Another James Bond pastiche by Sebastian Faulks

An edition of Radio 4’s literary quiz, The Write Stuff, recently broadcast on Radio 4 Extra, was of particular interest to Bond fans, as it featured Ian Fleming as its author of the week. Following the typical format of the programme, listeners were treated to the panellists’ favourite Fleming quotations, a quick-fire quiz round all about Fleming, and, at the end of the programme, the panellists having been tasked with concocting literary passages written in the style of the author, the resulting four pastiches. 

The quotations were taken from the novels From Russia, with Love, You Only Live Twice, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a 1962 interview with Fleming in The New Yorker. I’m glad to report that I scored full marks on the quiz round. Unsurprisingly, team captain Sebastian Faulks had no difficulty either. 

As for the pastiches, the panellists had to imagine that James Bond had been turned down by the Secret Service and had resorted to a different career. For Sebastian Faulks, this was familiar territory, having already written a Bond pastiche, which imagined Bond shopping in a supermarket, in an earlier series. For his second effort (well, third, if you count Devil May Care), Faulks imagined Bond as a plumber, sent to fix the blocked sink of one Miss Sapho Crumpet and discovering the presence of a rival firm going by the name of SPECTRE – Surbiton Plumbing, Electrical, Carpentry and Roofing Experts.
 

Pistache, Faulks' 2006 collection of pastiches from The Write Stuff

Fellow panellist Mark Billingham imagined that Bond had turned to hairdressing (licensed to cut, style and blow-dry) in a pastiche that ended with a neat play on Goldfinger’s most famous line (‘No, Mr Bond, I expect you to dye’!). Natalie Haynes presented Bond as a dentist (‘Doctor? No, dentist’, Bond says to a patient), who has a licence to drill and works with a hygienist called Flossy Galore. In the final pastiche, John Walsh returned Bond to his roots, imagining Bond as an ornithologist. 

This was clever stuff, and all the pastiches were fun, but what’s interesting is that all drew, perhaps a little unimaginatively, on the Bond films of the 1960s. In three of the pastiches, dialogue by Bond was delivered in a Sean Connery-style accent, and the efforts variously referenced Dr No, Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice. Clearly, the memes of the early Bond films remain influential, more so, perhaps, than later entries.

At the time of writing, the Fleming edition of The Write Stuff is on the BBC’s iPlayer Radio, but not for long!

Are James Bond novels getting longer?

In an interview by Sathnam Sanghera for the Times Magazine in September, William Boyd said that he thought his James Bond book, Solo, “might be the longest Bond novel at 336 pages” ('...pretending he doesn't know this for a fact', Sathnam Sanghera commented). Boyd admitted at the 'Boyd on Bond' event at the Southbank that he hadn't read any continuation Bond novels except Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun and Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care, and so we can excuse the inaccuracy. In fact, the longest Bond novel is Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, which at 432 pages is almost 100 pages longer than Solo.

Boyd's claim notwithstanding, his comment perhaps reflects a wider view that, certainly by modern standards, Ian Fleming's novels are rather on the short side, possibly even too short to be taken very seriously. Indeed, in his preview of the Designing Bond exhibition in London in July 2012, design critic Stephen Bayley, writing in the Times (2nd July 2012), dismissed the original novels as novellas. But is this fair? Are Fleming's books really so short? Are Bond books increasing in length over time? Let's have a look at some numbers.

I collected data for all of Fleming's books, except Octopussy (a statistical outlier), and all continuation novels, except the novelisations of Pierce Brosnan's Bond films. I chose to ignore several variables that might affect book length, such as font size, pages size, margins and spacing, simply taking instead the number of the last page in the UK first edition hardback. This gave me a dataset of 39 books.

Here are some basic statistics. As stated, the longest Bond book is Carte Blanche. The shortest is John Gardner's Nobody Lives Forever (1986), which is 192 pages long. In fairness to William Boyd, Solo is the second longest book (actually 322 pages). The longest Fleming novel is Goldfinger (1959) at 318 pages, only four fewer than Solo. The shortest Fleming novel is Casino Royale (1953) at 218 pages. Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (2008) is within the top quarter with 294 pages, while Kingsley Amis' effort (1968) is roughly in the middle with 255 pages. Raymond Benson's novels are generally on the higher end, his longest being The Man with the Red Tattoo (2002), Doubleshot (2000) and Never Dream of Dying (2001), all being 320 pages in length. The longest Gardner novel is The Man from Barborossa (1991) at 303 pages. The overall mean across the dataset is 262 pages.

