Being a fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books, I was recently given a copy of Match Up, an anthology of short stories that pair up well-established characters from thrillers and crime fiction. The volume is edited by Lee Child, and naturally Jack Reacher makes an appearance, teaming up with Kathy Reichs' forensic anthropologist, Dr Temperance Brennan.
The idea of character crossovers is nothing new, though is largely restricted to television, films and comics, especially of the superhero kind (though I remember a somewhat bizarre episode of Murder She Wrote in which amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher joins forces with Magnum PI). Characters from different novels rarely share the page together.
Unsurprisingly, Match Up got me thinking about James Bond and which other character he could join in an adventure. There are plenty to choose from – the many rivals in 1960s spy fiction for Bond's crown, for example – but there are two characters I'd put on my shortlist: Philip Marlowe and Jules Maigret. Their respective authors, Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon, both have a connection to Ian Fleming. Fleming certainly admired their work. He knew Chandler well and had met and conversed with Simenon about their respective books.
I would also like to find out the answer of an intriguing question. Raymond Chandler was once asked who would win if they found themselves up against each other, Bond or Marlowe? With a story featuring both characters, we might have a chance of finding out.
Actually, come to think of it, there is already a ‘match up’ of sorts – Clive Cussler’s Night Probe, featuring marine adventurer Dirk Pitt and a British agent called Brian Shaw. Clive Cussler based Shaw on Bond and indeed is reported to have intended the character to be Bond but was prevented by legalities.
There was another aspect about Match Up that interested me. In Lee Child and Kathy Reichs' story, Brennan is framed for the murder of a journalist, who had been investigating the suicide of an air force officer, one Calder Massee. It was believed that journalist had evidence that supported claims that Massee had in fact been murdered and that Brennan was part of the cover-up. But Reacher knows that it was a case of suicide and joins Brennan to get to the bottom of the conspiracy.
How does Reacher know? The air force officer had been exposed as a spy, having passed secrets to the Russians (the back story is set during the 1980s at the tail end of the Cold War). As an officer in the military police, Reacher is sent to confront and arrest Massee. When they meet, they talk. Reacher later recounts, 'I laid out the situation. He begged me to let him shoot himself. He wanted to spare his family the disgrace.'
Suicide to avoid dishonour is a familiar trope in fiction, but I couldn't help thinking of Ian Fleming's Octopussy, in which James Bond, investigating the theft of gold and the death of a mountain guide in Austria at the end of the war, catches up with the perpetrator, Major Dexter Smythe, and offers him the chance to put his affairs in order and commit suicide, thus sparing Smythe the disgrace of a trial.
The phrase ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’, long associated with James Bond, has proved successful enough in the cultural environment to have a life beyond Bond. Ian Fleming used the phrase, or, rather, a version of it, in a letter to fellow author Raymond Chandler in 1956. Fleming suggested that while Chandler's novels were 'sociological studies', his were 'pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety'. Whether Fleming coined the term is uncertain, but it’s possible that the phrase existed in some form before then. In any case, the phrase became inextricably linked with James Bond during the height of Bondomania in 1964/5. James Bond was known as Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Italian fans (or Japanese fans or the press depending on the account one reads), which inspired John Barry to write a song entitled ‘Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ for Thunderball (1965). A variant of the phrase appeared in 2005, though away from the world of James Bond – as the title of Shane Black’s comedy thriller, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, starring Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. Coincidentally, given the origin of the phrase, the titles of Raymond Chandler’s novels and stories are used as chapter headings through the film.
David Leigh, who runs the excellent website, ‘The James Bond Dossier’, recently alerted me to another use of the phrase. Back in the early 1980s, Specimen, a goth band (or what has been described as a glam horror post-punk band – think of The Cure dressed as extras from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), owned and ran the goth club, The Batcave, in London. They played there, too, and one of their songs was called ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’.
As with the Shane Black film, this ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ had nothing to do with Bond, although there are hints of the Bond theme in the baseline and a chord progression. This may be coincidence, but then again, possibly not. Have a look at the video and make up your own mind. The song’s not terrible either.
David has noticed another connection between the Batcave and Bond. Morten Harket, the lead singer of A-ha, who of course wrote the title song for The Living Daylights (1987), can be seen in another video shot at the venue, dancing in glam-goth-inspired attire. Look out for him 5 minutes 35 seconds into the video.
