by Mike Ripley
Over a long and commercially successful career, Deighton stuck to his belief that the two biggest dangers for a writer were alcohol and praise and has politely refused the Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger on three occasions.
IAN FLEMING
‘I have not seen a member of the Secret Service for many years, Mr Bond. Not since the war. Your Service did well in the war. You have some able men. I learn from my friends that you are high up in your Service. You have a double-0 number, I believe – 007, if I remember right …’
– Mr Big in Live and Let Die, 1954
Ian Fleming was a household name in Britain before his most famous creation was immortalised on the cinema screen. Probably more has been written about Fleming than about any other thriller writer and without doubt more has been written about James Bond than about any other hero in popular fiction and film since Sherlock Holmes. The character has featured, to date, in twenty-five hugely successful films (twenty-six if we include the 1967 spoof of Casino Royale) and thirty-nine novels,1 twenty-five of them written since Fleming’s death in 1964, and Bond has spawned numerous spin-offs and a host of merchandising2 from aftershave and cufflinks to coffee mugs bearing the legend ‘Shaken Not Stirred’.
What Fleming would have thought of the Bond films (he lived only to see the first two) and the stream of ‘continuation’ novels has been much discussed and of course will never be known, though from the very start of his writing career he believed that film adaptations were vital to book sales. With sales to date of more than 100 million copies – not including translations – and one in five of the world’s population having seen a Bond film,3 he certainly had a point.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was born in 1908 into a well-to-do Scottish banking family, but his father was killed on the Western Front in 1917 and Ian and his brothers were brought up by their slightly Bohemian widowed mother. He was educated at Eton, where he excelled on the athletics field rather than in the classroom and, after failed attempts at joining the diplomatic service and at the military academy at Sandhurst, he was sent to Munich and then the Austrian Tyrol to brush up his German. There he honed his translation skills and began writing short stories. Journalism beckoned and in 1931 he joined Reuters. He was sent to Moscow to cover a spy trial in 1933 and whilst there attempted, but failed, to get an interview with Joseph Stalin. Worried he was not making enough money, he quit Reuters for merchant banking, only to be labelled by a City colleague as ‘the world’s worst stockbroker’.4
Fleming’s experiences in Germany and in Russia were, however, to provide a springboard to a new career. In September 1938 in a letter to The Times, he outlined ‘Herr Hitler’s intentions’ and how Hitler was successfully following the Nazi Party Programme first published in 1920. Then, in April 1939, he submitted a confidential report on the strengths and weaknesses of having Soviet Russia as an ally against Germany in, as seemed likely, the event of war.5 Such activity drew him to the attention of Naval Intelligence and on the outbreak of war he was made personal assistant to the Director with the rank of Commander. He was to serve throughout the war and although he never saw combat, he engineered numerous covert intelligence operations, some successful, others highly imaginative but hardly useful.
After the war he entered the world of newspaper management with the Sunday Times, built himself a home in Jamaica (which he called ‘Goldeneye’), and, in 1952, settled down to write the spy story to end all spy stories, Casino Royale.
If it was not the spy story to end all spy stories – in fact it would be more accurate to say it was the spy story which began modern spy stories, albeit one kind of spy story – it was certainly the right thriller in the right place at the right time.
The reasons for its success have been argued over for more than sixty years but most observers agree that James Bond brought a splash of Technicolor into black-and-white lives. Film producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the godparents of the cinematic Bond franchise, are in no doubt:
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Britain was living in a time of austerity and people were trying to rebuild their lives after the horrors of the war. Into this drab world entered James Bond, the gentleman spy equally at home in Whitehall or on a beach in the Bahamas.6
Often described as a heady cocktail of sex, sadism, brand names, exotic locations, fast cars, high living and glamour, the Fleming formula would certainly have dazzled British readers still struggling with rationing and shortages as well as coming to terms with sliding down the league table of world powers. (Though the same reasoning could hardly be applied to American readers for example, who were enjoying rapid rises in both domestic consumer comforts and international status.)
