James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  The Express James Bond comic strip debuted on 7 July 1958 with the first instalment of an adaptation of Casino Royale. It was written by Anthony Hern, who Fleming felt had done a good job in abbreviating his books for serialisation in the same paper. Its illustrator was John McLusky.

  The first printed depiction of James Bond had come on the front of the 1955 UK Pan paperback edition of Casino Royale. The artwork of Roger Hall featured a good-looking man at a card table in a light-coloured tuxedo. Few would have found in it a discrepancy with the picture planted in their minds by Fleming’s prose, aside perhaps from the man’s blond hair. In the comic strip, McLusky realised well Fleming’s written description of Bond’s good looks, untidy comma of black hair and facial scar, even if he did make 007 look a tad older than the average reader might have imagined him. Curiously, his depiction of Bond in the first panel of the opening strip made him look a little like Ian Fleming.

  As with most examples of the medium, the Bond Express strip comprised three panels. Ordinarily, a reading experience literally lasting seconds motivates writers and illustrators to jam as much action into each strip as possible. However, Hern & McLusky, at Fleming’s suggestion, employed the stately pace of the original novel, dwelling on incidental and sensual detail in the same manner as Fleming’s prose. One entire instalment was dedicated to the details of a meal, another to the changes wrought on Royale-Les-Eaux by gentrification. There was, of course, some action. The testicle-torture scene was necessarily made vague, but a preamble where Bond was ordered to strip was disturbing in itself.

  Bond was now appearing every single weekday in a national paper, and would do for the next three-and-a-half years. Newspapers, of course, tend to be passed around homes and picked up by third parties in workplaces. By this process, the number of people who understood who was being spoken of when the name James Bond came up in conversation was increasing exponentially.

  Only Fleming would ever have been able to reveal whether it led to his writing down.

  In Goldfinger, the seventh Bond novel, published on 23 March 1959, M instructs Bond to investigate the suspected bullion-smuggling activities of one Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. That gold bars with Goldfinger’s ‘Z’ inscription are repeatedly found in the possession of SMERSH operatives suggests that Goldfinger is nothing less than the foreign banker of the Soviet terror organisation.

  It so happens that Bond knows the man from his private life: he had exposed his card-cheating scam in the opening chapters. This is as awkward and unlikely as – and almost identical to – the coincidence of Bond being assigned to the Moonraker site the day after his contretemps with Hugo Drax over a card table. Moreover, Fleming has already tested our suspension of disbelief to breaking point by giving a character with a mania for gold the surname Goldfinger and the forename Auric (‘of, relating to, or derived from gold’ – Merriam-Webster). This is symptomatic of a book that is as preposterous as it is readable.

  Bond selects from the car pool a battleship-grey Aston Martin DB III and sweeps down to the Royal St Marks Club at Sandwich, where Goldfinger has told him he tends to play golf. It is revealed to be the stamping ground of Bond’s teens: club pro Alfred Blacking had told him he could make him a scratch player with enough practice but ‘something had told Bond that there wasn’t going to be a great deal of golf in his life …’

  Goldfinger is diminutive with a large round head covered in a carroty crew cut. ‘It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world’ is Bond’s opinion. Bond outwits Goldfinger on the greens but their subsequent dinner doesn’t lead to the job offer for which Bond is angling.

  Bond goes off to investigate Goldfinger’s plant in Switzerland. There he runs into Tilly Masterton, out for revenge for her sister Jill, whom Goldfinger had punished for colluding with Bond by fatally painting her gold. The two of them get discovered by Goldfinger’s bowler-hatted, cleft-palated, physically terrifying Korean manservant Oddjob.

  ‘Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”’ These words to Bond from Goldfinger give the book its triptych structure. It’s also an example of Fleming’s ability to work into his texts memorable, poetic phrases. Strangely, though, Goldfinger doesn’t kill 007 and Tilly but instead spirits them to America, where they are required to assist in what Goldfinger has termed Operation Grand Slam.