Peter Cheyney was a British author of espionage stories and American-style hard-boiled detective fiction. Largely forgotten and unread today, he enjoyed huge success between the 1930s and 1950s, when his work was published; according to Fergus Fleming, Cheyney sold over 1,500,000 copies of his books in 1946. It is little wonder, then, that in the early days of his Bond career, Ian Fleming aspired to what he termed 'the Cheyney class', wishing to emulate Cheyney's success and appeal.
We learn this from the superb collection of Ian Fleming's letters, edited by his nephew Fergus and published last year by Bloomsbury. Fleming's aspiration is revealed in a letter to Jonathan Cape in 1953 concerning Live and Let Die. By the time of From Russia, with Love, published in 1957, Fleming's view of Cheyney had changed. In a letter to Wren Howard of Jonathan Cape, Fleming wrote that a proposed comic strip for the Express risked his work descending 'into the Cheyney class'. What was once emulated for its style and popularity was now regarded as inferior and low-brow.
Fleming's later view of Cheyney seems to have continued unchanged for the remainder of his Bond career. It is telling that in interviews given in the early 1960s, Fleming listed, among others, Chandler, Hammett and Oppenheim as influences, but there is no mention of Cheyney. Reading Peter Cheyney now, it is not difficult to understand why Cheyney has not stood the test of time and why Fleming thought his work a cut above the Cheyney class.
Peter Cheyney's 1942 novel, Never a Dull Moment, one of a number of books that feature FBI detective Lemmy Caution, is a case in point. The narrative takes place in England during the Second World War (Cheyney's novels have contemporary settings). Caution is on leave in Scotland, but is requested by the FBI to go to London and investigate the disappearance of an American woman, Julia Wayles. In the course of his enquiries, he discovers a gang of American gangsters working in England for the Germans as a fifth column.
The novel is for the most part exciting and fast-paced, and superficially there are similarities with the Bond novels. The names of Cheyney's femme fatales, such as Dodo Malendas, are as exotic-sounding as those of Fleming's heroines. Caution is tough with the villains and attractive to women, and he'd more than match Bond in his alcohol consumption. We even get a 'Caution, Lemmy Caution' when Caution introduces himself to another character.
As with the Philip Marlowe novels, the Lemmy Caution novels are written in the first-person. Some of the lines come close to Chandler quality (“He lets go a gasp like a steam whistle. I take advantage of the pause in hostilities to punch him in the belly hard.”), but some of the scenes and descriptions are repetitive, and I found that the narrative, rendered in a vernacular style, became tedious to read after a while. To the modern reader, the book might best be regarded as sub-Chandler or, more generally, a parody of a hard-boiled thriller.
Cheyney's espionage writing is rather more conventional. For example, his short story, 'The Double Double-Cross' is a nice little tale about a plan to bring a halt to the activities of the seductive Roanne Lucrezia Loranoff, a Russian aristocrat, émigrée and spy. The story sits comfortably alongside any spy story of the time, but in no obvious sense could it be considered a forerunner of Bond.
That said, another of Cheyney's espionage stories is Dark Duet (1942), which Raymond Chandler considered to be Cheyney's one good book, telling Ian Fleming so in a letter in 1955. One of the characters in the book is called Hildebrand. Three years after Chandler's letter, Hildebrand would crop up again in the title of one of Fleming's short stories.
So is Ian Fleming in or out of the Cheyney class? In my view, definitely out, being some distance above it. But that is not to say that Peter Cheyney doesn't deserve to be read. While his Lemmy Caution novels can be hard-going to the modern reader, Cheyney's espionage stories are a better read and earn their place in the development of spy fiction.
He went into the kitchen and cooked himself Canadian bacon, scrambled eggs and toast, washed down with coffee. James Bond having a spot of breakfast? Actually, no. This is a breakfast consumed by Raymond Chandler's dogged and wise-cracking private eye, Philip Marlowe. But it could easily have been Bond's breakfast too, bacon, coffee, and in particular scrambled eggs being Bond's favourite. Only the cooking separates the two heroes; Bond has a housekeeper for that.
Re-reading Chandler's 1953 novel, The Long Good-bye, I was reminded how large a role food plays in the Philip Marlowe mysteries, almost rivalling the Bond books for food mentions and descriptions.
