by Colin Watson
The thriller hero is made of sterner stuff. He need pay no court to the intellect. He can move around, taking his chance with whatever medium he enters. Television does not daunt him, although the probabilities are that it will not accommodate him for long and that even while he stays he will need to defer to certain expectations. One hero there was, though, whose lease of television time had begun to look like a permanent freehold. His name was Simon Templar, alias The Saint.
The Saint of Television existed in the person of Roger Moore, an actor of pleasant voice, athletic build and seemingly imperishable good looks. His manner was casual but aware; it could switch from kindly concern to insouciance, from gravity to lip-curling ferociousness. He was patently a ladies’ man, yet a man’s man for all that. For he was one of the most devastating balsa-smashers in the business. He looked clean enough to eat your dinner off. And he was one of the very few television characters in relation to whom speculation about toupees seemed indecent.
This latter-day Saint was virile but unmarried, which meant that a not-too-serious touch of romance could be added to each episode. His wealth, evidenced by invariable elegance of apparel and a habit of turning up in expensive places for no better reason than to be met accidentally by an acquaintance in need, was unexplained yet not, somehow, suspect. One felt that it must have accrued from the dispositions of grateful Bohemian monarchs and from daring coups that had left only blackguards the poorer. Wherever he might be, in Tuxon or Maidenhead or Rome or Mombasa, Templar would be whisked to and fro in his big whiter-than-white car. Neither the car nor its owner ever got dirty.
Over the years, one began to feel that the smooth, dependable, inoffensive, sometimes silly but never soporific, Saint series was a projection into drama of all the advertising rituals and assumptions. Most television wears an air of salesmanship somehow; it is, after all, a shop window for talent and ideas as well as things to eat, smoke and wash with, and in the end the patina of commercialism spreads over all. The more expert the programme, the stronger the impression it conveys of trying to sell something. As Simon Templar developed in self-assurance, dress sense, wit and resourcefulness, he became less a representation of good battling against evil than of the victory of the discriminating and deodorized possessor of indispensables.
The Saint’s metamorphosis is of particular interest. It provides an opportunity, rare and possibly unique, of making direct comparison in the same persona between the qualities regarded as heroic forty years ago and those which commend themselves to a mass-audience now. Certain of these qualities have been modified scarcely at all. In 1930, Leslie Charteris observed that
when confronted by an armed man twice his own size, the Saint felt that he needed no excuse for employing any damaging foul known to the fighting game …
Karate chops, gouges, trips, and the flailing of opponents with balsa furniture are tactics which a modern television audience accepts with characteristic equanimity. There exists no longer the obligation Charteris apparently felt to justify this sort of mayhem by doubling the odds against the hero. Even the expressions ‘foul’ and ‘fighting game’ have a faint mustiness about them, although they will not be altogether unintelligible for as long as sport continues to be ransacked for metaphors by thriller writers, con men and ministers of state.
The vintage Saint books were being written while ‘Sapper’ was at the height of his popularity. A close relationship between Templar and Bulldog Drummond is apparent at a number of points. Thus the Saint’s injunction to a friend to
‘Get out your car, fill her up with gas, and come right round to Brook Street. And pack a gun. This is going to be a wild night.’
was a distinct echo of Drummond’s cry to Stockton four years earlier:
‘Call up your war lore, for we’re going to have a peerless night creep!’
The resemblance between the manner in which Drummond addressed an opponent of lower social status and the Saint’s approach to his inferiors at that time, is also striking. Here was the Saint, interviewing a petty criminal – or rather a man he suspected of being one:
‘Do you talk, Rat Face?’ he asked. ‘Wotcher mean – talk? Yer big bullies …’ ‘Talk,’ repeated the Saint patiently. ‘Open your mouth, and emit sounds which you fondly believe to be English.’
Again the Saint, his wit now at its keenest:
‘… the misshapen lump of bone that keeps your unwashed ears apart …’
and
‘Why haven’t you come down before – so that I could knock your miscarriage of a face through the back of your monstrosity of a neck?’
In this mood, Simon Templar was virtually interchangeable with Captain Drummond, author of the felicitous
‘Now, rat face, what excuse have you got to offer for living?… I will break your arm – and that thing you call a face as well.’
But all that was fifty years ago. Drummond never had the chance to learn how to modify his language and behaviour to suit television’s heterogeneous audience. He died with the whip of his preparatory school invective at full larrup against unwashed hides and the cringing backs of Bolshy and Dago. His adventures still are read by thousands of consenting Britons, but in private. Their promulgation, unexpurgated, on television would be impossible in a world where Dagos play, and win, at football; where the Unwashed are up to their eyes in enormously profitable detergents; and where Bolshies buy and diligently watch the twenty-six episodes of The Forsyte Saga.
The Saint, on the other hand, has adapted himself to new times and a new medium. He still chases evil-doers, but it is unthinkable that he would identify them as simply ‘foreign-looking birds with ugly mugs’, as he did in The Saint Closes the Case (1930), even though his own appearance has remained miraculously unchanged since those days when
his dark hair was at its sleekest perfection, his blue eyes danced, his brown face was alight with an absurdly boyish enthusiasm.
