James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Chapter 9 marks the first time we are told that Bond likes a Martini to be ‘shaken and not stirred’. We’re still not quite there with the phrase ‘licence to kill’, though: Leiter says to Bond, ‘You’ve still got that double O number that means you’re allowed to kill?’

  As so often, Fleming mixes wince-making romantic dialogue (‘I have always been in step with the thought of you, but you didn’t come, and I have spent my life listening to a different drummer’) with descriptive prose that is exquisite (‘The great six-lane highway stretched on through a forest of multi-coloured signs and frontages until it lost itself downtown in a dancing lake of heatwaves … A glittering gunfire of light splinters shot at Bond’s eyes from the windscreens of oncoming cars and from their blaze of chrome styling …’)

  The proactive 007 of Diamonds are Forever is a figure less dependent than previously on coincidences and the good work of others. Despite this, as well as the acute portrayal of the glitz and greed of Vegas and the way plot strands are wrapped up ingeniously and even a little poetically, this Bond book never seems to shake itself out of a low-key state.

  Fleming himself had decided that it was a last gasp. He told Raymond Chandler, ‘I have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve.’ His difficulty in devising plots – something which he would lament again and again – was at the time compounded by the fact that Bond seemed to have bumped up against the ceiling of his commercial potential. None of the books had become bestsellers in the UK, those issued in the States had flopped and the intermittent interest from Hollywood never seemed to translate into green-lit projects.

  From Russia with Love, the fifth Bond novel, published on 8 April 1957, is the first Bond book to deviate in significant ways from the established template.

  Bond does not appear at all in the first third of the book. Instead, we are introduced to Donovan Grant, a psychotic defector, Colonel Rosa Klebb – charmless and insanely loyal head of SMERSH executions – and Corporal Tatiana Romanova, a young, beautiful and malleably loyal employee of Soviet intelligence. The last of these is chosen for the task of providing a honey trap for ‘Angliski Spion’ Bond, on whom SMERSH have a ‘bulky file’. After Klebb briefs Tatiana, she then tries to, as it were, debrief her. The corporal flees from the sexual overtures of a woman Fleming describes as looking like ‘the oldest and ugliest whore in the world’.

  Bond finally makes an appearance at around the one-hundred-page mark in the form of his traditional adventure-heralding summons to the office of M. Bond is rather taken aback when informed by his boss that Tatiana has made contact with the Secret Service’s station in Istanbul and has offered to bring to the West a much-coveted code cracker called the Spektor – on the condition that she be retrieved by Bond, with whom she has fallen in love from the details on him in his file.

  The Service’s Q Branch supplies 007 an attaché case, in the lining of which is hidden .25 ammunition, throwing-knives, fifty gold sovereigns and a cyanide pill. His sponge bag contains a tube of shaving cream that unscrews to reveal the silencer for his Beretta. This is the low-key beginning of the gadgetry that the Bond films would ultimately take into the realms of science fiction.

  Upon their first meeting, the supposedly loyal Tatiana develops such a crush on Bond that she determines to defect for real. The exchanges between the pair are symptomatic of Fleming’s perennial Achilles heel: being unable to portray romance as anything but gushing cliché.

  At Tatiana’s insistence, the two of them take the Spektor machine to the West via the Orient Express, an anachronistic decision in the jet age but clearly engineered by Fleming so as to provide lashings of luxury travel porn. Ostensible backup arrives in the form of fellow service agent Norman Nash. It is Donovan Grant, able to pass himself off as friendly via some intercepted code phrases. Later Bond is woken in the train compartment by Grant and merrily told, ‘No Bulldog Drummond stuff’ll get you out of this one’ – an echo of a similarly postmodern taunt by Le Chiffre in Casino Royale that this ‘is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed’. In point of fact, Bond does pull off something Sapper’s hero would likely do: insert a silver cigarette case between the pages of a book that he holds over his heart as his deadshot enemy lets rip with his gun. Bond plays possum before fatally making use of one of his concealed knives.