In the same book, while investigating the murder of a wealthy socialite, the apparent suicide of the only suspect, her husband, and babysitting an alcoholic author, Philip Marlowe consumes more Canadian bacon for breakfast, a chicken salad sandwich lunch, and evening meals of hamburger, mashed potato and onion rings, and prime ribs and, somewhat incongruously, Yorkshire pudding.
It's clear from interviews with Ian Fleming that James Bond owes his origins in part to the tradition of hardboiled detective fiction, particularly that of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The last two thirds of The Spy who Loved Me is pure American pulp-fiction (in the best possible way), and generally the action, spare prose, and dry humour (yes, there is some) of the Bond books wouldn't be out of place in a Chandler novel. To that list we can add food descriptions, which offer another point of similarity.
Being a relatively frequent visitor to the US – though not to California, where Marlowe plies his trade (at least not in books; Bond does travel to California in the 1985 film, A View to a Kill) – Bond would be familiar with Marlowe's food choices. In Live and Let Die, Bond eats a charcoal-grilled hamburger and has a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and coffee at his New York hotel, and orders a chicken sandwich during his rail journey to Florida. In Miami (Goldfinger), Bond enjoys roast prime ribs of beef. Admittedly, Bond doesn't eat Yorkshire pudding in the US or elsewhere for that matter, but he does have a passing thought about toad-in-the-hole, which uses the same batter recipe.
Given their shared tastes, someone really ought to get Marlowe and Bond together for a dinner date. Now that's a parody waiting to be written. Thinking about it, we already have an idea of how that might look on the page. The Bond books feature a laconic private detective, Bond's friend and comrade-in-arms Felix Leiter (who, by his second appearance, is a Pinkerton's agent), with much of Leiter's time spent, it seems, in restaurants and bars.
Not only does Felix Leiter know his food, but he also has his fair share of wisecracks. In Diamonds are Forever, before entering Sardi's, where Leiter introduces Bond to brizzola ('Beef, straight-cut across the bone. Roast and then broiled. Suit you?'), Leiter quips that in Texas, 'even the fleas are so rich they can hire themselves dogs'. Philip Marlowe would be proud of that one, and would no doubt enjoy dining at Sardi's too.
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).
In an earlier article, I discussed the origin of the phrase, 'Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'. The phrase, which became widespread around 1964/5, is usually attributed to the Italian fans or press, but I revealed that Ian Fleming had used a similar phrase. His version – 'bang, bang, kiss, kiss' - appears in an article based on a 1963/4 interview published in 1965.
In fact, we can place Fleming's usage some seven or eight years earlier. In 1959, The London Magazine published a tribute written by Fleming to his friend Raymond Chandler, who had died that year. In his article, Fleming presented a selection of correspondence between him and Chandler in which they discussed, among other matters, books, writing, and authors (they both admired Eric Ambler and Dashiell Hammett).
In a letter dated 27th April 1956, responding to Chandler's view that, despite his favourable review of the book, Diamonds Are Forever contained some bad parts, Fleming admitted that he probably didn't take his own writing seriously enough. Fleming suggested that while Chandler's novels were 'sociological studies', his were 'pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety'.
Of course, we needn't make a direct link between Fleming's 'kiss, kiss, bang, bang' phrase, and the later variant used in Italy. But the closeness of both variants points to something of a 'common ancestor' from which both originated. In other words, the phrase already had a degree of currency in cultural space, certainly before the phrase gained greater prominence with the release of Thunderball in 1965, and probably before Fleming put his words in a letter to Raymond Chandler in 1956.
References
Fishman, J, 1965 007 and me, by Ian Fleming, in For Bond Lovers Only (ed. S Lane), Panther Fleming, I, 1959 Raymond Chandler, The London Magazine, vol. 6, no. 12
The other day I picked up my copy of the Triad/Panther edition of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, first published in 1977, and glancing at the back cover read the familiar quotation: 'Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.' The author was Sunday Times book critic Raymond Mortimer.
I then picked up the later Penguin edition (showing the Richie Fahey design), and saw that the quotation was repeated. Except that it was attributed to Raymond Chandler. The same attribution, along with a reference to the Sunday Times source, was made on the Penguin 'abstract art' edition. And a shortened version of the quote and Chandler/Sunday Times attribution will be repeated again on the back of the Vintage 'There is only one Bond' edition.
So who does the quotation belong to? The only way to find out was to return to Raymond Mortimer's Sunday Times review of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, published on 30th March 1963. The phrase was indeed there, though not quite in the same form as that shown on the Triad and Penguin paperbacks. The actual line is:
'James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.'