He is a good deal less homicidal, too. His victims generally recover in time to be handcuffed and led away by representatives of law and order (formerly, it might be recalled, Templar’s implacable opponents). Yet in one single encounter in his younger days he shot two men dead, knifed a third in the throat, smashed the jawbone of a fourth, and dropped yet another ‘like a poleaxed steer’ before concentrating on the last, and most hateful, crook of all.
That knifing, incidentally, is one of the great curiosities of British crime fiction. The convention was very well established by the time the Saint novels began to appear that only foreigners and very low-grade criminals indeed used knives as fighting weapons, although home-bred murderers were allowed to press into service such cutlery as happened to be lying around provided they left it sticking in the victims and did not adopt it as permanent personal equipment. Yet Templar, whom no less reliable a witness than a rival in love once described as ‘the whitest man in the world’, quite clearly had habitual recourse to this alien practice.
There was a little knife in the Saint’s hand – a toy with a six-inch leaf-shaped blade and a delicately chased ivory hilt. It appeared to have come from nowhere, but actually it had come from the neat leather sheath strapped to the Saint’s forearm under the sleeve, where it always lived; and the name of the knife was Anna. There was a story to Anna, a savage and flamboyant story of the godless lands …
Twenty years were to pass before another fictional hero of like popularity was to be openly credited with carrying a knife. And, like the old time Saint, he was to be an avowed killer.
CHAPTER 18
Licence to kill
The novels of Ian Fleming have been held to represent the watershed between the old-style thrillers that people in the first half of the century were happy not to be able to put down, and the escapist literature of the Pop age. Gone, implies this argument, are the cosy, complicated tales of death at the country house party; departed for ever the aristocratic detective, the homicidal governess, the master criminal audaciously disguised as a commissioner of police, the fien
dish Chinese, the mad scientist. Arrived is the daring but irresponsible anti-hero, the hireling of realpolitik. He has in his mouth the radioactive ashes of guilt, but because he is an agent in the struggle between ‘us’ and ‘them’ instead of the outdated tournament of good and evil, he is enabled to behave (and, significantly in a society that has heard of something called sadism, to suffer the behaviour of others) in a fashion calculated to give readers more piquant vicarious sensations than ever they could have enjoyed in the pages of Edgar Wallace or Dorothy Sayers, Dornford Yates or G. K. Chesterton.
In an increasingly materialistic social climate, one of the most potent magic words is ‘new’. Advertisers use it perpetually, and not only because even they find it easy to spell. People are supposed to be awed by it as once they were awed by the sign of the cross. A 1969 paperback edition of Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had on its cover the heading ‘The New James Bond’. The story was then six years old. Whether or not the impending release of a film based on the book justified the use of that word ‘new’, the publishers clearly thought it a desirable description. Why, after all, should not the book-buying public possess the same commercially conditioned reflexes as the biscuit-and-floor-polish-buying public and salivate on the mention of novelty?
Well, perhaps people do respond in this way. Perhaps they will buy a book on the assurance that it is notably different from or better (or worse) than any other book yet printed. But if so, they are reacting to flattery, to the implication that they have lively tastes and adventurous minds. What they truly are anxious to obtain is not novelty at all, but familiarity. Any librarian will attest that the most commonly voiced request in a working day is for ‘another like this’ or ‘another one by him, or her’. Sought is the reappearance of old friends and enemies, the continuity of recognizable heroism and defined villainy. The readers of sensation literature (and this is no reflection on their intelligence) show a conservatism much more rigid than might be supposed from the extravagance of their fare. Loyalties to specific authors and characters are strong, as are prejudices against experiment, disruption of pattern, and, above all, lapses from seriousness. Such conservatism favours the formula, the series, the stock character, the repeat prescription.
And Fleming, by design, instinct, or great good luck, repeated every prescription in the pharmacopoeia of crime and spy fiction. His thirteen James Bond novels can be seen as a potted history of the twentieth-century thriller.
There was at one time a strong possibility that the argument aroused by the books of Ian Fleming would expand into a minor literary industry. They were attacked as false, decadent and ill-written. They were championed for their readability, their realism and their lack of moral pretentiousness. The dispute continued throughout the 1960’s in newspapers and magazines. Several books were published, including an elaborate defence by Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier. These, tending as they did to encourage the establishment of Bondology as a spoof science on the lines of the Holmesian discipline, led the debate into even more complicated and, possibly, irrelevant courses. What the contestants often seemed too preoccupied to tackle was the most obviously important question of all. Why had the Fleming stories reached in print and film so vast a public (estimated by the end of the decade to be three times the entire population of Britain) that the name Bond was an international commonplace?
The reasons, one might think, should not have been really difficult to discover. But again and again they were overlooked in the excitement of proclaiming personal views of the literary, moral, political and psychological implications of the Bond saga.