  Prior to his death, Grant hadn’t been able to resist boasting of his forthcoming meeting with Rosa Klebb, at which he expects to collect the Order of Lenin. In fact, it is Bond who makes the meeting in Room 204 of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where, for the first time in any of the books, he says, ‘My name is Bond, James Bond.’ Klebb transpires to be a fiery fighter: even as she is taken into custody, she produces a poison-tipped blade from the toe of a shoe, which she propels into Bond’s right calf. The book ends with 007 crashing to the floor.

  The author bewilders us by having Bond reflect that he ‘had never killed in cold blood’ when it was explained way back in the first book that that is exactly how his double-O number was acquired. This, though, may not be sloppiness but one of the first signs of a penchant Fleming would increasingly display for revising his hero’s universe in response to criticism. On this occasion, it might be the case that he was reacting to complaints of the brutality in Bond books. However, the latter cause is hardly helped by the pro-rape and wife-beating philosophising of Turkish supporting character Darko Kerim, a vicious catfight between two gypsies and Tatiana’s imploring of Bond, ‘You will beat me if I eat too much?’

  Curiously structured though the book may be, the switching of the spotlight in From Russia with Love onto things that would be unseen or background in a normal Bond book ultimately comes across as an interesting sideways view of a familiar character.

  Although Bond’s continued existence is in peril at the end of From Russia with Love, there is paradoxical evidence that Fleming was using the book as his tilt at being taken seriously as a writer. In correspondence with Raymond Chandler leading up to its writing, Fleming said he would endeavour to ‘order my life so as to put more feeling into my typewriter’. In a letter to Michael Howard of Cape, he said, ‘… my main satisfaction … with the book is that a Formula which was getting stale has been broken … one simply can’t go on writing the simple bang-bang, kiss-kiss type of book.’

  BACKLASHES AND BOOSTS

  Regardless of his apparent satisfaction with From Russia with Love, as 1956 turned into 1957 Ian Fleming was pessimistic about being able to produce another Bond adventure. He told his publisher, ‘… the vein of my inventiveness is running extremely dry and I seriously doubt if I shall be able to complete a book in Jamaica this year.’ However, if he had genuinely toyed with the idea of making the knife wound inflicted by Rosa Klebb fatal, Fleming clearly quickly decided against it.

  When not in Jamaica, the Flemings would rent out Goldeneye and, in November 1956, it so happened that Anthony Eden – family friend as well as British Prime Minister – decided to stay there. The names of Fleming and his fictional hero were suddenly plastered across the newspapers, with a resultant spike in Bond book sales. Nine months after Fleming had penned the scene in which Bond appears to die at the end of the not-yet-published From Russia with Love, there was suddenly a significantly enhanced financial incentive to produce more Bond adventures.

  Moreover, the author had at his disposal a ready-made Bond tale. It dated from another of his unsuccessful brushes with moving pictures. In mid-1956, NBC-TV producer Henry Morgenthau III had asked him to come up with a proposal for a television drama. Fleming proffered a project with a Caribbean backdrop variously known as Commander Jamaica and James Gunn, Secret Agent. The author barely bothered to pretend the hero was not an Americanised Bond in his twenty-eight-page pilot script. The project failed to attract backers. Fleming simply recycled the story for Dr No, his sixth James Bond novel, published on 31 March 1958.

  The book opens with a scene in which three hitmen kill John Strangways, regional officer for the Secret Service in Jam
aica, by dressing up as beggars and forming the chain required by the fact of their pretending to be blind. This serves only to compound the conspicuousness they already possess by virtue of being ‘Chinese-Negro’. Its absurd lack of realism is emblematic of a book that definitively takes Bond away from a common-or-garden espionage milieu into grandiose, even pulpy, terrain.