The ‘glamour’ of the world of the James Bond books has too often been easily dismissed as advertising agency lifestyle wish-fulfilment and Fleming’s use of brand-name products – though this was hardly new. Product-placement had certainly found its way into Leslie Charteris’ ‘Saint’ books of the Thirties (Prelude to War in 1938 praising, among other things, the ‘ambrosia’ that was Carlsberg lager) but for the average British male queuing for his packet of ten Woodbines at the newsagents, the idea of having a box of fifty Morland cigarettes with their distinctive ‘triple gold band’ would have seemed very glamorous indeed, as would the institution of the Cocktail Hour in Casino Royale where Bond sips an Americano whilst watching the other men in the bar quaffing ‘inexhaustible quarter-bottles of Champagne’ and the women sipping dry Martinis. It would have been some comfort to that British male reader, given the amount of alcohol Bond consumed, that their fantasy hero had on occasion to resort to Phensic tablets.7
And therein may lie the real secret of Bond’s success, and Fleming’s skill, for although the grotesqueness of the villains he faced and the frequency of his sexual conquests were pure fantasy, Bond himself was not a superhero with special powers. He did get hurt, betrayed and made mistakes. Though critics often attacked Bond for his thuggishness and brutality, supporters would say this was a tough, self-disciplined, war-hardened fighting man doing his utmost for Queen and Country. Had not the war – still very fresh in most readers’ minds in 1953 – shown that it was occasionally necessary to ‘fight dirty’ when faced with a diabolical enemy?
In his obituary of Fleming in The Observer8 Maurice Richardson wrote: ‘Bond seemed to have been most cunningly and industriously synthesised to combine all the qualities essential for a new-style, up-to-the-minute, hyper-sexed, ready-made daydream secret service hero.’
Ian Fleming was possibly a more cunning and more industrious writer than his obituary suggested, for while James Bond was indeed a forward-looking hero – an up-to-date man in the thick of a new kind of war – he was also slightly retro, something of a throwback to the Victorian or Edwardian gentleman hero (except not very gentlemanly). Bond might not have strode across the grouse moors with Sir Richard Hannay, swapped tips on unarmed combat with Bulldog Drummond, compared safe-cracking techniques with gentleman thief Arthur J. Raffles, or stood at a bar with Simon Templar, but he would have recognised them as brothers-in-arms of a sort. Ian Fleming created a hero who was both excitingly new and very relevant to a changed (Cold War) world, and yet somehow also comfortingly familiar to readers, at least British ones, of popular thrillers.
When Kingsley Amis was asked to write an Introduction to a new edition of his Bond ‘continuation’ novel Colonel Sun in 1991, he concluded that Ian Fleming ‘was a masterly action-story writer in the tradition of Conan Doyle and John Buchan.’
Not everyone, of course, agreed. The ‘sex and the sadism’, both so mild in comparison with much of today’s crime fiction, seemed to upset people the most. Alistair MacLean, who emerged as the major force in adventure thriller writing just as Fleming’s Bond was getting established, did not mince his words: ‘Take Fleming – I couldn’t stand his basis of sex, sadism and snobbery. If you require those things, you are not a writer.’9
It is unlikely Fleming would have been stung b
y such criticism – although he certainly envied the larger sales figures of MacLean’s early thrillers – as his own attitude to James Bond often showed that his tongue was never far from his cheek. As early as 1956, after only four novels, Fleming wrote to his friend (and reviewer) Raymond Chandler saying: ‘If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond … my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.’10
Others recognised something of the naughty schoolboy in Fleming’s writing, none more so than actor Richard Burton, who had been widely suggested as a suitable big-screen Bond in the late Fifties. Some years after Fleming’s death, Burton got around to reading You Only Live Twice and in April 1969 noted in his diary: ‘You cannot help liking Fleming. He is so obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingway-esque, sadistic, sexually-maniacal boy-scout that in the end he becomes likeable.’11
Perhaps the last word on Fleming and his alter ego James Bond should go to Len Deighton who, in 1962, was touted as Fleming’s most serious rival with The Ipcress File signalling a major sea-change in spy fiction. (Deighton was also asked by producer Harry Saltzman to write the first draft of a screenplay for the 1963 film of From Russia with Love.) In his 2012 memoir James Bond; My Long and Eventful Search for his Father, 12 Deighton writes:
I have heard Ian Fleming described as withdrawn and austere, while others called him an eccentric. The simple truth is that he was a brilliant fantasist; a surrealist almost. His wartime ideas for espionage antics were nothing short of preposterous, and so were most of his post war ideas about how society should be reorganized. The fictional character James Bond was his screwball alter ego. Writing provided a chance to depict the forbidden dreams of this outwardly cool, but morose and moody Royal Naval officer. Bond; the cruel and sadomasochistic womanizer, not notably clever but effortlessly coping with the fast cars and boats, jet helicopters and lethal electronic technology that was taking over the world, came from deep within Ian’s creative imagination. Bond was everything that Ian despised and admired, everything he feared and everything he cherished. But Bond was not Ian Fleming.