The sequence of books produced by Fleming, Gardner and Benson allows some interesting comparison. The mean length of Fleming's novels is 253 pages. This is slightly more than the mean for Gardner's books (241 pages) but somewhat smaller than the value (301 pages) for Raymond Benson's novels. The standard deviations for the books of Fleming and Gardner are also quite similar (27 and 29 pages respectively), but more than that for Benson (25 pages). This suggests that Benson's novels are more consistent in terms of page length, while the books of Fleming and Gardner varied rather more. This is confirmed by the overall range (that of Fleming is 100 pages, compared with 61 for Benson), and the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by mean), which standardises groups of data of different size. That for Fleming and Gardner is 0.12, while that for Benson is 0.08.

These values suggested to me that Gardner's novels are practically the same sort of length as Ian Fleming's, but that Raymond Benson's are different; judging by the means, Benson's books are consistently longer. I tested this by first combining into a single list Fleming's and Gardner's books and ranking the books in size order. I could see that the novels were fairly evenly mixed. There was a Gardner, then a Fleming, then two Gardners, followed by two Flemings, four Gardners then a single Fleming, and so on, as if randomly intermixed. When I compared Fleming and Benson, again combining the lists and ranking the books by page length, most of Benson's books were at high end of the list. There were eleven Flemings (out of 13) ranked below the shortest Benson. Evidently Benson's books were generally longer than Fleming's (and no doubt Gardner's too), and a Mann-Whitney test confirmed there there was a significant statistical difference between the lengths of Fleming's and Benson's books.

So while there has been no steady rise during the time that Fleming and Gardner were writing (1953-1996) (it could even be suggested that Gardner deliberately copied the length of the original novels for greater authenticity – his Herbie Kruger novels, for example, are much longer than his Bonds), the continuation novels of Raymond Benson and subsequent authors have been generally longer than earlier novels.

Much of the explanation for this is likely to be cultural, with authors (Gardner excepted) matching, to some extent unwittingly, the length of their Bond books with that of their other works or other contemporary fiction. It is probably true to say that when Fleming was writing, contemporary novels were the same sort of length as his own. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe books averaged about 250 pages per book. William Boyd's novels are more consistently over 300 pages long. In other words, book length has been driven upwards over time, and authors conform to that trend. Nevertheless, does it really matter? After all, it's not the size of the book that counts, but what's inside it.

The worlds of Wodehouse and Fleming: potential connections

Sebastian Faulks, author of the continuation James Bond novel, Devil May Care, is to turn his attention to another English literary institution and continue the adventures of PG Wodehouse's best-known characters. Invited by the Wodehouse estate to revisit the world of Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, Faulks' novel, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, will be published in November.

Just as with Bond, Faulks encountered Jeeves and Wooster from an early age, reading his first Jeeves story by the age of 12 (he first read Fleming aged 13). And both Bond and Wooster have been victim to Faulks' ingenious literary parodies, initially written for the BBC radio quiz, The Write Stuff, and subsequently published in the 2006 volume, Pistache. In his Fleming parody, Faulks imagined Bond shopping in a supermarket. For Wodehouse, Faulks gave Wooster the voice of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe.

Beyond these rather loose connections, the worlds of Wodehouse and Fleming have only fleetingly coincided. When we are introduced to Donovan 'Red' Grant in Fleming's From Russia, with Love, we learn that Grant is reading, or at least carries for form's sake, a copy of Wodehouse's 1913 novel, The Little Nugget. As far as I can tell, Wodehouse doesn't appear to have returned the compliment by having one of his characters read a Bond novel, but there are suggestions in his novels written after the release of the film of Dr No in 1962 that Wodehouse responded to the success of the Bond films.

Frozen Assets, published in 1964 (the year Goldfinger was released and a year after the release of From Russia With Love) features a sub-plot in which one of the main characters, Christopher Biffen, or Biff, is persuaded to take who he thinks is a Russian spy to a club to get him drunk and reveal his secrets. But “aren't international spies inclined to be on the cagey side?”, Biff wonders. In Do Butlers Burgle Banks, Wodehouse's novel published in 1968 (a year after the release of You Only Live Twice and Bond spoof Casino Royale), burglar Horace Appleby, having been away, asks one of his gang-members, Ferdie the Fly how he occupied himself during Appleby's absence. “Went to the pictures...one of those spy things”, is the response. And in The Girl in Blue, published in 1970, we learn that Crispin Scrope, owner and resident of Mellingham Hall had not acquired the taste for any book with spies or a couple of good murders.

