper.
But like Fu-Manchu, Blofeld heads a secret organization that intends to bring down the world: the Si-Fan in Rohmer, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in Fleming. In Rohmer’s 1936 novel President Fu Manchu, it is suggested in passing that Japan’s real-life Society of the Black Dragon is associated with the Si-Fan. In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld has surrounded himself with former members of the same society. In The Devil Doctor, published in 1916, Fu-Manchu traps Nayland Smith and his friend Dr Petrie, and speechifies about seppuku and other Japanese traditions:
‘“The weapon near your hand,” continued the Chinaman, imperturbably, “is a product of the civilization of our near neighbors, the Japanese, a race to whose courage I prostrate myself in meekness. It is the sword of a samurai, Dr. Petrie. It is of very great age, and was, until an unfortunate misunderstanding with myself led to the extinction of the family, a treasured possession of a noble Japanese house...”’18
Fu-Manchu places Nayland Smith in a wire cage called the ‘Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom’ and lets starving rats loose inside it. He then offers Petrie the samurai sword with which to kill his friend before the rats gnaw him to death. Petrie swipes at Nayland Smith with the sword, nearly decapitating him, but the two are rescued at the last moment by Fu-Manchu’s female assistant Karamaneh, who has switched sides, something she did regularly. In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld makes several speeches that echo Fu-Manchu’s in this novel, and also uses a samurai sword:
‘“The account I have to settle with you is a personal one. Have you ever heard the Japanese expression ‘kirisute gomen’?”
Bond groaned. “Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld!”
“It dates from the time of the samurai. It means literally ‘killing and going away’. If a low person hindered the samurai’s passage along the road or failed to show him proper respect, the samurai was within his rights to lop off the man’s head. I regard myself as a latter-day samurai. My fine sword has not yet been blooded. Yours will be an admirable head to cut its teeth on.”’19
Bond manages to best Blofeld in the sword fight, in a chapter titled ‘Blood and Thunder’, which was a phrase often used to describe boys’ adventure stories and similar tales from the late 19th century onwards. Reading such speeches in isolation, it’s hard to tell if it’s Blofeld speaking, or Dr No – or Fu-Manchu. The ‘mocking, lecture-room voice’ and megalomaniacal rhetoric of Fleming’s villains has its origins in Rohmer’s work.
Although Fleming first encountered Rohmer as a boy, it seems he kept up with the series as an adult. One bizarre similarity comes in the story Green Devil Mask, which was serialized in the Canadian publication Star Weekly in January and February 1952. In it, Nayland Smith stops a plot by Fu-Manchu and his daughter to turn the gold bullion in Fort Knox into a worthless base metal using a new type of X-ray. This may simply be an uncanny coincidence because in Goldfinger, published in 1959, the titular villain merely wants to rob Fort Knox of its gold. But when it came to making the film of the novel a few years later, the scriptwriters felt that this didn’t work, and changed the plot so that Goldfinger plans to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox, rendering it worthless for decades.
A novel that seems very likely to have influenced Ian Fleming directly is The Island of Fu Manchu, which was published in 1941. Fu Manchu has set up a sisal mine in Haiti using cheap labour, having frightened the locals by the fraudulent use of voodoo. The mine is a diversion: inside a hollowed-out volcano, Fu Manchu operates a secret base in which he keeps experimental underwater craft that will help tip the balance of world power. He captures Denis Nayland Smith and Bart Kerrigan, and threatens to throw them in a massive swamp, which contains Burmese soldier spiders.
This sounds like a James Bond adventure taken to the extreme. In Live And Let Die, Mr Big – described by Antony Boucher in his review of the novel for The New York Times as ‘a sort of blackface Fu Manchu’20 – uses voodoo to frighten locals in Jamaica into submission. Dr No features a guano mine on Crab Key, and No uses cheap local labour to build his base. A base in a hollowed-out volcano was used by Blofeld in the film of You Only Live Twice, but not in Fleming’s novel, where Blofeld operated from a castle. Rohmer did not only provide elements that Fleming built on to create what we now recognize as his style: in many ways, Fleming toned down those elements, and despite Rohmer’s lack of convincing characterization and archaic prose style, his work often seems more in line with the popular perception of James Bond stories than Fleming’s own novels.
