A recent obituary in The Times recorded the death on 14th March 2014 of Sam Peffer, a commercial artist who was not a household name, but whose artwork graced the early Pan editions of the James Bond novels and inevitably found a place in thousands of homes across Britain and beyond during the late 1950s and 1960s.
Away from Bond, Peffer designed cover artwork for paperbacks published by Corgi, and Panther, among others, and throughout much of the 1970s and early 1980s produced lurid film posters, usually for X-rated, horror or kung-fu films. He retired in 1985 when poster commissions dried up as film companies turned to photo montages, rather than painted artwork.
But it is his work on the Bond novels for Pan that Sam Peffer is probably best known. His pulp-fiction style perfectly reflected the tough, violent, hard-boiled adventures within. In tribute to his work, here are the covers attributed with certainty to Sam Peffer.
Casino Royale (1958): In Peffer's depiction, Vesper Lynd is portrayed as damsel in distress, rather than the femme fatale of subsequent covers. Peffer's cover is notable for depicting James Bond in a way that was in more keeping with the character described in the novel. Instead of the smooth card player shown on the first paperback edition of 1955, we have a strong, tough agent, complete with a comma of hair. And the model for Bond? That was Peffer's brother-in-law, a stuntman named Jack.
Dr No (1958): James Bond drags an exhausted Honey Rider through the Jamaican swamps as they escape the clutches of Dr No, whose cruel omnipotence is brilliantly suggested by Sam Peffer artwork. And Peffer's depiction of Bond in jeans and coarse work-shirt reminds us that Bond is a man of action prepared to get his hands dirty, a far cry from the dinner-suited spy of today's popular imagination.
From Russia, With Love (1959): James Bond forcefully holds Tatiana Romanova by the wrist. Tatiana appears reluctant to travel with Bond, as if uncertain of her fate once on the British side or fearful of the reaction from SMERSH on the Russian side.
Moonraker (1960): With his ripped shirt and exhausted expression, James Bond is every bit Ian Fleming's tough, commando-like secret agent. Bond tightly embraces special branch agent Gala Brand, who looks on in sheer terror at the missile launch depicted in the background.
Sam Peffer's artwork was replaced by those of Raymond Hawkey in the mid 1960s, but Peffer's legacy lives on. There were hints of Peffer's work in the series of pulp-fiction style covers designed by Richie Fahey for Penguin in 2006. It is also testament to the affection held by Bond afficionados for Sam Peffer's covers that many of the contributors to 'Field Reports' on the Artistic License Renewed website have cited them as their favourite Bond dustjackets in paperback or by continuation authors.
Acknowledgement
The images have been taken from the Piz Goria website, an excellent site which is dedicated to collecting James Bond paperback novels by Ian Fleming.
As the authors of two recent introductions to the novel (Nick Stone in the Penguin edition and Douglas Kennedy for the Vintage edition) observed, The Spy Who Loved Me, first published in 1962, is anomalous. Written in first person from a woman's perspective, Ian Fleming's tenth novel hardly deserves the label of a James Bond thriller. When Bond does enter the narrative in the final third of the book, he walks into plot of a cheap crime novel featuring two hoodlums intent on fraud, violence, and murder. Yet, it is one of my favourite Bond novels. It was probably the second Bond book I read, and it was just as exciting as my first (On Her Majesty's Secret Service).
I've returned to the book several times over the years, and have never failed to be pulled in by its gripping, pulp-fiction-inspired narrative. And each reading has brought fresh insight. The latest re-reading is no exception.
Ian Fleming was avid reader of American hard-boiled crime fiction, and especially admired the works of its some of its chief exponents, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. If Fleming was attempting to emulate those authors in his own work, then The Spy Who Loved Me is arguably his finest effort (Diamonds Are Forever also owes more to American detective fiction than it does spy fiction or Bulldog Drummond-style tales of derring-do). Fleming's intention seems clear enough when Bond finally appears. As the book's narrator, Vivienne Michel, observes, he is dressed in a “uniform that the films make one associate with gangsters – a dark-blue, belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down.” Later, when he introduces himself to the hoodlums, Sluggsy and Horror, Sluggsy exclaims, “This shamus is a limey dick! A gum-shoe!” In this novel, then, James Bond is less British agent, and more Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.
There are other aspects of the novel that recently caught my attention. One of them was Vivienne's background. As she relates, her parents were killed in an accident (a plane crash) when she was eight, and she was subsequently brought up by her aunt. Sound familiar? Fleming gave Bond a similar back-story when he wrote Bond's obituary in You Only Live Twice (1964). If the origins of some of the ideas behind Bond's childhood lie in The Spy Who Loved Me, then this potentially gives the earlier novel enormous significance. Had Fleming never written The Spy Who Loved Me, his account of Bond's childhood might have been very different.
That is not the only possible connection between The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice. After Vivienne Michel escapes from Sluggsy and Horror, she is recaptured and is violently abused. Crawling into the kitchen of the motel, she makes herself some scrambled eggs and bacon (what else?), and slowly as the food brings warmth and nourishment, Vivienne regains her strength and desire to survive. “Love of life is born of the awareness of death, the dread of it”, she considers. Her statement seems to prefigure Bond's haiku expressed in You Only Live Twice: “You Only Live Twice / Once when you are born / And once when you look death in the face.” Both convey a similar sentiment.