  The scheme is ambitious: a plan to rob Fort Knox. With the connivance of bosses of various mafias (unlike in Diamonds Are Forever, that word is used), America’s gold depository will be stripped of its contents. Tilly is very taken with one particular mafia boss, ‘Miss Pussy Galore’, leader of the lesbian organisation the Cement Mixers. Pussy seems more taken with Bond, or ‘Handsome’, as she addresses him.

  Unknown to the mobsters, Goldfinger is planning to contaminate the water supply of the town of Fort Knox not with a sedative but deadly poison. He is also planning to rendezvous with a Russian ship, apparently neither he nor Fleming imagining that his intention to be ‘the richest man in history’ might be jeopardised by relocating to a land opposed to Western decadence.

  The holes in the plot really begin to mount up at the point that Goldfinger and co. board what is disguised as a supply train of medical supplies and staff destined for the stricken and quarantined Fort Knox. Bond, of all people, is entrusted with the job of alerting Goldfinger by walkie-talkie of hiccups in the proceedings.

  Seeing bodies littering the Fort and its surrounds, Bond initially fears the worst. However, a note he has left aboard Goldfinger’s chartered plane has got through to Felix Leiter. The apparently dead soldiers spring to life when the villains are at the door of Fort Knox. This is arguably plausible, but that the townsfolk have also been playing possum on request – and have been doing so well enough to trick the eye of someone like Bond – is idiotic. That a mere Pinkerton agent like Leiter is allowed on the scene to give Bond protection seems unlikely, but somewhat less so than the fact that he is seen ‘pounding up the platform’. What happened to his artificial leg?

  After Oddjob has killed Tilly by breaking her neck with his steel-rimmed bowler hat, Bond ends up on a plane hijacked by Goldfinger headed for Russia. Bond uses one of the retractable daggers hidden in his shoe heels to smash a window, through which Oddjob is sucked. As the plane is depressurised Bond goes berserk ‘for the first time in his life’ and strangles Goldfinger to death. Bond then holds a gun on the cabin staff while he arranges a pickup crew over the radio. That Fleming spends an inordinate amount of time on this dialogue-heavy scene, but perfunctorily summarises the potentially exciting crash-landing, is not explicable, but, then, so little here is.

  Fleming’s fears about self-parody have come true in the shape of Goldfinger’s eloquence and contained rage. (‘Mr Bond, the word “pain” comes from the Latin poena meaning “penalty” – that which must be paid. You must now pay for the inquisitiveness …’) Moreover, Paul Johnson’s complaints about Dr No – chaotic construction and forgotten incidents and situations – would seem to apply far more to this book. As would Johnson’s acknowledging that the sub-par ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision: Goldfinger may not stand up to reflective scrutiny but it flows along smoothly under Fleming’s masterful guidance.

  Bond is shown to possess surprisingly liberal sentiments about the recent banning of heroin in the UK (‘Prohibition is the trigger of crime’). Elsewhere, though, Bond is far from broadminded. He is found thinking of Koreans as ‘rather lower than apes in mammalian hierarchy’. When he smiles at the end of a soliloquy from Goldfinger about how his staff sometimes occasionally accidentally kill white prostitutes whom they enjoy subjecting to ‘the grossest indignities’, it is not absolutely clear that this is pretend-amusement in the object of maintaining his cover. However, the danger of attributing Bond’s viewpoints to the author is illustrated by 007’s opinion that ‘pansies of both sexes’ are proliferating a
s ‘a direct consequence of giving votes to women and “sex equality” … He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.’ Among Fleming’s friends numbered homosexuals such as William Plomer and Noël Coward. Moreover, Reflections in a Golden Eye, which on occasion Fleming had no problem citing as the source for the name of his Jamaican house, was a notably gay-themed work.

  The eyebrow-raising statement herein that Bond has been in the double-O section for only six years – he was clearly a veteran of the section in Casino Royale six books ago – reveals that Fleming is beginning to regret having, in Moonraker, pinned down Bond’s age to thirty-seven. Fleming was starting to encounter the classic dilemma afflicting writers of action series. Most such writers learned to get around it by never specifying their hero’s age and simply ignoring the fact that no one individual could possibly have so many adventures in a lifetime, yet alone that part of a lifetime where a protagonist’s bodily abilities are the match of those of his adversaries. Fleming’s solution was to keep altering the facts and shifting the goalposts.

