Nobody does it better, p.5
Nobody Does it Better, page 5
RALPH WINTER
For years I thought Sean Connery was my favorite Bond, but I’ll tell you something: I think Daniel Craig has taken over. He’s just got the swagger, the attitude, but also a broader range of emotions than Sean Connery brought. Sean was definitely a bull in a china shop, and you can see a little more complexity to Bond with Daniel Craig. Personally, I’m going to have a tough time transitioning from Daniel Craig to somebody else.
THE ROAD TO BOND
“You seem to have this nasty habit of surviving.”
“I was in holiday in Jamaica in January 1952“ … and I think my mental hands were empty.… After being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off it. So, as I say, my mental hands were empty and although I am as lazy as most Englishmen are, I have a Puritanical dislike of idleness and a natural love of actions. So I decided to write a book.”
Such was the mental state of Ian Lancaster Fleming in 1952 when he sat down to write what would become the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. By that point, various chess pieces had already been put in motion, completely unaware of the fact that that action by Fleming—putting word to paper—would ultimately bring all of them together. Producer Albert R. Broccoli had formed Warwick Film Productions with Irving Allen, and they were prepping their first film, The Red Beret; future producer Harry Saltzman, together with Rhea Fink, formed the Mountie Enterprises Corporation (soon to be named Rider Amusement Corporation), whose purpose was to manage coin-operated hobby horses in department stores; Terence Young’s sixth directorial effort, The Frightened Bride, was released; writer Richard Maibaum had written 19 films, with the 20th, Paratrooper, being released in 1953; Sean Connery had been a professional soccer player and bodybuilder en route to a career in acting; and Roger Moore, who had scored a number of uncredited film roles, was earning a living as a male model. For all of them, though, the word was “Bond,” and Bond was Fleming.
JOHN CORK
(board member, The Ian Fleming Foundation)
I unashamedly love all the Ian Fleming Bond novels. Oh, I wince at the racism and the treatment of women, but that’s present in virtually all the writing of the era. Fleming was a genius of a writer. You want to turn the page. He was often full of hot air, tossing out factoids that were almost true, dazzling you with his seeming depth of knowledge that frequently made real experts cringe. Yet the confidence in his writing wins over the reader. He can build a great paragraph that is both literary and easy to follow. He understands how to construct a chapter, build to a climax, pay off suspense. Reading each novel is like watching a good magic show filled with new tricks. He makes you care, he draws you in, and then he surprises the hell out of you.
RICHARD MAIBAUM
(cowriter, Dr. No)
I thought Fleming was a terrific writer, the best of that kind of adventure. I think he’s great and I did read them whenever I was working on a script. I was surprised, always, when I went back to see how good they are.
TERENCE YOUNG
(director, Dr. No)
Ian was an intensely shy person, which never showed. I don’t care what anybody says, he obviously had some wish fulfillment in James Bond; it was something he wished he could have done himself. I’m convinced there was an awful lot of Bond in his own makeup, but there is nobody who was James Bond in his life. Bond was how Fleming saw himself: the sardonic, cruel mouth; the hard, tight-skinned face. Ian was a charmer, though, once you got to know him. He was one of the most delightful people I ever met.
Fleming was born on May 28, 1908, in Mayfair, London, to a wealthy family consisting of his mother, Evelyn, and father, Valentine, who was a Member of Parliament for Henley beginning in 1910. He was also the grandson of Robert Fleming, a Scottish financier who founded the Scottish American Investment Trust as well as the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. The Fleming family also included an elder brother, named Peter, who became a travel writer; younger brothers Michael and Richard; and a maternal half-sister—Amaryllis Fleming—born out of wedlock. In 1921, he enrolled at Eton College.
TOM SOTER
(author, Bond and Beyond: 007 and Other Special Agents)
He was a poor scholar and a good athlete. He moved on briefly to Sandhurst Military Academy, but decided against the military life. From there, he went to Switzerland to study for the foreign service exam. Later, his mother obtained him a job at the Reuters News Service. Fleming had done some writing privately, and had always been obsessive with detail and had a lively imagination. He had also learned Russian for his foreign service exam, all of which came in handy in 1933 when Reuters sent him to cover a notorious trial of six British spies in Moscow.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
(author, The James Bond Films)
They were accused of sabotage by the Soviet government. In dispatches that won him the respect of his fellow journalists, Fleming carefully avoided a mundane, blow-by-blow account of the trial and concentrated, instead, on the atmosphere surrounding the event and the strange personalities of the men who were making the news.
