Fleming on the BBC's Desert Island Discs

I recently listened to a short extract of Ian Fleming’s interview on the BBC’s radio programme, Desert Island Discs. Little of the broadcast, originally made in August 1963, survives, although we have a record of the music, books and luxury item Fleming would have taken with him to the hypothetical desert island (a list that all 'castaways' appearing on the long-running programme have to provide).

Fleming's responses to presenter Roy Plomley's questions are likely to be familiar to any student of Fleming, and concerned Fleming’s early career, his war exploits, how he came to write the first Bond novel on the eve of his wedding, his writing regime, the origin of Bond as a mixture of wartime commando and secret service agent, and so on. But the interview also offered, for me at least, some additional information. At one point in the interview, Plomley asked Fleming about criticisms of violence and sadism in his books. Fleming replied that “the old days of getting a crack on the head with a cricket stump have rather gone out”, continuing that he thought it “ridiculous to go on writing thrillers in the old Bulldog Drummond, John Buchan way.” The response was similar to something he said in interview with Jack Fishman (published in 1965 in For Bond Lovers Only): “I didn't believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types. I felt these types could no longer exist in literature.” His Desert Island Discs interview reveals that he had added Buchan's Richard Hannay to his list of out-dated heroes.

I wonder, though, whether Fleming's later interviews incorporated a relatively new response that had been repeated and honed to provide a neat explanation for the style of his books, but wasn't necessarily in Fleming's mind when he began to write them. In his discussion with Raymond Chandler on thriller writing, broadcast in 1958, Fleming addressed the subject of torture and violence. “I was brought up on Dr Fu Manchu and thrillers of that kind”, he said, admitting that “even Bulldog Drummond gets in the grips of the villain.” The implication is that Bond wasn't the first hero to be routinely tortured by the villain, and that the Bond novels follow a tradition that existed in the books Fleming read as a child. Certainly, Fleming didn't reject those books as old-fashioned in that discussion, but it is possible that over time Fleming developed a narrative to explain his style and to offer in response to criticisms of 'sex, sadism and snobbery'. It was a narrative that looked more strongly to American style thrillers and away from Bulldog Drummond and other 'clubland' heroes.

While the Bond books have a pace, a sense of location, and a level of sex and violence that clearly derive from hard-boiled thrillers, in particular Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, connections to the books of Fleming's childhood, notably in relation to his villains, cannot be ruled out. Moonraker's Sir Hugo Drax, for example, has more than a passing resemblance to Carl Peterson, the villain of Sapper's Bulldog Drummond novels, while Dr No could come from the pages of Fu Manchu (which Fleming admits in his Fishman interview influenced his writing).

James Bond PI: the American origins of 007. Part 1

The admixture in Ian Fleming’s novels of exotic consumption, available women and violence was famously dismissed by Paul Johnson in 1958 as ‘sex, sadism and snobbery’; Johnson saw Fleming instilling in Bond the characteristics of a schoolboy bully, a frustrated adolescent and suburban snob. Johnson admitted that these three ingredients were expertly crafted, but this was at the expense of plot and structure, which were ‘incoherent’ and ‘haphazard’. Fleming was, in Johnson’s view, a typically English writer whose writing was somewhat unhealthy and a product of his own Establishment background; Bond, a ex-Royal Naval commander and regular visitor to Blades, a London club, and exclusive French casinos, was no more than a fantastic, and rather nasty, projection of Fleming himself.

The problem that the critics faced was that they were comparing Bond with other English literary heroes, and found that Bond did not fit the mould. The differences between Bond and the standard clubman do-gooder were difficult to reconcile, and the solution for the critic was to dismiss Bond as the horrible little brother of Bulldog Drummond and the stories themselves as offering no more than fleeting escapism. This was to miss the point of Fleming’s creation; any comparison of Bulldog Drummond and Bond would have revealed that the two characters were cut from very different cloths.

It has been pointed out that Ian Fleming read Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond adventures as a child and was enormously fond of them; the exploits of the daring army captain fresh from the Great War and those of others, such as Rudolf Rassendyll from The Prisoner of Zenda, provided the young Fleming with a release from the unpleasantness of life at Durnford School, which he attended from 1917 at around the age of nine. While some aspects of those stories – the sense of adventure, moral purpose, and not a little wartime spirit – may have found their way into Fleming’s novels, there was no direct transference of their form or characters. Put simply, Bond was no Drummond. In the first of his adventures, Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, bored and restless at the end of the First World War, seeks adventure, possibly of a criminal nature. He accepts the plea of a pretty young woman to extricate her from marriage to an overbearing bully of a man and finds himself against master-criminal Carl Peterson and foiling a plot that threatens the very existence of England. Drummond tackles the villains with a cheerful recklessness armed occasionally with a gun, but mainly just his fists, and is helped by his ex-army batman James Denny, and a network of officer-friends, who leap into action like a over-enthusiastic pack of bounding labradors.

For Fleming, the lantern-jawed, stoical Bulldog Drummond types came from an imaginary past that lacked credibility and resonance: ‘I felt these types could no longer exist in literature’. Drummond is a thrill-seeker who pursues danger for its own sake; relying on his own resources and presumably substantial funds. His actions are framed by an unwritten gentlemanly code, and he tackles Peterson and his evil machine with the sportsman’s determination to play fair. This is an important point: the motif of a game or sport runs throughout the first novel. Drummond admired ‘a good sport’, and relishes the serious game. ‘The game has begun’, he remarks to his sidekick Denny, and, to keep them from danger, he tells his friends ahead of the final showdown with Peterson that there’s no call on them to remain in the game. He is even a member of the Junior Sports Club, where most of his friends reside.

Fleming rejects this utterly. Fantastical, certainly, but his novels are grounded in a reality that Sapper’s lacks. In Casino Royale, perhaps with his childhood reading in mind, Fleming has Bond recall that in school it was easy ‘to pick out one’s heroes and villains’, but in the real world the divisions were blurred. Killing was a necessary part of his job, but it could be messy and unpleasant where gentlemanly rules did not apply. Prompted by the words of Le Chiffre to reflect on the nature of his job, Bond considers whether is playing ‘Red Indians’. He does not like this thought – he takes no comfort from a description that recalls Drummond’s sporting metaphors – and by the end of his adventure, he has awakened to the dirty consequences of cold war espionage – evasion, killing, and betrayal. The end of Casino Royale marks a transition for Bond from wartime thrill-seeker to cold war killer, and in detailing this, Fleming severs any romantic connections Bond’s job might have had with Drummond-style escapades.