James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  The name that Fleming chose as a substitute is rather peculiar. The Secret Service Bureau was formed in 1909 and during World War I was split into two. The Security Service – or Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5) – covers domestic intelligence matters. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – Military Intelligence, Section 6 (MI6) – gathers foreign intelligence. The British government began acknowledging the existence of MI5 only in 1989 and MI6 in 1994. Fleming’s term ‘Secret Service’ could be said to nod to the original unbifurcated organisation’s name. It had also been used in many previous British espionage books as either a colloquial or umbrella term. However, by now it seemed American nomenclature: the Secret Service has the job of ensuring the physical safety of high-ranking members of the US government.

  Whatever Fleming’s reason, he ultimately lost interest in his disguise. Although he never employed the more common MI6, by the time of the ninth Bond book, Thunderball (1961), he was occasionally stating SIS to be Bond’s employer.

  Bond carries a .38 Colt Police Positive with a sawn barrel and a very flat .25 Beretta automatic with a skeleton grip. The fact that he carts around weapons is germane to his codename: 007. Fleming would later in the series change the meaning of the ‘double-O’ prefix to that of a licence to kill, but in Casino Royale it is stated as denoting an agent who has had to kill in cold blood in the course of a job. What never changed was that the double-O status is of no little prestige in the Service.

  In either of its meanings, the double-O status has no counterpart in real life. There have been some suggestions from ex-SIS employees that executions occasionally happened, albeit carried out by contractors, but never any claim that this was commonplace. In 1953, however, society was far less open and governmental agencies far less answerable to the public, or indeed the executive. It would therefore have seemed possible – and, in the case of an organisation that didn’t officially exist, un-disprovable – that secret agents went around surreptitiously dispensing death.

  As to the actual nomenclature, Fleming told Playboy, ‘I pinched the idea from the fact that, in the Admiralty, at the beginning of the War, all top-secret signals had the double-O prefix.’ Although it is widely assumed – including by this text – that the phrase ‘double-oh’ means two zeros, it should be noted that nowhere in Fleming’s corpus is it stated that this is the case.

  Bond is not without a tender side, something hinted at by his terror of being brought to his knees by love or by luck, a fate he considers inevitable. He is also, if not afflicted by moral doubts, then certainly not prone to brainless my-country-right-or-wrong standpoints. He notes of the shifting definitions of villainy in a developing Welfare State, ‘If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that.’ Additionally, he opines that the people whose killings had garnered him the double-O number were ‘probably quite decent people’ who were ‘just caught up in the gale of the world …’ Nonetheless, his attitude towards his antagonist in this book is never sympathetic.

  Said antagonist is Le Chiffre, one of the Opposition’s chief agents in France, in which role he acts as undercover paymaster for a fifth-column trade union. In one respect, this villain is what the world would come to consider quintessentially Bondian: ‘Le Chiffre’ is French for ‘figure’ or ‘numeral’ and has been adopted because this stateless, apparently amnesia-stricken ex-inmate of Dachau considers himself merely a number on a passport. That tinge of the outlandish aside, however, he is a fairly common-or-garden baddie. That he is a ‘flagellant’ and ‘does not laugh’ hardly distinguishes him from those touched with the banality of evil. Or indeed from the often grim, often spank-happy Bond himself.

  Although he is a competent operative, Le Chiffre’s financial difficulties have caused him to misappropriate monies entrusted to him by the Soviet Union (‘Redland’, in Secret Service nomenclature). He is therefore in a perilous position. Unknown to him, but known to the Secret Service, an operative of SMERSH is already heading his way with deadly intent.

  SMERSH is, to quote a memo sent to M, an ‘efficient organ of Soviet vengeance’. It would be Bond’s nemesis until the ninth 007 book, when Fleming decided to make his character’s main adversary SPECTRE. Although Fleming sets up an elaborate and ostensibly knowledgeable explanation for the title of the organisation – SMERSH is a conflation of Russian phrase ‘smert shpionam’, which means ‘Death to Spies’ – it didn’t actually exist. A Russian World War II counterintelligence agency of that name had long since been broken up. The organisation to which Fleming was alluding was clearly the KGB.

