Orchard Press Online
Mystery Magazine
May 2002
 |
CRIME BEAT
by Paul Davis |
Copyright © 2002 Paul Davis. All rights reserved.
Happy Anniversary, Mr. Bond
Celebrating 50 years of Ian Fleming’s James Bond Character
Forty years ago an
impressionable 10 year-old boy attended a Saturday afternoon showing of “Dr.
No” at the Colonial movie theater in South Philadelphia. Dr. No was the first
James Bond film based on Ian Fleming’s suave and dangerous British secret
agent and crime fighter with the Double O license to kill.
I’ve been a great
admirer of Ian Fleming ever since that initial film viewing. The first nine
books in my now extensive library were Fleming’s and many of my lifelong
interests such as travel, crime and espionage were all sparked by Fleming. As a
teenager, I was fascinated by Fleming’s use of exotic locales, women and
villains in the stories.
Many years later, I was thrilled to have been able to spend a
week with my wife at “Goldeneye,” Fleming’s villa in Oracabessa, Jamaica.
Fleming wrote all of the James Bond novels at this cliff top villa that
overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Fleming had steps carved out of the cliff, which
lead down to a private beach. Like Fleming, I went free diving in the cove and I
worked at Fleming’s original Jamaican Blue Mahoe writing desk. I also met and
spoke to a wonderful woman named Violet, who was Fleming’s original
housekeeper. It was truly a dream vacation for a Fleming aficionado.
As an aficionado, I
was quite pleased to discover that Penguin’s Modern Classics re-released the
complete set of 14 James Bond novels in April, marking the 50th
anniversary of one of fiction’s most enduring characters. “Casino Royale,”
Ian Fleming’s first James Bond thriller, was completed in 1952, which was also
the year I was born.
In the publishing of
the Fleming novels in hardback, paperback and Audi book, Penguin praised
Fleming’s work, noting that the novels were immediately recognized as classic
thrillers by his contemporaries Kingsley Amis, Raymond Chandler and John
Betjeman.
“Fleming was able
to peer beyond the Cold War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate
the emerging milieu of the Colombian cartels, Osama bin Laden and, indeed the
Russian Mafia, as well as the nightmarish idea that some such fanatical
freelance megalomaniac would eventually collar some weapons-grade plutonium,”
Christopher Hitchens wrote in his introduction to the newly released novels.
With the books
back in print, my hope is that they will gain a new generation of readers who
only know the James Bond character from the hugely successful film series. The
twentieth Bond film will be coming out this November.
Although I loved
Sean Connery’s portrayal of James Bond in the early films, the series has
sadly transformed from thrillers with a few humorous asides to action-comedies
and later turned to camp and self-parody. After Roger Moore finally gave up the
role to Timothy Dalton, and then to Pierce Brosnan, the films have thankfully
returned somewhat to being thrillers.
It seems to me that
with each film after “Goldfinger” the producers tried to top the previous
Bond film in stunts, gadgetry and outlandishness. Like most of Fleming’s
faithful readers, I wish the films had followed the novels more closely. The
books, which have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, have little
connection to the current James Bond films other than the use of the character.
To many who only know the films, James Bond is no better than a comic book
character.
Ian
Lancaster Fleming often told friends that he was going to write “the spy story
to end all spy stories.” He was born in London, England on May 28th
in 1908. Fleming’s father, Major Valentine Fleming, was killed in France in
1917 during the First World War shortly before Ian’s ninth birthday.
Fleming attended
Eton, SandHurst and the Universities of Geneva and Munich. In his twenties, he
worked as a correspondent for Reuters News Agency and he was dispatched to the
Soviet Union in 1933 to cover the famous spy trial of six British engineers who
worked for Metropolitan-Vickers. He later worked as a stockbroker until the
start of WWII when he became the personal assistant to the director of Naval
Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey. Royal Navy Commander Ian Fleming worked out
of Room 39 at the Admiralty for the course of the war.
Fleming accompanied
Godfrey to the U.S. to establish closer relations and he met with J. Edgar
Hoover and William Stephenson, who was “The Man Called Intrepid.” He visited
Camp X in Canada where allied spies and commandos were being trained. Much of
his wartime experience would find their way into his books.
On another Naval
intelligence mission in 1942 he ventured to Jamaica to meet with his American
counterparts over concerns about German U-Boat in the Caribbean. He fell in love
with the tropical island and bought an old donkey racetrack, deciding to build a
house there.