A major difference between Fleming and Rohmer is in their protagonists: James Bond is a very different character from the anodyne Denis Nayland Smith and his assorted accomplices. Bentley-driving Bulldog Drummond is more similar to Bond, although I think there were several closer models. But Fleming’s villains – their conspiracies, strategies, ways of working, manner of speaking and treating others – as well as the locations and overall tone of his novels, all owe a lot to Rohmer’s work. Rohmer was a very prolific author, and it would take much more space to do justice to this topic, but I hope this article has at least gone some way to showing that he was a major source of inspiration for Ian Fleming – and often a very direct one.
Notes
1, 7, 8, 15. All quotes from The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu (the American title) by Sax Rohmer: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/173/173-h/173-h.htm
2. p127, Dr No by Ian Fleming, Pan, 1965.
3. p10, Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett, Phoenix, 1996.
4. pp239-240, The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson, Companion Book Club, 1966.
5. What Boys Read, The Times, February 15, 1950.
6. p210, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel by Julian Symons, Viking, 1985.
9. p176 The Hand of Fu-Manchu (American title) by Sax Rohmer, Borgo Press, Wildside Press edition, 2001.
10. pp209-210 The Hand of Fu-Manchu.
11, p158, Dr No.
12 pp67,68 Bulldog Drummond by Sapper, House of Stratus, 2001.
13. pp20-21, The Quest of The Sacred Slipper by Sax Rohmer, Borgo Press, 2002.
14. p168 Bulldog Drummond.
16. pp60-61 The Final Round by Sapper, House of Stratus, 2009.
17. pp55-58, Dr No.
18. p192 The Devil Doctor by Sax Rohmer, BiblioBazaar, 2007.
19. pp170-171, You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming, Pan, 1966.
20. ‘Criminals At Large’ by Anthony Boucher, The New York Times, April 10, 1955.
‘It is certainly necessary for you to die’
This is part of Blunt Instruments, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, villainous mastermind Dr Evil captures Austin Powers, who he then introduces to his son, Scott:
‘DR EVIL
Scott, I want you to meet Daddy’s nemesis, Austin Powers.
SCOTT EVIL
What? Are you feeding him? Why don’t you just kill him?
DR EVIL
I have an even better idea. I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.’
This is an obvious parody of James Bond, and raises a laugh for that reason. One of the best-known examples of such a scene takes place in Goldfinger, in which Bond is captured by the eponymous super-villain, a gold-smuggler said to be ‘the richest man in England’. In the novel, published in 1959, Bond is bound to a table and threatened with a buzz saw:
‘Bond glanced down the table on which he lay spread-eagled. He let his head fall back with a sigh. There was a narrow slit down the centre of the polished steel table. At the far end of the slit, like a foresight framed in the vee of his parted feet, were the glinting teeth of a circular saw…’1
Bond, increasingly desperate as the saw approaches his body, suggests that he and his companion Tilly Masterton could work for Goldfinger. The offer is rejected:
‘Bond said politely, ‘Then you can go and —— yourself.’ He expelled all the breath from his lungs and closed his eyes.
‘Even I am not capable of that, Mr Bond,’ said Goldfinger with good humour. ‘And now, since you have chosen the stony path instead of the smooth, I must extract what interest I can from your predicament by making the path as stony as possible...’’2
But then, on a whim, Goldfinger changes his mind. He decides he does need a couple of assistants after all, and shuts off the saw.