  Le Chiffre has decided to make good his losses by gambling in the casino at Royale everything in his trade union’s depleted coffers. For the purposes of inflicting a blow – financial and psychological – on the enemy, it is recommended to M that ‘the finest gambler available to the service should be given the necessary funds and endeavour to out-gamble this man’. Guess who.

  A showdown over a baccarat table hardly sounds exciting – or even Bondian – stuff, but the drama actually picks up at this point. Although Casino Royale has an arresting first line (‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’) and features in Chapter 6 a blood-splattered failed assassination attempt on Bond by means of a bomb, the book’s opening is leisurely. No explosive ‘pre-title sequence’ here – or, really, in any of Fleming’s books – but an opening six-dozen pages that merely pootle along.

  Bond is assigned Vesper Lynd as his Number Two. ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’ he thunders. ‘Do they think this is a bloody picnic?’ He is, though, somewhat mollified when Vesper turns out as promised to be a black-haired, blue-eyed beauty with ‘splendid … protuberances … back and front’.

  The book’s most exciting scene comes when Le Chiffre is facing potential ruination at the card table. One of the villain’s henchmen discreetly tries to make Bond withdraw his bet by pressing into his coccyx a silent gun disguised as an umbrella. Faced with the alternatives of his spine being shattered and of letting Le Chiffre win his desired loot, Bond ingeniously creates a diversion by toppling backwards in his chair.

  In an attempt to retrieve his money, Le Chiffre abducts Vesper. After an exciting and well-written car chase, 007 ends up in the clutches of Le Chiffre, who takes him to his villa and begins torturing him by swatting with a carpet beater what the mores of the time dictated be delicately referred to as ‘the underpart of his body’. Bond determines not to talk and resigns himself to death, but he is saved from a grisly fate by the intervention of the SMERSH agent tasked with executing Le Chiffre. With no orders relating to Bond, the assassin simply carves a warning sign into his hand.

  Bond is not just smitten enough by his new colleague to decide to name his proprietary Martini a ‘Vesper’ – he resolves to propose to her. However, her behaviour at the secluded inn at which they are staying becomes strange and disturbing. The next morning Bond is woken with the devastating news that Vesper has killed herself with a bottle of sleeping pills. Her suicide note piles on the devastation. She had been a double-agent for the Russians, blackmailed into the role by their torture of her Polish lover. She has been conspiring with Le Chiffre against Bond all along, if reluctantly. With SMERSH now on her trail, she had put herself and Bond beyond danger by her fatal action.

  Bond weeps. The ‘harsh obscenity’ which he emits before he does is something to which we are not made privy. For all their reputation of raciness, Fleming’s books would usually only allude to profanity or represent it with underlining. Only in the last few books of the series would the likes of ‘arse’, ‘cock’ and ‘balls’ rear their heads, and never the short version of what Fleming rendered in You Only Live Twice as ‘Freddie Uncle Charlie Katie’.

  Despite 007’s callous statement to his handler, ‘The bitch is dead now,’ there is a hint that this woman to whom Bond had so frequently
patronisingly thought of as ‘the girl’ was in fact cleverer than he: Bond acknowledges that, in contrast to his ostentatious actions, she had been working at his elbow for the other side quietly and without heroics. Bond was no feminist, but women would often be portrayed in Fleming’s books in just such a proactive and positive light, something not at all common in the fifties and sixties, especially in thrillers.

  Bond had been contemplating resigning from the Service, but the thought of helping to take on SMERSH – without whose terror methods people like Vesper would not engage in treachery for the Soviet Union – gives him a professional resolve. Although Fleming can’t have known at this point that the Bond character would play out over a series, it almost feels as if this new attitude is intended as a long-term raison d’être for the hero – what is commonly known today as an origin story.