After the war,
Fleming returned to journalism and became a foreign manager for the London
Sunday Times. He built his villa in Jamaica and named it Goldeneye. A long time
bachelor and “womanizer” like his James Bond character, he finally married
Ann O’ Neill and often told reporters that he wrote the books to get over the
shock of getting married at the age of 42.
Each year he spent
the months of January and February at Goldeneye, where he wrote that year’s
James Bond novel.
Not that it matters,
as Ian Fleming himself said in the introduction to “From Russia With Love,”
but much of the background material in his books was accurate. He was a
journalist and intelligence officer before he became a novelist, so his books
contain a good deal of what he called “incidental intelligence.” From the practices of voodoo in “Live and Let Die,” to
genealogy in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” his books explained in
detail a wide variety of subjects. He also richly described places, products and
events, which added authentic touches to his stories.
Although Fleming has
been criticized for creating unbelievable villains like Ernst Stavro Blofeld and
Dr. No, one should stop and consider real life villains Martin Bormann, Al
Capone, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Or consider Manuel Noriega, a tin-pot
dictator who was involved in international drug operations, believed in
witchcraft and wore red bikini underwear for protection from his enemies. Top
that, Mr. Goldfinger.
In a 1964
Playboy
magazine interview Fleming said that Bond was a man of action, a cipher, and
simply a blunt instrument in the hands of the government. Fleming also infused
the character with some of his own “quirks and characteristics.”
He said he wanted
Bond to be entirely an anonymous instrument and let the action of the book carry
him along. He wanted the character to more or less follow the pattern of Raymond
Chandler’s or Dashiell Hammett’s heroes – believable people, believable
heroes.
“He’s sort of an
amalgam of romantic tough guys, dressed in 20th Century clothes,
using 20th Century language,” Fleming told Playboy. “More true to
the type of commandos and secret service men than to the heroes of ancient
thrillers.”
The Double O license to
kill was a fictional device to make Bond’s job more interesting. He said he
got the idea of the Double O from the Admiralty, which at the beginning of the
war used the Double O prefix on all of its top-secret signals. Bond battled
SMERSH, which was a contraction of Smert Shpionam, meaning Death to Spies.
SMERSH was a real Soviet counterintelligence group that hunted and executed
anti-Soviet spies during WWII. In the later books Bond took on SPECTRE – The Special
Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. SPECTRE
was an international crime organization that contained elements of SMERSH, the
Gestapo and international organized crime groups.
He readily admitted his
plots were fantastic, yet he said they were often based on the real world of
intelligence. He noted that on occasion a news story would “lift a corner of
the veil” and reveal the real world of spies and commandos.
Fleming made note of the
case of the Russian assassin Captain Nikoly Khokhlov, who came equipped with an
electrically operated gun fitted with a silencer and concealed in a gold
cigarette case. The gun fired bullets tipped in cyanide, which might lead a
pathologist to rule the cause of death to be heart failure.
“I can trace most
of the central incidents in my books to real happenings,” Fleming wrote in a
magazine article. “The line between fact and fiction is a very narrow one.”
Fleming would often
dismiss his books as mere entertainment, but he also said that thrillers may not
be literature with a capital L, but it was possible to write what he described
as “thrillers designed to be read as literature.” He went on to say that the
practitioners of this form have included Edgar Allen Poe, Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. He said he saw nothing shameful
in his aiming as high as that.
Fleming died in
August of 1964. He did not live to see the film “Goldfinger,” which was
released later that year. He died of a heart attack, which his character Darko
Kerim in the novel “From Russia With Love” described as “the Iron Crab.”
Fleming died, as he thought he would, from living too much, and from living too
well.
Most photos of Ian
Fleming show him in the last years of his life, but I’ve always liked an
earlier photo of him, where he is standing in his Royal Navy uniform before a
fireplace in Room 39 at the Admiralty. In this photo he is young and handsome,
with dark hair and a cold sardonic look on his face. He looks like an awful lot
like his character James Bond.
For more information
on Ian Fleming, you can read “The Life of Ian Fleming,” by John Pearson and
“Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond,” by Andrew Lycett. And course you
must read the James Bond novels:
Casino Royale
Live and Let Die
Moonraker
Diamonds are Forever
Goldfinger
For Your Eyes Only
Thunderball
The Spy Who Loved Me
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
You Only Live Twice
The Man With The Golden Gun
Octopussy and The Living Daylight
Contact the Author - daviswrite@aol.com