TOM SOTER
His account of the trial’s climax caught the attention of the British public and earned the plaudits of his journalistic colleagues. It also brought him to the notice of the British Secret Service, which requested a secret report from him on the conditions of the Russian capital. His success could have led Fleming to a career in journalism, but his fear of poverty made him take what looked like a more lucrative and secure job as a stockbroker.
He spent 12 years as a stockbroker from 1933 to 45, though in between, during World War II, he was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Intelligence of the Royal Navy, to become his personal assistant. As such, he was able to develop plans designed to undermine the enemy while at the same time helping to coordinate strategies of espionage.
THOMAS CULL
(webmaster, The Literary 007)
Fleming had a “good war” and it provided him with tremendous inspiration for plots, characters, and even gadgets. His pivotal role as a liaison between NID, SIS, and SOE meant he was privy to all manner of operations and key players, from naval directors such as Admiral Godfrey to female SOE agents, secretaries, and real-life “Q” Charles Fraser-Smith.
BRIAN LETT
(author, Ian Fleming and SOE’s Operation Postmaster: The Top Secret Story Behind 007)
My personal view is that Ian Fleming was substantially influenced by the war years, and by what he learned about the early days of the Special Operations Executive [SOE]. As I say in my book, Fleming wrote to Major General Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, after the war, asking him to write the stories of the various heroic agents and what they had done. Gubbins was prevented from doing so by the Official Secrets Act, so Fleming then walked a narrow line between fiction and fact with his James Bond stories. Ian Fleming’s brother Peter had worked for SOE early in the war, and Ian himself was liaison officer between the Royal Navy and SOE in 1941 and 1942. He perfected the false cover story for Operation Postmaster.
JEREMY DUNS
(author, The Dark Chronicles: A Spy Trilogy)
Given Fleming’s intelligence involvement in the war, Bond is kind of a composite of lots of commandos and special forces people and stories he’d heard about different operations. They became more glamorous and transformed into a loose plot, and you can see that particularly in Casino Royale.
TOM SOTER
One of Fleming’s wartime experiences was to serve as the basis for Casino Royale. Traveling with Admiral Godfrey, Fleming stopped at a casino in Lisbon where Nazi intelligence leaders reportedly gambled. He decided he would try to beat the Nazis at cards, thereby depleting their secret service funds, which he imagined were being used for gambling. It’s not clear whether the card players actually were Nazis, but it was clear that they beat Fleming—who only had 50 pounds anyway.
RAYMOND BENSON
(author, The James Bond Bedside Companion)
Fleming’s experience in the war informed his writing immensely, especially with the first book, Casino Royale, in which he used some real events, albeit highly embellished. Being a journalist, he was already an excellent word craftsman, so he knew how to write. He could spin a good yarn. He was also influenced by the types of adventure stories he read as a child—Bulldog Drummond, the Sax Rohmer books—and thus the Bonds were not “realistic” in the sense, say, a John le Carré spy novel might be. The Bonds were more fantastic and imaginative—just as the films became.
JEREMY DUNS
Not a lot of people appreciate the fact that Fleming came from a privileged background, so it was very unusual for him to be interested in thrillers—but he was a thriller nut. He was also a member of a very exclusive gentleman’s club in London where he would spend quite a lot of time sitting in an armchair reading cheap paperback thrillers. His family were bankers and war heroes, essentially. You had to be highbrow, you had to read literature, and Fleming also read literature and had pretentions in that area, but his guilty pleasure, if you like, was thrillers. He read a lot of American thrillers; he was into kind of hard-boiled stuff. He enjoyed going on trains and traveling around the place and just taking a paperback thriller with him, which he did for years. The result of this is that he knew a huge amount about the genre.