When it came to adapting the book for film, this scene proved problematic for the scriptwriters. The first problem was the one that Austin Powers poked fun at: why would a villain go to such extravagant lengths to kill the hero when it would be much simpler (and safer) to just shoot him through the head? Secondly, how does Bond get out of the situation? Fleming’s solution seemed highly implausible, and might elicit groans from a cinema audience. And finally, the entire set-up was a cliché: along with being tied to train tracks, such scenes had been a staple of the early radio and film serials, pulps and cartoons. In Columbia Pictures’ Captain Midnight in 1942, for example, the titular hero finds himself on a log rapidly heading towards a buzz saw, while in the 1933 Disney cartoon The Mad Doctor, Mickey Mouse has an extended nightmare in which he is strapped to an operating table by a Doctor XXX before a spinning saw descends from the ceiling to cut him in two.
While he was working on the treatment for Goldfinger in April 1963, Richard Maibaum wrote to the film’s producers, Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, to explain his solution to this problem:
‘That BUZZ SAW in the torture scene must go. It’s the oldest device in cheap melodrama. The villain strapping the heroine to a work bench, etc. It’s comic by now. Instead, I am dreaming up a machine which utilizes the new LASER BEAM. It was featured in LIFE magazine and I have sent for the article to send on to you. It’s a coiled light around an oblong-shaped ruby. When the light is turned on a beam of red light is emitted from the ruby. A ten-thousandth of a second exposure to the beam can remove a cancer. It also can be used, when developed, to cut steel, etc. I visualize a demonstration of the beam, from an overhead contraption hanging from rails on the ceiling, showing it cutting through steel like a razor through paper. And then used, as the buzz saw was in the book, threatening to cut Bond in half. The beam will look like a fiery red concentrated thin long blade emerging straight down from the contraption overhead, coming closer, closer. With the same electrical whine as the saw would have. This out-Flemings Fleming. Using the very latest scientific discovery in the old way of scaring the wits out of people.’3
The futuristic extravagance of the laser beam distracted from the fact that the essence of the scene remained the same, with the same problems: there seemed no reason for Goldfinger not to just shoot Bond, no reason to spare him, and equally no way for Bond to plausibly escape from the table. Maibaum and Paul Dehn, who was called in to work on the script, both struggled with these problems. Eventually, Dehn worked out a solution whereby Bond overhears Goldfinger refer to ‘Operation Grand Slam’ earlier, and by mentioning it piques the villain’s interest and fear enough to have him shut off the machine. Dehn also added the famous dialogue in the scene:
‘BOND
Do you expect me to talk?
GOLDFINGER
No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’
Goldfinger was the film that made James Bond a global phenomenon. As a result, this scene is popularly regarded as the prototype of the villain arranging an elaborate death for the captured hero, as parodied in Austin Powers and elsewhere.
But this convention doesn’t simply predate Goldfinger: it was so common that it was already being parodied decades before the novel and film were released. In Leslie Charteris’ 1930 novel Knight Templar (later retitled The Avenging Saint), Simon Templar renews battle with villainous mastermind Dr Rayt Marius. In the third act, Marius captures The Saint, who sardonically remarks that he hopes he has invented a ‘picturesque’ way for him to die:
‘“It is certainly necessary for you to die, Templar,” said Marius dispassionately. “There is a score between us that cannot be settled in any other way.”
The Saint nodded, and for a moment his eyes were two flakes of blue steel.
“You’re right, Angel Face,” he said softly. “You’re dead right… This planet isn’t big enough to hold us both. And you know as surely as you’re standing there that if you don’t kill me I’m going to kill you, Rayt Marius!”
“I appreciate that,” said the giant calmly.
And then the Saint laughed.
“But still we have to face the question of method, old dear,” he murmured, with an easy return of all his old mocking banter. “You can’t wander round England bumping people off quite so airily. I know you’ve done it before – on one particular occasion – but I haven’t yet discovered how you got away with it. There are bodies to be got rid of, and things like that, you know – it isn’t quite such a soft snap as it reads in story-books. It’s an awful bore, but there you are. Or were you just thinking of running us through the mincing machine and sluicin’ the pieces down the kitchen sink?”
Marius shook his head.