Well, as George Baker's Sir Hilary Bray says in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, “It's not the sort of thing we rely on”, but it is possible that these references to spies reflect an awareness of the Bond films (and novels) and growing 'Bondmania', just as a passage in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (published in 1974) in which Bertie Wooster encounters a protest march in London, reflects a period of protest against the government and the Vietnam War, among other issues.

In any case, there is one more certain connection between Fleming and Wodehouse – a dislike of a particular way of serving boiled eggs. In Live and Let Die, when Bond and Solitaire eat at a diner in Jacksonville (chapter 12), Bond complains of the American habit of serving boiled eggs mixed up in a teacup. Galahad Threepwood has the same complaint in Wodehouse's Galahad at Blandings (1965). “When you ask for a boiled egg, they bring it to you mashed up in a glass”, he complains.

Some James Bond parodies

During my time as a student at UCL, one of my lecturers wrote and produced a short comic play every Christmas. I had minor roles in two of them, the Prisoner of Zenda and Dracula. I preferred to write, though, and in 1995, after the release of GoldenEye, I wrote a James Bond pastiche, called Goldenthigh. The play was not performed in the end, but I was rather proud of my effort. James Bond investigates the loss of top secret documents within secret service headquarters and tracks down a double agent. His only clue: the traitor has a peculiar birthmark, a golden thigh. Being a comedy, the piece featured an elderly James Bond, an ever-irascible M, an exasperated Q, who gives Bond just a simple pen with which to write his reports, and a Miss Moneypenny, who still adores Bond, but also yearns for adventure herself.

Both the James Bond books and films provide material ripe for pastiche. The earliest parodies were in response to the success of the film version of Dr No, released in 1962, although they also drew on aspects of the novels. The same year saw, for example, the publication of Harvard Lampoon's Alligator. In it, J*mes B*nd pursues the eponymous villain, who steals the Houses of Parliament and floats them down the Thames. Another early parody was Sol Weinstein's Loxfinger. Published in 1965, the book was the first adventure to feature the Jewish secret agent, Oy-Oy-7.

'Bond Strikes Camp', written in 1962 by Cyril Connolly, was a more literary effort, and if we remove the camp plot – M persuades Bond to dress in drag in order to effect a honey trap, but actually takes the role of the target so that he can be picked up by Bond – we are left with a fair facsimile of Fleming's style. Connolly parodies the personal aspects of the relationship between M and Bond that Fleming describes in Moonraker, the short story 'For Your Eyes Only', and others, and, in what would become a staple of any spoof, has Bond visit the Armourer (the story pre-dates Q).

Starting with the Harvard Lampoon, humorous and satirical magazines have long been the vehicle for Bond parodies. For example, Alan Coren wrote one for Punch. 'Doctor No will see you now' imagined Bond as a pensioner, who wore bi-focals and dentures (made bespoke by Charles Fillibee of Albemarle Street), had arthritis (requiring a specially-adapted trigger guard to be fitted to his Walther PPK), and a fading memory (he carries a slip of paper with his code number written down at all times). Hardly the Bond of the films and novels, but a very funny caricature nonetheless.

Other parodies have appeared in newspapers usually in response to a new film, book, or Bond actor. When Daniel Craig was revealed as the new James Bond, he was reported as saying that Casino Royale would feature an updated Bond. The Sunday Times wondered what an updated Bond would look like ('For you Mr Bond, it's PC Galore'). He'd need to attend gender equality awareness training, fill in a health and safety questionnaire, participate in a seminar on diversity in the workplace, and brief the outreach officer about a series of school visits.

No review of parodies would be complete without mention of Sebastian Faulks' effort. No, not that one; I'm referring of course to his earlier effort, 'Ian Fleming thinks that even James Bond goes shopping', which was published in his collection of pastiches, amusingly called Pistache (2006). Faulks takes Bond to the supermarket, where Bond silences an employee who tells him not to smoke, and prepares to kill a shelf-stacker who recommends the wrong wine. Like Cyril Connolly's piece, Faulks hints at the style of Fleming, and exaggerated it, but unlike Connolly, his Bond, with his faultless knowledge of wine and arched eyebrow, parodies the Bond of the films.