  The narrative of Casino Royale consists of generally businesslike third-person prose but with touches of lyricism (‘The moonlight shone through the half-closed shutters and lapped at the secret shadows in the snow of her body on the broad bed’). Most of it is from Bond’s point of view but we are also occasionally given glimpses into the minds of other characters, including Vesper. This would usually be the case in Fleming books and, as here, the non-Bond points of view, as well as the occasional passages of omniscience, really serve only to weaken and slacken the prose.

  The salient details about espionage are dropped in casually enough to create verisimilitude, while the author is clearly on comfortable ground when describing the plush and upholstered terrains Bond traverses. However, Fleming – in one of the first of many examples across the series of his insufferably propounding on things he clearly knew little or nothing about – attributes psychopathic behaviour to ingestion of marijuana. (Even the way he spells it – ‘marihuana’ – seems gauche.)

  As well as Mathis, the book features supporting characters who will be recurring in the series. We meet here Bill Tanner, M’s chief of staff and Bond’s best friend in the Service; Miss Moneypenny, Fleming’s secretary and gatekeeper; and Felix Leiter, a good-humoured Texan CIA operative.

  Casino Royale is a peculiar way to kick off the James Bond series. It’s thin and sedate enough to carry the whiff of being a padded-out novella. Moreover, the hero of this volume of just 218 pages in its first edition is a man not with a mission to kill but a licence to bankrupt. However, it is only what succeeded Casino Royale that makes a slim book of dossiers, card games, travelogue, blundering and lovey-doveyness seem atypical Bond.

  Additionally, we should remember that at the time Casino Royale was unusual and hard-hitting: frankness about non-marital sex, an allusion to masturbation (‘Bond awoke in his own room at dawn and for a time he lay and stroked his memories’) and a testicles-oriented torture scene were not mainstream stuff in 1953.

  Fleming’s first foray into novels was not without its difficulties. After his long-term friend William Plomer – an editor at Jonathan Cape – had prised it out of his reluctant, self-deprecating hands, it was submitted to Mr Cape himself. While Plomer and his colleague Daniel George thought a lot of the manuscript, it would seem that Cape agreed to publish it only as a favour to Peter Fleming, a Cape author. Ian Fleming also had to agree to extensive revisions, which delayed its publication.

  Once publication was imminent, Fleming set up Glidrose Productions, a company in which he and his wife owned all shares and to which he assigned his Bond literary rights, the type of manoeuvre common in a period marked by rising top-rate income-tax levels. In a gesture whose extravagance was worthy of some of the villains he would create for his character, Fleming also ordered a gold-plated typewriter.

  Casino Royale was published on 13 April 1953, housed in a sedate jacket designed by Fleming himself, featuring an arrangement of valentine hearts dripping blood. It attracted some sparkling praise in the book-review sections. That The Sunday Times described Fleming as ‘the best new English thriller-writer since Ambler’ would have impressed no one aware of Fleming’s connection to the paper, but the plaudits for the new book were widespread: ‘a first-rate thriller’ (Manchester Guardian); ‘an extremely engaging affair’ (The Times Literary Supplement); ‘Fleming tells a good story with strength and distinction’ (The Listener).

  Fleming would continue to pick up garlands but not, for a while, spectacular sales. Yet Casino Royale’s print run of 4,750 would not, from Pearson’s recollection, have dismayed the author. ‘That was one of the oddities about the whole Bond phenomenon,’ Pearson says. ‘Jonathan Cape … was a very upmarket, rather smart publisher, not the sort of publisher who normally did thrillers, and he saw them at that time as very much upmarket thrillers. Very much a private, closet activity which he indulged in largely for reasons of his own psychology and the rest of it. I worked for him for six months on The Sunday Times before somebody said, “Oh, Ian writes books, you see.”