“I have noticed,” he remarked, “that in the stories to which you refer, the method employed for the elimination of an undesirable busybody is usually so elaborate and complicated that the hero’s escape is as inevitable as the reader expects it to be. But I have not that melodramatic mind. If you are expecting an underground cellar full of poisonous snakes, or a trap-door leading to a subterranean river, or a man-eating tiger imported for your benefit, or anything else so conventional – pray disillusion yourself. The end I have designed for you is very simple. You will simply meet with an unfortunate accident – that is all.”
He was carefully trimming the end of his cigar as he spoke; and his tremendous hands moved to the operation with a ruthless deliberation that was more terrible than any violence.’4
This is essentially the same gag as the one in Austin Powers, only 67 years earlier – and 23 years before James Bond was created. Charteris was poking fun at well-established thriller conventions, as well as at himself, as he had used many of them. But he also made sure not to undermine the idea so much that he couldn’t use similar plot devices later:
‘The Saint knew as well as anyone that the blood-curdling inventions of the sensational novelist had a real foundation in the mentality of a certain type of crook, that there were men constitutionally incapable of putting the straightforward skates under an enemy whom they had in their power – men whose tortuous minds ran to electrically fired revolvers, or tame alligators in a private swimming bath, as inevitably as water runs downhill. The Saint had met this type of man.’5
Knight Templar features several other conventions now associated with James Bond. In the novel’s opening chapter, Simon Templar is held at gunpoint; he throws a cigarette onto the floor that fills the place with white smoke, allowing him to make his escape. ‘Altogether a most satisfactory beginning to the Sabbath,’ he remarks to his sidekick, Roger Conway, as they speed away in his eight-cylinder Hirondel:
‘‘I won’t say it was dead easy, but you can’t have everything. The only real trouble came at the very end, and then the old magnesium cigarette was just what the doctor ordered...’’6
If you were to feature such a scene in a film or novel today, it would be seen as a parody of James Bond. But Ian Fleming also spoofed this precise plot idea. In From Russia, With Love, published in 1957, Bond is caught unawares on the Orient Express by SMERSH assassin Red Grant, who aims a copy of War and Peace at him that can shoot –.25 dum-dum bullets fired by an electric battery. Bond stalls for time by saying that SMERSH seems to have thought out their operation very well, but for one thing. Grant asks him to elucidate:
‘‘Not without a cigarette.’
‘Okay. Go ahead. But if there’s a move I don’t like, you’ll be dead.’
Bond slipped his right hand into his hip-pocket. He drew out his broad gunmetal cigarette case. Opened it. Took out a cigarette. Took his lighter out of his trouser pocket. Lit the cigarette and put the lighter back. He left the cigarette case on his lap beside the book. He put his left hand casually over the book and the cigarette case as if to prevent them slipping off his lap. He puffed away at his cigarette. If only it had been a trick one–magnesium flare, or anything he could throw in the man’s face! If only his Service went in for those explosive toys!’’7
The joke in Austin Powers about villains not shooting heroes when they get the chance is immediately associated with the Bond films, testament to how successful they have been. A knock-on effect of their global popularity has been that Ian Fleming is now thought to have originated many conventions of the thriller genre that predate his novels by decades. A related convention to the villain preparing overly elaborate methods of doing away with the hero is that while doing so he also boastfully explains his plans. Once the hero has escaped, he is then armed with enough information to stop the plot. Red Grant makes this mistake in From Russia, With Love:
‘‘I expect you’d like to know what this is all about. Be glad to tell you. We’ve got about half an hour before you’re due to go. It’ll give me an extra kick telling the famous Mister Bond of the Secret Service what a bloody fool he is.’’8
This device also features in Knight Templar: when Rayt Marius captures The Saint, he conveniently outlines ‘the bare and sufficient essentials of an abomination that would set a torch to the powder-magazine of Europe and kindle such a blaze as could only be quenched in smoking seas of blood’.9
Even the popular conception of what constitutes a ‘Bond villain’ predates Ian Fleming. Marius is an arms-dealer trying to start a war on behalf of a group of financiers. Said to be ‘one of the richest men in the world’, he is nicknamed the Millionaire Without A Country. He is also a giant, and an ugly one at that (his face ‘might have served as a model for some hideous heathen idol’), which is why The Saint repeatedly calls him ‘Angel Face’.