From this short examination of Bond parodies, we can recognise a few common aspects, such as M's testy interview with Bond, a visit to Q, Bond's experience of growing old and unfamiliarity in everyday situations. While the books and films continue to provide riches source material, the real and contemporaneous world intrudes. In 'Bond Strikes Camp', allusion was made to the traitor Guy Burgess. In the Sunday Times parody, the joke was also on the Press's preoccupation with 'political correctness gone mad'. Each parody is very much of its time.

How to write a James Bond novel

I’m ten chapters in to the new James Bond novel by Jeffery Deaver, Carte Blanche. Mind you, that’s not saying much – the chapters are very short (not quite As I Lay Dying short, but if I kept to my ‘a chapter before bed’ rule, it would take me the best part of two and a half months to read). So far the book is shaping up well. I’ll present a book review and an examination of the Bond memes replicated in the novel soon, but today I thought I’d explain why I think Carte Blanche will be a better Bond adventure than Sebastian Faulks’ Devil May Care.

In 1962, Ian Fleming published a short piece, entitled, ‘How to write a thriller’. We learn here that it took Fleming six weeks to write a Bond novel. This he did by writing 2000 words for four hours each day during his annual two-month stay in his Jamaican home, Goldeneye. Six weeks may seem inadequate, but it followed months of research, and years of experience hewn from his wartime and journalistic careers.

Sebastian Faulks copied Ian Fleming’s recipe for writing, in that he blocked out six weeks of his diary and wrote the book. Faulks does not specify how long he took to research the story before then, but in his piece on writing Devil May Care, he merely says that he found an idea for the villain’s scheme, and took Bond to a location Bond had not been before. And Faulks admits that whereas his well-known pastiches incorporate 125% of the original authors’ characteristics, Devil May Care contained 75%. I would agree. Parts of his novel were not too different in style to his deliberate pastiche, published in his collection of parodies, Pistache.

We know more certainly how much research went into Carte Blanche: six months. In On Writing Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver notes that this time was spent researching Bond, plot details, and aspects of modern intelligence, resulting in 3,000 pages of research and a story outline of 130 pages. And, like Fleming, who said that he rarely wrote about places he had not seen, Deaver has visited all the places described in the book. Carte Blanche took Deaver three months to write after the research.

Fleming wrote that ‘each word must tell and interest or titillate the reader before the action hurries on’. Judging by the research, and from those ten chapters, Deaver will also succeed in this aim. I’ll let you know!

References:

Deaver, J, 2011 Writing Carte Blanche, Hodder and Stoughton
Faulks, S, 2009a Sebastian Faulks on writing Devil May Care, in Faulks 2009b
Faulks, S, 2009b Devil May Care, Penguin
Fleming, I, 2009 Ian Fleming on writing thrillers, in Faulks 2009b

How many James Bond book titles are there?

Or, to rephrase the question, how many types of titles did Ian Fleming use? To give an example, Live and Let Die is what I will call a phrase variant, deriving obviously from the well-known saying, ‘live and let live’. Other phrase variants are Diamonds are Forever, a mutation of the de Beers’ advertising slogan, ‘A diamond is forever’, From Russia, with Love, which is a play on oft-used sentimental expressions, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is taken from the standard phrase used on government communications, and You Only Live Twice, a derivation of the saying, ‘you only live once’.

Then there are film/book title variants. The Man with the Golden Gun appears to fall into this category, with its inspiration probably coming from The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra. Another title type is personal name – Goldfinger and Dr No – with other names forming a fourth category. Moonraker, the name of Drax’s rocket, Thunderball, the name given to the mushroom cloud resulting from an atomic explosion, and Octopussy, the pet name of an octopus, belong to this group. (We should note, however, that Fleming didn’t actually choose the Octopussy short story title as the main title of the volume, as it was published posthumously.)

Of the remaining titles, For Your Eyes Only is presumably an original phrase, which Fleming came across and used during his wartime career in the Navel Intelligence Division, although I must confess I can’t put my finger on evidence to support this. It may in fact be a phrase variant, being similar, but not identical, to a form of words used in espionage. The origin of The Spy Who Loved Me is also uncertain, but is also provisionally placed in the original phrase category.