Why the workmanship of Fleming has been so warmly argued about is a mystery. At one extreme, his admirer O. F. Snelling declares the master’s skill to be such that he could have rendered a telephone directory fascinating. At the other, Mordecai Richler dismisses him as ‘an appalling writer’ – stylistically appalling, presumably, not horror-provoking. Neither statement is true. Fleming was a competent storyteller on a journalistic level and within the framework of the formula he adopted for the James Bond novels. Whether he could have done anything successful outside that framework cannot now be proved but the fact that he did not try, despite financial independence and a growing personal weariness with the 007 routine, does suggest that he had nothing else to say.
Fleming’s grasp of syntax was reasonably good and it would be ungracious in the post-Hemingway era of buckshot prose not to commend an author who could deliver well-turned sentences. A few of his descriptions are memorable, and not solely by reason of the grotesque elements on which he depended so heavily.
One chronic weakness he suffered was the inability to create characters. All his villains are monstrous puppets, assembled from the rag-bag of childish imaginings. They have no relation to human society and no discernible function other than the indulgence of their own unexplained and quite unproductive malevolence. The villains’ henchmen are correspondingly bizarre in appearance and habit; the most distressing from a literary point of view are certain Americans and Negroes who speak in what Fleming (notoriously ‘tin-eared’) supposed to be their native vernacular. The only other characters – or character substitutes – of any importance in the Bond novels are the sexual conquests of 007. They are distinguishable by name and, in some cases, by slight physical deformities; otherwise they all are standard issue, breast-thrusting lingerie demonstrators that pass for desirable sex-pots in the world of the prep school and, it would seem, British Naval Intelligence.
Plot structure varies scarcely at all from book to book. Bond is summoned by his master, ‘M’, and dispatched upon a mission. Its object is to thwart a conspiracy, either directly instigated by the Soviet Union or likely to be to that country’s advantage, and to assassinate the sinister guiding genius. Bond penetrates the villain’s stronghold, is captured and tortured. He escapes, with or without the help of the nymphomaniacal young woman who by this time has drawn thrustingly abreast of him. He engineers the destruction of plot, villain and all, fulfilling his personal norm of three murders per book, and bows out to an interlude of peaceful fornication until ‘M’ gets another idea.
With the best will in the world, one cannot pretend that the phenomenal success of what Fleming once termed, with exploratory false modesty, his ‘blatant thrillers’ is attributable to inventiveness, power of characterization, descriptive style, compassion, or any other of the literary good mark earners. Critics have been surprised and disconcerted by this. Some have heard with relief the rallying cry of Kingsley Amis: ‘All literature is escapist’, and approved his contention that the adventures of Agent 007 constitute reading that is only different from, and not worse than, ‘primarily enlightening fiction’. If what the cautious call value judgements – by which they mean straightforward personal opinions that may be quoted against them later – are to be avoided, Amis’s conception of literature as a spectrum rather than a ladder or a class list is useful. Ultra and infra are terms much less committing than top and bottom. But they advance no further the solution of the essential problem: why does Fleming’s work sell?
By virtue of passages such as these?
And after a while his other hand went to the zip-fastener at the back of her dress and without moving away from him she stepped out of her dress and panted between their kisses. ‘I want it all, James. Everything you’ve ever done to a girl. Now. Quickly.’
… and of course we were in each other’s arms again under the shower and our bodies were slippery with water and soap and he turned the shower off and lifted me out of the shower cabinet and began to dry me lingeringly with the bath towel …
The mounded vee of the bikini looked up at Bond and the proud breasts in their tight cups were two more eyes. Bond felt his control going. He said roughly, ‘Turn over.’
The sexual encounters in the Bond books are as regular and predictable as bouts of fisticuffs in the ‘Saint’ adventures or end-of-chapter red herrings in the detective novels of Gladys Mitchell, and n
ot much more erotic. Yet it often has been claimed that these, in conjunction with carefully described scenes of cruelty, form the pornographic core of the Fleming lodestone. At one time this might have seemed a reasonable view. In 1953, when the first of the Bond stories, Casino Royale, was published, many people in Britain and America – probably the majority – had inherited and unthinkingly absorbed the notion that merely to read about certain sins was very nearly the same as committing them. The range of such sins was limited, admittedly: felonies such as fraud, robbery, arson and murder were not deemed to contain an element of communicable pleasure, whereas all venereal offences, from bottom-pinching to rape, were. Anglo-Saxons had for so long been more sensitive than other nations to the harm that might be done by ‘dirty’ books that they were regarded throughout the world as the readiest potential customers for them. The situation was to change radically. With the emergence of what apprehensive people called ‘the permissive society’, meaning a society less convinced than formerly that morals, like drains, were matters for public administration, the indictment of Fleming as a purveyor of sex and sadism began to sound rather far-fetched. What was wrong, anyway, asked Amis in 1965, with those ‘beautiful, firm breasts’? Might not those who affected to deplore Bond’s peripatetic copulation really be sublimating into literary criticism their own sexual regrets?