  In May 1959, a new James Bond tale was printed in a most unlikely outlet. It was Cosmopolitan that played host to ‘Quantum of Solace’.

  The women’s magazine provided no particular fanfare for what was the first published 007 short story. Although its front cover was, as ever, emblazoned with details of its contents, ‘Quantum of Solace’ wasn’t listed among them, while the story’s standfirst (‘Marriage can survive every disaster but one …’) drew no attention to the identity of its protagonist. Nonetheless, the outlet was appropriate. ‘Quantum of Solace’ is a uniquely female-friendly Bond tale, wherein the agent takes a back seat to a recounted soap opera. The story would be reprinted in Britain in Modern Woman that November.

  The next Bond appearances were also short stories. ‘James Bond and the Murder Before Breakfast’ was serialised in the Daily Express in September 1959. ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ was published in March 1960 in Playboy.

  The latter periodical certainly seemed more consistent with the Bond brand than Cosmopolitan. Hugh Hefner had started the magazine in 1953, the year that Fleming had launched Bond on the world. The publication’s mixture of liberal politics, adventurous prose and nude women made it the bible of those who felt they were throwing off the shackles of the Victorian morality then still widespread – and to which M had admitted in From Russia with Love – for a libertarian and hedonist ethos. It was a suitable outlet for a character now synonymous with sexual promiscuity and high living.

  Playboy was also a suitable outlet for writing of the quality of Fleming’s. Although easy to mock as the epitome of one-handed reading, the magazine was on a higher plane than Stag, which serialised Dr No and The Spy Who Loved Me. Playboy published high-calibre wordsmiths such as Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck and Arthur C. Clarke, while its massive celebrity interviews often transpired to be definitive explorations of their subjects’ psyches.

  ‘Playboy continued to publish short stories and excerpts from his novels in the early sixties, and went on to do pictorials from the movies,’ explains Raymond Benson. He asserts, ‘Playboy was a pretty big deal. I say that Playboy and John F. Kennedy were the main instrumental things to bring Bond into the public consciousness in America.’

  In mid-1958, Fleming was approached by CBS about a Bond television series.

  Fleming wrote treatments – detailed plot synopses – for thirteen episodes of this putative thirty-two-episode series. Judging by a memo he provided to CBS, it appears that by this point the network had accepted that 007 should not be an American. Fleming was actually imploring them not to go too far the other way with ‘stage Englishness’, which he defined as, ‘monocles, moustaches, bowler hats, bobbies … blatant English slang … public-school ties and accents …’ The series was never made, apparently because Fleming offended the relevant producer by discussing a different project with a counterpart at the network.

  Another television project that failed to materialise stemmed from a 1959 $10,000 bid from production company Hubbell Robinson to make a ninety-minute TV movie of From Russia with Love to be sponsored by Ford and to star James Mason as Bond.

  While live-action Bond floundered, literary Bond continued, if with its own problems. In a letter to Plomer after the completion of Goldfinger, Fleming asserted that it was ‘the last full-length folio on Bond. Though I may be able to think up some episodes for him in the future, I shall never be able to give him 70,000 words again.’ Plomer must have been weary of this sort of doom-mongering from the author, but this time at least Fleming didn’t seem to be being unduly pessimistic. The follow-up to Goldfinger was For Your Eyes Only, published on 11 April 1960. The UK publisher called the contents ‘Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond’, the US publisher ‘Exploits’, but, either way, they were short stories. Moreover, three of the five were previously published.

  Not known by the public at the time was an additional reason for viewing the project as ersatz: four of the stories recycled plots Fleming had devised for the aborted CBS television series. This is not to mention that two of the stories – ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ – are experimental, suggesting that Fleming was casting around for ways to perpetuate his character.