So we have a tentative list of five title types. Fleming’s titles in turn inspired the authors charged with writing continuation Bond novels, who tended to use the same basic title types. Phrase variants include John Gardner’s Win, Lose or Die, and Raymond Benson’s The Facts of Death. Personal names are evident in Colonel Sun by Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis) and Scorpius by John Gardner. Curiously, neither Raymond Benson, nor Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond series, use personal names for titles. Of the film/book title variants employed by the continuation authors, all examples, such as Licence Renewed (John Gardner) and The Man with the Red Tattoo (Raymond Benson), have their origin in Fleming’s phrases or titles. The fifth type, original phrase, is interesting in that the continuation authors have turned to the category proportionately more than Fleming. There is, for example, Gardner’s Role of Honour, Benson’s Zero Minus Ten, and Higson’s By Royal Command. Recent authors have also used original phrases; Sebastian Faulks had Devil May Care, while Jeffery Deaver’s forthcoming novel will be called Carte Blanche.

Another aspect to consider is the association of certain words or concepts with the world of James Bond. The most frequently used are death (or variants of, such as die), forever, the man who or from, and negative words, such as never and nobody. Fleming used these sorts of words sparingly, but they increased their frequency among continuation authors to the point of over-use. Half of Raymond Benson’s Bond novels have the word death (or similar) in the title, while almost a quarter of John Gardner’s titles use a negative. In contrast, only 8% of Fleming’s titles use a form of death, and none uses negatives. Despite this, these words and concepts have become so strongly associated with Bond that continuation authors regularly turn to them. Their use has also spread to films – Licence to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day – and no doubt anyone invited to generate a Bondian title is likely to consider words like these. Oddly enough, no title generator has used the word that Fleming used twice and is just as Bondian: love.

James Brand: Is Bond a snob?

Controversially, in his BBC 2 series tracing the development of key character types in English fiction, Sebastian Faulks’ placed James Bond in the category of snob, rather than hero. Bond’s heroic (or even anti-heroic) qualities, it seems, were of less interest to Faulks than Bond’s consumerism and awareness of brand-name products. In Faulks’ view, this makes Bond a snob because such materialism is driven by a desire to gain status through the recognition and admiration of others. This snobbery is different from the kind that leads to disdain and rejection of people regarded as socially inferior, and Bond is instead what Faulks terms a ‘connoisseur snob’. The charge is not a new one – Paul Johnson got there first in 1958, accusing Bond of having the ‘snob-cravings of a suburban adult’ – but is it true?

It is undeniable that Ian Fleming’s novels feature many brand-name products and that Bond is loyal to them. Faulks reminds us of a few – sea-island cotton shirts, Morland Special cigarettes, a supercharged Bentley – and to those we can add a Ronson lighter, Pinaud’s Elixir shampoo, a Chemex coffee maker, Tiptree’s Little Scarlet strawberry jam, to name but a few.

Some of these, like the cigarettes, were Fleming’s own brands of choice, which he simply gave to Bond, since the products were already familiar. Others Fleming chose for Bond to add a measure of reality in an otherwise fantastic world. As Fleming remarked, the use of products made the adventures seem more valid and truthful. Readers not only read about Bond, they could be him by using the same shampoo or consuming the same jam. If a few items were out of the ordinary reader’s reach (the Bentley notably), well that merely reflected the cultural environment in which Fleming lived.

We should be careful, however, not to exaggerate Bond’s dependency on branded goods, which remain in the background of his adventures, or confuse the literary Bond with the cinematic Bond, who is much more particular about the correct products. A staple of the films, the demonstration of arcane knowledge (‘I prefer the '53 myself’ (as opposed to a Dom Perignon '55)), never appears in the books. And the literary Bond recognises snobbery when he sees it – snobbery is, after all, the ‘hairy heel of Achilles’ that traps Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

In any case, an alternative interpretation can be offered: Bond is discerning. Products vary in quality. Bond has tried other brands but did not like them. He eats Little Scarlet jam because it is the tastiest, and he uses a Ronson lighter because it is the most reliable. Once the selection has been made, the trial-and-error process has been completed, and the use of the product is maintained by force of habit.

Is Bond a snob? Probably to no greater extent than most of us are. We have all settled on particular products and throw brand names about with no more meaning than to indicate a generic product. Bond is, as Fleming intended, one of us.