So what of Raymond Chandler? Chandler wrote two reviews of Bond books. The first, a review of Diamonds are Forever, was published in the Sunday Times on 25th March 1956. The second, reviewing Dr No, was published on 31st March 1958. In neither review did Chandler write anything that resembled Raymond Mortimer's line. It is possible that Chandler did say something similar, but it has been difficult to find its original source (and of course Chandler can't have written the line in connection with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as he died in 1959).
I can't help feeling that Chandler never wrote a phrase on the lines of 'Bond is what is every man would like to be', and that the association between the author and phrase is apocryphal. I also wonder whether the error in attribution occurred simply from the confusion of both writers being called Raymond. What is interesting, though, is the fact that copying-errors in the attribution and words have been perpetuated through various editions of Bond paperbacks. The inaccurate quotation has become a meme in its own right, being spread and replicated without reference to the original source.
Images: On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Design copyright Triad/Panther Books 1977 On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Design copyright Penguin/Richie Fahey 2006
A feature on Vincent Cassel in the Sunday Times magazine of 23rd April 2012 began with the words: 'Vincent Cassel is married to Monica Bellucci, loves his kids and can afford to turn down any film he's offered. Women want to be with him, men want to be him.' The final sentence is a phrase associated with James Bond, and encapsulates Bond's attraction to both men and women. That the feature's writer, Stefanie Marsh, used the phrase, whether knowingly alluding to the world of Bond or not, is testament to its success as measured by its longevity and spread into wider popular culture.
The phrase is often attributed to Raymond Chandler ('Every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him'), which potentially dates it to 1959 or earlier, but it certainly appeared in print in 1963. In a review of On Her Majesty's Secret Service published in the Sunday Times in 1963, Raymond Mortimer wrote, 'James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.'
It is possible that Raymond Mortimer had adapted Chandler's line [but click here to read an update and further discussion about the origin of the phrase], but more likely the writers were expressing variants of a phrase already current in cultural space, and since the 1960s, there have been many more variants expressed. Sean Connery, for example, said in Playboy in 1965 that 'Bond is the invincible figure every man would like to be, every woman is excited by, and is everyone's survival symbol.' Even Ian Fleming had his own version. He told Jack Fishman in c 1963, 'Bond is the kind of man every girl secretly dreams of meeting and leads the life every man would like to live if he dared.'
More recently the phrase was used in Austin Powers (1997), in which Mrs Kensington, played by Mimi Rogers, said, 'Women want him, and men want to be him'. And the response from Bond directors John Glen, Martin Campbell and Michael Apted at January's CES 2012 in Las Vegas when asked why people want to see Bond films was that men want to be Bond and women want to go to bed with him.
Another phrase strongly associated with Bond that does not derive from lines in the Bond books or films is 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'. Around the time of Thunderball (1965), Bond was known in Italy (and/or Japan, depending on one's source) as Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and as a result, John Barry composed a piece with that phrase as the title for Thunderball. As with 'Men want to be him...' type phrases, however, 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' was probably already well established in popular culture. Fleming had used it himself. He also told Jack Fishman, 'I admit that Bond is...the feverish dream of the author of what he might have been – bang, bang, kiss, kiss – that sort of stuff.'
We may also add to our list the phrase, 'martinis, girls and guns', which Cheryl Crow used in her song for 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies. What these examples suggest is that memes such as phrases, which are often attributed to a single origin, may already have existed in some form in cultural space, and because of that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they are expressed in reviews, interviews, articles, films, or song lyrics.
References:
Fishman, J, 1965 007 and me, by Ian Fleming, in For Bond Lovers Only (ed. S Lane), Panther Jarman, C M, 2009 Licence to quote, Blue Eyed Books
I was listening to Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming in conversation – the recording is part of the BBC’s archive on James Bond – and was struck by a number of Chandler’s statements that reminded me of passages that appeared later in Fleming’s novels.
The conversation was originally broadcast in 1958, and Fleming was about to publish Goldfinger. In the programme, Chandler asks Fleming why he included torture scenes in all his novels. Fleming disputed this, but then admitted that this was a product of growing up with Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond novels (evidently the influence of these earlier English thrillers cannot be dismissed altogether). Chandler said, ‘Next time try brainwashing’. Fleming did not try brainwashing in his next book (For Your Eyes Only), but it does appear in his final full-length novel, The Man With The Golden Gun. After losing his memory in Japan at the conclusion of You Only Live Twice, James Bond travels to Russia and into the hands of the KGB, which brainwashes him into assassinating M.