  Fleming’s bewilderment about what to do with Bond – mixed perhaps with a determination to innovate as a stung reaction to the critical backlash he had endured – kicked in at precisely the halfway mark of the fourteen Bond books (which count includes the posthumously published Octopussy and The Living Daylights). For Your Eyes Only was succeeded by Thunderball, effectively a novelisation of an unmade film for whose script Fleming was only partly responsible. That itself was succeeded by The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Bond is a mere bit-player. Repetition, laziness and whimsy often marred the books after that, despite their qualities. Ironically, this apparently uncertain groping for inspiration started just prior to the Bond films making the character vastly more famous. What is generally considered the worst Bond book, The Spy Who Loved Me, appeared in the same year as the film that inaugurated 007’s explosion into fame, Dr. No.

  For Your Eyes Only’s opening story is ‘From A View To A Kill’, a retitled ‘Murder Before Breakfast’. Bond is instructed to investigate the murder of a Royal Corps of Signals dispatch rider in France. Bond mounts a patient surveillance operation on the remains of a nearby gypsy caravan site that had aroused the interest of sniffer dogs. An artificial, moving flower stem gives away the presence of a Soviet spy unit’s underground bunker. Bond decides to do a dummy dispatch run the next morning, much to the consternation of fellow agent Mary Ann Russell. He takes exception to her characterising the Secret Service as ‘a lot of children playing at Red Indians’, a criticism he had accepted from Le Chiffre back in Casino Royale, and responds, ‘Now, be a good girl and do as you’re told.’

  Sure enough, retracing the murdered driver’s route lures from the hidey-hole a would-be assassin, who – unaware of Bond’s prior knowledge and .45 Colt – meets a brutal end. Bond, hoping that no more fatalities will be necessary, makes his way to the bunker in the company of some station agents. He meets unexpected resistance and is convinced he is about to die, but the man poised to shoot him collapses in a heap. The person whose deft shot has saved Bond’s life is the young woman he had patronised earlier. (Bond repays Mary Ann the favour by, it’s implied, pleasuring her in the adjacent forest.)

  This twist in the tale is, of course, the sort of thing often found in short-form fiction, but, despite this, the story overall reads like a mini-Bond novel. As in other stories here, we are even made privy to details that are so character-defining that they seem almost too important to be sprinkled into such a vehicle – for instance, that Bond lost his virginity in Paris at the age of sixteen. (The fact that he lost his notebook – i.e. wallet – on the same evening has been interpreted by some as meaning that the person to whom he lost his virginity was a prostitute.) Yet we are left with something of a ‘So what?’ feeling, someth
ing that applies with all the stories in the volume, despite flashes of good writing.

  The title story opens with the gunning down of an old white couple who refuse to sell their Jamaican property to three interlopers. It turns out that the couple, named Havelock, were very good friends of M, who stamps ‘For Your Eyes Only’ on the file he passes to Bond in acknowledgement of the extracurricular and vigilante nature of his task.

  Bond flies to the Canadian lair of the villain, Herr von Hammerstein, an ex-Gestapo man buying up land in the Caribbean as a security against the possible rise to power in Cuba of leftist rebel Fidel Castro. There, 007 runs into Judy Havelock, a young woman armed with bow and arrows, intent on vengeance for the murder of her parents. The two team up to deadly effect in a well-written long-distance showdown.

  Even in such a short piece of prose, there are stylistic errors and plot inconsistencies. Additionally, when Bond’s plans are jeopardised by his encountering Judy, it strikes one as not only too similar to the Tilly Masterton situation in Goldfinger but too soon after it, with the fact that she happens to be beautiful (does Bond ever encounter unattractive or old women?) ratcheting up the predictability level to pretty near crushing. Oh, and he also threatens to spank her.

  The fourth story, ‘Risico’, was serialised (as ‘The Double Take’) in the Daily Express simultaneously with the book’s publication. In it, 007 is dispatched to Rome to deal with the growing menace of the opium export business. The opium is supplied free of charge by Russia because the country views the social problems caused by the drug as a useful weapon in the Cold War. Bond’s running away from the heavies of local contact Colombo when he mistakenly perceives menace is a nicely prosaic touch among the heroics.