Having suffered one serious heart attack in 1961, Ian Fleming was further weakened by an acrimonious legal wrangle over the rights to Thunderball, originally developed as a film treatment13 with scriptwriter Jack Whittingham and producer Kevin McClory in 1959. He died suddenly in 1964, just as the James Bond industry was becoming a global enterprise.
Interest in Fleming’s creation did not diminish with the author’s demise, just the opposite in fact. There were not only more films, but more books by ‘continuation’ authors14 and hundreds, if not thousands, of books about Bond, the Bond books and the Bond films. One of the best known is Kingsley Amis’ The James Bond Dossier in 1965, but before that, in 1964 and within a few months of Fleming’s death, Double O Seven: James Bond – A Report was published. Written by Oswald Frederick Snelling (1916–2002), an antiquarian bookseller and author of boxing histories, it went quickly into paperback and was said to have sold a million copies.
In his Preface to the Panther paperback, Snelling records how a friend had telephoned him with the news that Ian Fleming had died and the words: ‘Imagine – no more Bond!’
How wrong that anonymous friend was.
FREDERICK FORSYTH
My colleague is searching, virtually without clues and without any sort of lead, for one of the most elusive types of men in the world. Such specimens do not advertise their professions or their whereabouts.
– The Day of the Jackal, 1971
Within the thriller genre, the term ‘an instant classic’ is used far too often, but The Day of the Jackal has a pretty strong claim to such a label.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was born in Ashford in Kent in 1938 and has claimed that throughout boyhood, as an adolescent and a working journalist in his twenties, he ‘never had the slightest intention’ of becoming a novelist.1 As a child, fascinated by the sight of RAF planes overhead in the skies of wartime Kent, he had one main ambition: to fly. Which he did, doing his National Service in the RAF and becoming, at 19, their youngest serving pilot.
Journalism followed, first with the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk, then joining Reuters in 1961 as a reporter in Europe (he had a natural aptitude for foreign languages) and the BBC in 1965, which he left after about a year in order to cover the civil war in Nigeria and Biafra as a freelance. It was on his return from Africa, in 1970, that he resorted to fiction. ‘It was not until I was thirty-one that, home from an African war and stony-broke as usual, with no job and no chance of one, I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts.’2
The result was The Day of the Jackal which within a year was available in twenty editions and sixteen languages. In Britain, the 1972 paperback edition was reprinted thirty-three times up to 1990 – and is still being reprinted. Frederick Forsyth, however accidentally, had found a new career and thirteen more bestselling novels were to follow (including a ‘sequel’ to The Phantom of the Opera), along with novellas and short stories, many of which were filmed for television, though his greatest cinema hits came with Day of the Jackal in 1973, The Odessa File (1975), The Dogs of War (1980), and The Fourth Protocol (1987).