  Following Bond’s recovery from the poison administered him by Rosa Klebb, he is eased back into work with what M considers the cushy assignment of sending him to look into Strangways’s disappearance. Strangways’s last case had been an investigation into one Julius No, who owns an island between Jamaica and Cuba named Crab Key, bought for its valuable guano deposits. During Bond’s briefing, M takes the opportunity to replace the Beretta the agent has always thus far favoured but whose silencer had got caught in his clothing during his tussle with Klebb. The armourer presses onto a reluctant Bond a Walther PPK 7.65mm, ‘a real stopping gun’.

  Doctor No (despite the book’s title, the diminutive for his bogus medical designation is never used, although in the States the book was titled Doctor No) lives beneath the waterline of a cliff in shagpile-carpeted splendour, observing the sea life through a giant transparent wall. Of German-Chinese descent, the tall, bald, gliding No looks to the captured Bond like a ‘giant venomous worm’. The bizarre appearance is completed by hooks compensating for the hands amputated as a punishment for stealing from his own Tong.

  Although possessed of the usual Fleming-villain traits of psychopathy and megalomania, No is not without self-knowledge about the roots of his behaviour. ‘No love, you see, Mister Bond,’ he says. ‘Lack of parental care … I became involved with the Tongs, with their illicit proceedings … They represented revolt against the father figure who had betrayed me.’ Mr Big had previously spoken to Bond of his accidie. There would be other passages in Fleming’s books wherein the villains pronounced on their own psychology. This is something that would seem to date back to Fleming’s time in Kitzbühel. As well as being a novelist, Phyllis Bottome was an adherent of the work of psychotherapist Alfred Adler, whose biography she wrote. Bond’s psychology, though, would never be explored by Fleming, the one way in which the author remained true to his original objective of depicting a cypher of a human being.

  Not content with the fortune generated by investing his stolen loot in guano, No is now working with the Russians in jamming the telemetered instructions of American test missiles. Once again, Fleming is shoehorning in the Cold War when the villain could have worked perfectly well as unaffiliated. No’s grandiose plans have been jeopardised by mere ‘twitchers’: bird preservationists the Audubon Society are planning to build a hotel on a corner of the island on which they own a lease.

  This backstory is related by No to a sardonic Bond as a preamble to a terrible fate No has devised: a deadly endurance test in which Bond is forced to worm his way through endless narrow tunnels – horizontal and vertical – littered with obstacles such as electrified metal, extreme heat and tarantulas. Waiting in the pool beyond the exit is a giant squid whose suckered arms have the power to tear him apart. A canny Bond appropriates and defends himself with a cigarette lighter, a knife and a ventilation grille fashioned into a spear.

  Having become the first-ever survivor of this bizarre assault course, Bond finds Doctor No supervising the loading of a shipment. The secret agent commandeers a crane and dispatches the villain by dumping on his head a load of his precious guano. The book culminates in a rendezvous with Honeychile Rider, an orphaned, beautiful local child-woman who has become ensnared in Bond’s escapades.

  For the first time, the phrase ‘licence to kill’ is employed. So poetic is the passage in which it is – ‘The licence to kill for the Secret Service, the double-o prefix, was a great honour. It had been earned hardly. It brought Bond the only assignments he enjoyed, the dangerous ones’ – that Britain’s Pan Books used it (and a slight variation) as a blurb inside their sixties Bond paperbacks. It sat beneath a logo that stylishly superimposed the silhouette of a gun over the numerals ‘007’.

  Dr No – a real page-turner – has some powerful episodes. One is a truly creepy section where a petrified Bond has to endure a giant centipede making its remorseless, multi-legged way up the entire length of his sweating body. Also pleasing are Fleming’s evocative descriptions of Crab Key’s stinking, sulphurous marshes and the godforsaken, windswept landscape of the guanera.

  The Daily Express serialisations, the Eden visit to Goldeneye, the build-up of an audience over the course of five previous books and the graduation of the series to the wallet-friendly paperback format, had all played a part in a mushrooming of Bond’s popularity. Dr No was the first Bond book to sell in big numbers. Combined James Bond novel paperback sales were 41,000 in 1955. They were 670,000 by 1961, a point still a year distant from the first Bond movie, which event would send sales onto another plane entirely.