Then, during a conversation about gun crime in America, Chandler says, ‘The first thing you do after being struck on the head [with a gun] is vomit’. Fleming used this idea rather sooner. In the short story Risico (published in For Your Eyes Only), Bond is struck on the head with a Luger by one of Colombo’s men. Fleming writes, ‘When you come to from being hit on the head the first reaction is a fit of vomiting’.
In the broadcast, Fleming refers to Chandler’s latest novel, Playback. Chandler mentions that at the end of it, the hero Philip Marlowe proposes marriage. Chandler speculates that marriage and Marlowe’s job – a private detective – are incompatible, and that it would cause a problem in subsequent novels. Fleming said, ‘I don’t think my character’s going to get married’. Well, of course he does, to Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But, like Chandler, Fleming was aware that marriage and Bond’s job cannot be reconciled, and he (actually Blofeld) kills the marriage as the couple speeds off from the ceremony.
As Goldfinger says: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’. The obvious conclusion to draw from the broadcast is that, rather than these similarities being coincidence, Fleming took or ‘inherited’ Chandler’s ideas, stored them away in his mind, and recalled them (whether remembering the original source or not) to use in his writing. So, to answer the question posed in the title, in some cases the ideas came from Raymond Chandler.
If we want to live the James Bond lifestyle, then we could go skiing, drive Bentleys, consume foie gras, drink champagne, and wrestle a giant squid. Or we could read the books on Bond's bookshelf.
Kingsley Amis (writing as Bill Tanner) thought that Bond's bookcase was sparse. Bond was not a great reader. This assessment seems a little harsh. Why should Fleming include a catalogue of Bond's bookcase in the novels? And we surely do not expect Bond's adventures to involve trips to the library or descriptions of Bond getting through a couple of chapters each night before lights out. If Ian Fleming wrote a novel about Bond resting between missions, then we might have seen a different side of Bond – reclining in the armchair, feet resting on the pouffe, engrossed in the latest blockbuster.
But from the few references we do gain from the novels, we know that Bond did have a varied library. Bond liked a good thriller. He read Eric Ambler's The Mask of Demetrios on the plane to Turkey, and turned to the hard-boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlow and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. Bond read key sporting manuals – Ben Hogan’s Modern Fundamentals of Golf, Tony Armour’s How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time, and Scarne on Cards. Politics are covered by JFK’s Profiles in Courage and Allen Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence. For travel, Bond reads, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree (although this was on M’s recommendation). Bond’s copy of The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature may have provided Bond with spiritual comfort, but really it was simply a place to hide his gun.
Inevitably, James Bond’s choice in books mirrors that of Fleming’s. Some of the titles were undoubtedly shared, and it is a fair assumption that Fleming had read all the books he gave to Bond. He had certainly read The Traveller’s Tree. Fleming quoted extensively from it in Live and Let Die and, in a footnote, regarded it as one of the great travel books. We know that Fleming had read Philip Marlowe’s adventures, because Fleming admitted that the style of Raymond Chandler’s thrillers influenced his own.
Fleming also had a copy of The Craft of Intelligence; Allen Dulles sent him a draft. By referring to Profiles in Courage, Fleming was able to return the compliment that Kennedy gave Fleming when the president put From Russia with Love at number nine in the list of his ten favourite books. Fleming was a keen golfer (obvious from the battle of golf between Bond and Goldfinger) and we would expect Fleming to be up on the latest manuals.
It may seem asinine to say that Ian Fleming was well acquainted with the books that Bond reads, but there is an important point. If Fleming used books to create character, then the character was Fleming himself
Of course, Fleming had other influences, taken most notably from his wartime experiences. He recalled how, during the war, he controlled No. 30 Assault Unit, comprising a rough bunch of ‘courageous, amoral, wayward’ Royal Marines. Fleming’s intention was clear: not so much to draw James Bond as an American hero, though the parallels are close, but to disassociate Bond from the ‘stage Englishman’, returning virtues to the character that were gained in the war, but rapidly lost with the onset of peace and the dismantling of Empire. The solution was to combine the confident swagger of the American detective with the resolve and resourcefulness of the British Commando. With this in mind, the clues become obvious.