According to his publisher, Hutchinson,3 just as Jackal was hitting the headlines, the author ‘quietly went off in mid-1971 and re-emerged from wherever he had been with a manuscript called The Odessa File’ which ensured that Forsyth would have no further worries about finding a job or paying his debts.
Although in recent decades he became known on radio and in print as a forthright political commentator and one particularly in favour of Britain leaving the European Union, even on political discussion shows, he is introduced as ‘five decades a top thriller writer with 70 million books sold’4 and is often consulted as an authority on security and defence matters.
DICK FRANCIS
I was never particularly keen on my job before the day I got shot and nearly lost it, along with my life. But the .38 slug of lead which made a pepper-shaker out of my intestines left me with a fire in my belly in more ways than one.
– Odds Against, 1965
Richard Stanley Francis (1920–2010) was ‘born in the saddle’1 and never had an ambition to become anything other than a jockey. He was born in Pembrokeshire in South Wales into a family of horse trainers and riders and was to put his experience of horses to very good use, in more ways than one.
At the outbreak of WWII he attempted to join the Army on the assumption he could ask for a posting to a cavalry regiment. When told by a recruiting officer that the Army would decide where he went, not young Francis, he promptly volunteered for the RAF instead. After training in Rhodesia, he flew Spitfires and Lancaster bombers and only on demobilisation after six years’ service did he follow his ambition and become an amateur steeplechase jockey at the ‘advanced age’ of 25. He turned professional in 1948, rode some 350 winners, and competed in eight Grand Nationals – most famously in 1956 when his mount Devon Loch – a horse owned by the Queen Mother – inexplicably collapsed some fifty yards from the winning post, having been clearly in the lead and on course to set a record time.
Encouraged by his wife Mary, he wrote his autobiography The Sport of Queens in 1957 and retired from steeplechasing and became racing correspondent for the Sunday Express. His first novel, Dead Cert, was published in 1962 and a new thriller was to appear annually for the rest of the century. His heroes were always decent, honest men who coped bravely with physical hardship and pain, just as the author had had to do in his riding career which involved an impressive litany of broken bones. And he always maintained that his plots, especially when they concerned skullduggery around a race course, were never beyond the bounds of possibility. Perhaps they were too realistic as his 1967 novel Blood Sport, about the kidnapping of a racehorse, was later cited as being the inspiration behind the disappearance of Shergar in 1983!
Taking the axiom ‘write
about what you know’, Dick Francis did just that and acquired a vast and loyal following of readers, the majority of whom had probably never been anywhere near a race course. He had imitators but no real rivals, received numerous Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, of which he was made a Grand Master, and Gold and Diamond Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. He was also highly thought of in literary as well as royal circles (the Queen Mother was said to be his biggest fan). According to critic Mark Lawson: ‘Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin regarded him as one of England’s finest novelists’.2 He was certainly one of England’s most popular thriller writers and something of a National Treasure.
In 1999 an unofficial biography, A Racing Life by Sunday Express journalist Graham Lord, suggested that Dick’s wife Mary had made a considerable contribution to the ‘Dick Francis’ brand. This was immediately interpreted in the popular press as the fact that Mary Francis wrote the novels. In fact Francis had never made any secret of the amount of research which Mary – and their son Felix – had done for the novels. Researching the 1966 novel Flying Finish, Mary even learned to fly and went on to publish a Beginner’s Guide to getting a private pilot’s licence in 1969 under her own name. After her death in 2000, Dick said she had been ‘the moving force behind my writing’.3
Whether the Dick Francis novels were the product of a cottage industry or not, it did not affect their popularity and in 2007, son Felix moved seamlessly into the ‘family business’4 as the co-author of Dead Heat. Dick and Felix were to co-write four novels until Dick’s death in 2010. Since then, beginning with Gamble in 2011, Felix Francis has maintained the tradition of producing a bestseller a year.
ADAM HALL
There is only one thing London Control can do when a man wants to opt out; they have to give him an incentive that will make him opt in again. They tried this on me once in Berlin and it worked: they gave me a man to go after, a man I could hate.