  Nobody, though, would know any of this from some of the reviews Dr No garnered. It was this book’s publication that saw Fleming come under quite vicious attack.

  The most quoted slating of any Bond book is probably the review of Dr No that appeared in the 5 April 1958 edition of New Statesman. It was written by Paul Johnson, a socialist journalist with a high profile. ‘I have just finished what is without a doubt the nastiest book I have ever read’ is a memorable opening line for any review, but what really stuck in the public mind was the heading: ‘Sex, snobbery and sadism’. The latter was the subeditor’s summary of Johnson’s adjudgement of Fleming’s signatures: ‘There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, 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.’ In addition, Johnson averred, ‘Mr. Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner.’ He conceded, though, that ‘the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision; Mr. Fleming dishes up his recipe with all the calculated accountancy of a Lyons Corner House.’

  That Johnson’s objection to Fleming was as much political as moral or literary was betrayed by his comments:

  … 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 …

  History shows that Johnson was on a journey that would transform him from a passionate left-winger into a virulent right-winger. Unfortunately, the issue of whether his savaging was a classic case of overcompensation is one never addressed by those who invoke the review, especially American critics who have often heard of Johnson only through this piece of writing.

  However, it must be admitted that Johnson was riding a wave. A month before Dr No’s publication, Bernard Bergonzi complained in a nine-page article in literary monthly The Twentieth Century of Fleming’s ‘voyeurism and sado-masochism’, an appraisal that seems to have opened the floodgates. The Guardian was shortly decrying Fleming for promoting ‘the cult of luxury for its own sake’.

  Such reviewers’ objections almost seem bewildering now when Fleming’s sex, violence and product porn pales compared with what can be seen today on television screens in peak hours, but, as can be gleaned from the Johnson review, the disdain in which Fleming was held in some quarters was less a matter of objective analysis than the perceived requisites of changing times. The Western world was entering its most left-wing phase in history, one in which Establishment men like Fleming and his creation were perceived to be part of an oppressive and outmoded paradigm. During the decade it still had to run, such sentiment would only increase in intensity, culminating in the ri
ot-strewn year of 1968.

  In an introduction to a 2009 reissue of The Ipcress File, the 1962 novel that was the start of his trilogy featuring an espionage agent with a working-class background, author Len Deighton wrote:

  Publication of The Ipcress File coincided with the arrival of the first of the James Bond films. My book was given very generous reviews and more than one of my friends was moved to confide that the critics were using me as a blunt instrument to batter Ian Fleming about the head.

  He is not a lone voice. Asked if zeitgeist leftism motivated some of Fleming’s increasingly vitriolic reviews, John Pearson simply says, ‘Undoubtedly. Of course.’

  One can only imagine the effect of this on the psyche of Fleming, a man already in possession of a deep lack of self-worth.

  Despite the spikes in 007’s public profile created by the Express serialisations and the visit by Anthony Eden to Goldeneye, up until 1958 James Bond was not a significant cultural figure.

  Although reading was more prevalent across society in the days before universal television ownership (Bond was, more than plausibly, portrayed as not possessing a set in 1957’s From Russia with Love), the character was still invisible to the majority who restricted their reading to their daily newspaper, the odd magazine and the book they took with them on holiday. In 1958, 007’s profile began to change significantly with the introduction of a James Bond comic strip in the Daily Express.

  When the Express first suggested the idea, Fleming expressed ‘grave doubts’. He felt that the medium of the comic strip might divest his books of a ‘certain cachet’, especially if he succumbed to a temptation to ‘write down’. These thoughts were expressed in a letter to Wren Howard, co-founder of Cape. Fleming consulted William Plomer about whether he should agree to the Express’s suggestion, and then ignored his editor’s emphatic advice that he shouldn’t. The £1,500 fee per adaptation (over £30,000 in today’s money) plus syndication royalties – as well as the knock-on effect on Bond book sales – would seem to have been inducements he felt he could not afford to spurn.