  ‘I got Live and Let Die, which I thought was very good. I said to him, “Ian, I never realised you did this sort of thing. I think Live and Let Die is marvellous, it would make a marvellous film.”

  ‘“Film, dear boy? Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “These books are caviar for the general, not for the hoi polloi.” He didn’t say “the hoi polloi”, but that’s what he meant – they wouldn’t have a mass impact.’

  This suggestion is borne out by a letter Fleming wrote in 1957 to CBS television in which he said, ‘… my books are written for and appeal principally to an “A” readership but … it appears that the “B” and “C” classes find them equally readable, although one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their experience and in part incomprehensible.’

  Pearson adds of his conversation with Fleming, ‘I think already he was trying to film Casino Royale and he was very keen to make some money out of the books, but he never envisaged them being at that stage what they became.’

  HEADWAY

  Live and Let Die, published on 8 April 1954, would have made far more sense than Casino Royale as the inaugural James Bond novel. It is bigger, more exotic and more action-oriented than its predecessor and contains many of the elements that would come to be Bond hallmarks. Perhaps significantly, it marked the point where Fleming did not simply write from personal knowledge – as with Casino Royale – but immersed himself in research beforehand.

  Universal Export – mentioned as a cover name for the Secret Service for the first time – dispatches Bond across the Atlantic because coins that look as if they may be the fabled treasure of the pirate Bloody Morgan are mysteriously finding their way to the United States from a small, isolated island within British colony Jamaica. Their passage has apparently been arranged by Buonaparte Ignace Gallia, whose initials give rise to the name by which he is commonly known: Mr Big. While Le Chiffre had been a fairly vanilla villain, the symbiotic physical and mental monstrousness of Mr Big would transpire to be the usual mould for Fleming’s baddies. The author would almost always use ugliness or disfigurement as a shorthand for evil. Mr Big is an unsettlingly huge and grey-tinged man. He commands obedience by playing on the terror of voodoo in the American black community, allowing a rumour to thrive that he is the Zombie of Baron Samedi, the Prince of Darkness. The British government are particularly anxious to stop his distribution of the gold coins because it bankrolls Soviet activity: somewhat implausibly, Mr Big is an agent of SMERSH.

  Bond is initially told by the American law-enforcement services not to go stirring up trouble and that their policy, until the time is appropriate to strike, is ‘Live and let live’. Replies a quizzical Bond, ‘… I have another motto. It’s “Live and let die”.’ This phrase has, via Bond’s vast cultural popularity, become arguably more famous than the motto of tolerance of which it’s a vengeful inversion.

  Bond cuts off the source of the coins in Jamaica and rescues Solitaire, a beautiful and allegedly clairvoyant Haitian pet of Mr Big’s. Through Bond’s resourcefulness, the latter is subjected to the fate of bei
ng eaten alive by sharks Mr Big had intended for him.

  On its first American printing the chapter ‘Nigger Heaven’ was renamed ‘Seventh Avenue’, but the modern-day reputation the book has for antiquated racism smacks of manufactured outrage. Racist though he – or at least his character – often was, Fleming is shown in Live and Let Die to be in possession of opinions about black people that these days would be described as politically correct. Jazz-loving Leiter proffers the a-few-rotten-apples argument when he says, ‘In any half a million people of any race you’ll get plenty of stinkeroos.’ It is stated that Bond knows Jamaica well as a consequence of a long assignment there just after the war and had come to ‘love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people’.

  Despite the air of authenticity created by the likes of an opening three-dozen pages that read a little like a slow-burning police procedural, Live and Let Die is riddled with illogicalities and even comic-book occurrence. For instance, Bond’s planting of a mine for the assault on Mr Big’s fortress seems less logical than a raid that might glean Soviet-related information. Meanwhile, the credence Bond seems to give to Solitaire’s supposed clairvoyance is odd when she never definitively demonstrates her power.