In fact, this sort of megalomaniacal super-villain plotting wide-reaching conspiracies has existed since the beginning of the 20th century, featuring in thrillers by the likes of William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim. These characters were often physically deformed foreigners who wined and dined the hero with great sophistication while pontificating on their grand schemes. Here’s an excerpt from The Man With The Clubfoot by Valentine Williams, published in 1918, in which Prussian spymaster Dr Adolph ‘Clubfoot’ Grundt entertains British secret agent Desmond Okewood:
‘“You smoke?” queried Clubfoot. “No!” – he held up his hand to stop me as I was reaching for my cigarette case, “you shall have a cigar – not one of our poor German Hamburgers, but a fine Havana cigar given me by a member of the English Privy Council. You stare! Aha! I repeat, by a member of the English Privy Council, to me, the Boche, the barbarian, the Hun! No hole and corner work for the old doctor. Der Stelze may be lame, Clubfoot may be past his work, but when he travels en mission, he travels en prince, the man of wealth and substance. There is none too high to do him honour, to listen to his views on poor, misguided Germany, the land of thinkers sold into bondage to the militarists! Bah! the fools!”
He snarled venomously. This man was beginning to interest me. His rapid change of moods was fascinating, now the kindly philosopher, now the Teuton braggart, now the Hun incorporate. As he limped across the room to fetch his cigar case from the mantelpiece, I studied him.
He was a vast man, not so much by reason of his height, which was below the medium, but his bulk, which was enormous. The span of his shoulders was immense, and, though a heavy paunch and a white flabbiness of face spoke of a gross, sedentary life, he was obviously a man of quite unusual strength. His arms particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance... his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath the shaggy brows, that hinted at accesses of ape-like fury, uncontrollable and ferocious.
He gave me his cigar which, as he had said, was a good one, and, after a preliminary sip of his wine, began to speak.
“I am a plain man, Herr Doktor,” he said, “and I like plain speaking. That is why I am going to speak quite plainly to you...”’10
Since the publication of Casino Royale in 1953, dozens of articles and books have been written about Ian Fleming. Surprisingly, very few have looked at his influences in any depth. In The James Bond Dossier (1965), Kingsley Amis repeatedly compared Bond to H. ‘Sapper’ McNeile’s character Bulldog Drummond. But while Drummond was certainly an influence – a two-fisted hero in a Bentley battling arch-villain Carl Peterson and his mistress Irma – he was much less of one than Charteris’ The Saint, who is surprisingly absent from most literary criticism on Ian Fleming (Bernard Bergonzi being a notable exception). The early serials, pulps and other authors barely get a look-in, and the idea has solidified over the years that Fleming was influenced primarily by Sapper and John Buchan. He was inspired by both, but I think several other writers were greater influences.
The result of Amis’ and others’ misconceptions is that later critics have read a couple of Sapper or Buchan novels and come away with the idea that they represented the last markers before the arrival of James Bond on the scene: it is as though the thriller between around 1928 and 1953 has been completely forgotten. This has led to the even firmer idea that while the so-called ‘clubland heroes’ may have defeated a few foreign baddies and driven fast cars, there was no sex, sadism or snobbery in thrillers before Fleming.
When Ian Fleming sat down to his typewriter in Jamaica in January 1952, he created an iconic fictional hero. Like Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and King Arthur, as long as stories are told James Bond will live on. Kingsley Amis wrote The James Bond Dossier as a rallying cry for Fleming to be granted a place in the canon of literature as a genius of popular fiction alongside the likes of Jules Verne, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. But that cry has largely been ignored, and a great deal of analysis of Fleming’s work has misunderstood his place in the canon of the thriller.
With many thanks to Colleen Kelley at the Special Collections of the University of Iowa Libraries.