Speaking of Sluggsy and Horror, it has often been claimed that while Fleming forbade the filming of his novel, a vestige of the novel survived in the character of Jaws in the film of The Spy Who Loved Me. The henchman's metal teeth seems to have been based on the steel-capped teeth worn by Horror. But I wonder whether Sandor, who appears in the film alongside Jaws, was written with reference to the description of Horror's co-conspirator, Sluggsy, who is short and hairless.
Of course, any novel or film set in an American motel cannot fail to bring to mind Alfred Hickcock's Psycho (1960), and indeed Fleming seems to have referenced the film in the novel. Vivienne ponders the criminal threats motels face, which include murderers who leave “corpses in the shower.” There is no record of Fleming watching the film, but it is possible that this sentence reflects at least an awareness of it.
The Vintage edition of The Spy Who Loved Me that I recently acquired is the fifth edition of the book I own. Comparing the editions, I noticed that there were two things missing from it. There is no co-author. The novel is by Ian Fleming only, whereas my Penguin, Triad Grafton, Book Club and Cape editions purport to be written by Ian Fleming with Vivienne Michel. The Vintage edition also lacks the short preface that begins, “The spy who loved me was called James Bond”, which reveals that Vivienne's co-author persuaded his publisher to bring out their book. Interestingly, these paragraphs are also absent in the Penguin edition, but present in preceding editions. I think it a shame that these aspects have been dropped, as they are important in setting up a conceit that justifies the style of the book.
Not that, in my view, its existence needs to be justified. The Spy Who Loved Me may be anomalous, but it is also a brave experiment, an exciting pulp-fiction crime thriller, and an important work in the development of James Bond, containing as it possibly does the origins of memes that would be expressed in later forms.
The news that Ian Fleming's James Bond books from April will be published by Vintage – a stable-mate of Fleming's original publisher, Jonathan Cape – raises some interesting questions, not least with regard to cover design. Will Vintage return to the original covers or have covers derived from them, or use different designs altogether? I recently read Gary Lovisi's excellent book, Dames, Dolls and Delinquents: a collector's guide to sexy pulp fiction paperbacks (2009, Krause Publications), and was reminded of the variation in cover design in the 1950s. In particular, the early US paperback editions of Fleming's first four novels look rather similar to some of the pulp fiction covers shown in Lovisi's book.The resemblance, of course, was deliberate, as Casino Royale (retitled You Asked For It), published by Popular Library, and Live and Let Die, Moonraker (retitled Too Hot To Handle), and Diamonds Are Forever, published by Perma Books, were marketed to appeal to their publishers' core pulp-fiction reading demographic.
Let's look first at Casino Royale. Its new title, You Asked for It (1955), fits perfectly within the library of contemporaneous pulp-fiction titles, such as You've Had Your Chance (1951) and Take It And Like It (1951). The cover, too, showing Bond in the background smoothly fixing himself a drink, and a cool but sensual Vesper Lynd in the foreground, follows the conventions of pulp-fiction, as we can see when we compare it to, say, Blonde Hellcat (1954). Lovisi would probably place the Bond novel in his category of 'deadly femmes fatales', not least given the tagline: 'She played a man's game with a woman's weapons'. The cover artist is unknown, although Art Scott suggests that it's the work of Ray Johnson, who drew a number of covers for Popular Library. 
Unhappy at the title change, Ian Fleming switched publishers to Perma Books. Live and Let Die (1956), the first of the Perma books, kept its title – it fits the usual range of pulp-fiction titles reasonably well – and had a cover, showing Bond and a chained-up Solitaire in Mr Big's lair, that is likely to have appealed to pulp-fiction readers. Indeed, the artist, James Meese, regularly drew covers for pulp fiction, among them Homicide Hussy (1955). 
Moonraker followed, also in 1956, but like Casino Royale suffered a title change. The new title, Too Hot To Handle, was again typical pulp fiction. There are a number of similar-in-spirit titles among those selected by Lovisi for his 'Bad girl delinquents' category, such as As Bad As They Come (1959) and The Wayward Ones (1954). The cover, though, drawn by pulp-fiction artist Lou Marchetti, better fits Lovisi's 'Women in peril' category, as the cover for The Double Shuffle (1954) shows.
The final Perma Bond novel was Diamonds Are Forever (1957). This time there was no title change. Perhaps like Live and Let Die the title was consistent with pulp-fiction convention, as was the suitably brutal cover, by William Rose, which showed a women struggling to prevent a man from stealing her diamonds from around her neck. But Fleming was still unhappy with the Moonraker paperback and switched publishers again, this time to Signet.The marketing of the early Bond paperbacks in the US tells us much about how Fleming's novels were regarded. Given Fleming's pacy, sparse writing style, which was modelled to some extent on American hard-boiled thrillers, particularly those of Raymond Chandler, it is little wonder that US publishers felt that the natural home of the Bond novels was in the world of pulp fiction. Acknowledgement: Non-Bond covers taken from Lovisi, G, 2009 Dames, Dolls and Delingquents: a collector's guide to sexy pulp fiction paperbacks, Krause Publishing