Beyond his anti-aristocratic name and un-gentlemanly way of killing, Bond is an arch-consumer, deliberately selecting and remaining loyal to brand-names – Hoffritz razors, Palmolive toiletries, Ronson cigarette lighter, among others – in defiance of post-war ration-book austerity. Instead of tea and beer, the most English of beverages, Bond drinks strong coffee and hard liquor. In an American bar, Fleming describes Bond paying for the check, not the bill. And, as if to reinforce his credentials, Bond reads the latest Raymond Chandler.
Another crucial element in reorientating the English hero was the locations. Just one novel – Moonraker – is set extensively in England. Of the remainder, five of Bond’s adventures are set to lesser or greater extents in the United States. Fleming was at pains to get the Americanisms right, especially the dialogue, and had an assistant librarian at Yale to check his text. The result is an authenticity that, if a little ridiculous in a modern light, nevertheless takes the reader far away from the milieu of the English gentleman-adventurer produced by the likes of Buchan. Fleming’s efforts brought their reward. Though sales were slow to begin – Casino Royale initially failed to find a US publisher, and both this novel and Moonraker were later retitled for the first paperback editions – his books became enormously popular in America. He was surprised at this, but admitted that Bond ‘must seem very American in so many ways – his likes, his dislikes, and his rather full sex life’.
This must have been deeply satisfying for Fleming, a patriotic Englishman determined to keep Britain at the top table with the US. At last there was a tough British hero stripped of stereotypical English traits who could compete on equal terms with Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade or Mickey Spillane. Fleming gained the admiration, famously, of Jack Kennedy and, more significantly for him, of Raymond Chandler. In a review of Diamonds Are Forever, Chandler wrote, ‘the scene is almost entirely American, and it rings true to an American. I am unaware of any other [English] writer who has accomplished this’. Chandler had deduced Fleming’s aim of writing an American-style thriller, recognising that, unlike other British crime stories, Fleming’s had a ‘hard, clean style’, devoid of waffle. Chandler, though, had his reservations. He noticed that Fleming wrote ‘of brutal things, as though he liked them’, but advised that ‘the best hard-boiled writers never try to be tough, they allow toughness to happen when it seems inevitable for its time, place and conditions’, pleading for Fleming not to ‘become a stunt writer, or he will end up no better than the rest of us’.
Bond’s adventures were immediately familiar to Fleming’s readers, though perhaps not from British literature. The first paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep reads, ‘I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them’. Later on, Marlowe orders two black coffees, ‘strong and made this year’. As in the Bond books, there is an attention to detail and exactitudes – the facts that ground the character in reality; and like Bond, Marlowe knows what he wants. Then there is the violence, which sparsely punctuates the narrative, but is distinctly Bondian in tone when it occurs:
‘Perhaps it would have been nice to allow him another shot or two, just like a gentleman of the old school. But his gun was still up and I couldn’t wait any longer. Not long enough to be a gentleman of the old school. I shot him four times, the Colt straining against my ribs. The gun jumped out of his hand as if it had been kicked.
Compare this with a passage from the pages of Fleming:
‘Bond’s right flashed out and the face of the Rolex disintegrated against the man’s jaw. The body slid sluggishly off its chair on to the carpet and lay still, its legs untidy, as if in sleep.’
That Fleming’s spare description and journalistic prose resembles Chandler is unsurprising. Fleming certainly admitted the influence of Chandler and other ‘superb masters of the modern thriller’, including Dashiell Hammett, creator of the brutal Sam Spade. Both were from the ‘hard-boiled’ school of writing, which Joseph T Shaw described as hard and brittle, with authentic characterisation and action and a very fast tempo. Chandler in particular was noted for raising the genre from pulp-fiction to literature by writing ‘genuine drama…in a very vivid and pungent style’. The results were generally met with approval; a review of The Big Sleep published in The New Statesman admired the ‘full strength blends of sadism, eroticism and alcoholism’ (a description remarkably similar to Paul Johnson’s rather more pejoratively-meant epithet, ironically also published in The New Statesman).
Both Chandler and Fleming placed an emphasis on toughness and the speed of the narrative. Chandler accepted the need for constant action: ‘If you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand’. Fleming agreed to the same demands: ‘The pace of the narrative gets me round tricky corners. You take the reader along so fast…that he isn’t thrown by…incongruities’.
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.