TOM SOTER
After the excitement and responsibility of the war, Fleming’s civilian life seemed mundane. He drifted in and out of affairs with married women and became a foreign desk editor with The Sunday Times of London. He also bought a house in Jamaica, an island with which he became enchanted in the ’40s. After the war, he often said he would retire there and write the spy novel to end all spy novels.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
He was hired by newspaper magnate Lord Kemsley to manage the foreign news section of a large group of English papers. He took the job on condition that his contract included a two-month holiday each year.
Fleming’s journey toward James Bond began in earnest when he met and fell in love with a married woman named Ann Charteris, who, when she found herself pregnant with his child, divorced her husband and married Fleming—a marriage that ultimately led to him writing his first novel.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
When his beach house, which he named Goldeneye, was completed, he began a routine—coming to Goldeneye to write—that was to continue until the end of his life and which produced 13 James Bond thrillers. He’d toyed with the idea of writing for nearly six years, but it wasn’t until a few weeks before his marriage in 1952 that he decided to write a novel.
THOMAS CULL
In his formative years, he spent productive time with the writer Phyllis Bottome in the Austrian Alps, where he wrote some early short stories. There are many theories as to why he dove into writing Bond novels, but I think it was a mixture of escapism from his own life, an innate need to write, and a dash of commercial ambition which drove him.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
Fleming took the name of his main character from the author of a book that always graced his coffee table, Birds of the West Indies, by the ornithologist James Bond.
As Fleming told Playboy, “I wanted my hero to be entirely an anonymous instrument and to let the action of the book carry him along. I didn’t believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types. I mean, rather, I didn’t believe they could any longer exist in literature. I wanted this man more or less to follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler’s or Dashiell Hammett’s heroes—believable people, believable heroes.”
JAMES O. NAREMORE
(editor, North by Northwest: Alfred Hitchcock, Director Rutgers Films in Print Series)
The British tradition of spy fiction is a strong one, beginning prior to World War One with such writers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, and Erskine Childers (the last of whom was greatly admired by Ian Fleming). This was a period of growing conflict between European Imperialist states, when secret plots by spies created the possibility of mystery and suspense for writers. Maugham, who was a spy for Britain, could probably be described as the inventor of the “modern” spy story, which treats the work of spies ironically and raises implicit questions about the state apparatus. (See such later writers as Len Deighton and John le Carré.) Buchan, on the other hand, was a conservative who specialized in popular adventure. He influenced Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler, mainly because his technique was understated and his protagonists were ordinary people who found themselves caught up in spy plots.
In the mid-1930s, spy fiction was embraced by Popular Front writers, the most important of whom was Ambler, and it became explicitly anti-fascist. Hitchcock, who adapted or worked with almost half the writers I’ve mentioned, doesn’t explicitly refer to Nazi spies in his films until he gets to America at the beginning of World War Two. With the later Cold War, his evil spies are Russians or Commies, as in Topaz and Torn Curtain. In general, Hitchcock’s spy pictures were distinctive because of his sense of humor and his sly jokes, and because he understood that spy fiction was a form of travel literature. In his films, an ordinary character becomes involved with derring-do—a suspenseful, spectacular chase that also has a quality of a tourist travelogue.
JAMES STRATTON
(author, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much)
Greta Garbo’s Mata Hari and Marlene Dietrich’s Dishonored suggest many of the elements of these early spy films: exotic European locations, World War One time frames, beautiful but treacherous female spies, love interests controlling how the espionage works. Hitchcock used the genre as a frame for his own individual thematic interests, including mistaken identity, interrupted complacency, deception, victimization, betrayal, the violation of private space, the illusory stability of power, and the precariousness of public order. The mechanics of spying and the immediate strategic objective were beside the point. He brought stylistic complexity, visual depth, subtle humor, and freighted male-female interactions to the mix. Also, and I think this is a major point, Hitchcock saw espionage as a matter of social class; his villains (e.g., Alex Sebastian, Stephen Fisher, Phillip Vandamm) are wealthy, well-educated, upper-class patricians. Political espionage is a way of preserving their sense of privilege and control. The heroes who oppose them are more middle- class, more self-made, and less caught up by social conventions.
JAMES CHAPMAN
(author, Hitchcock and the Spy Film)
Fleming’s James Bond books were an important transitional moment in the history of British spy fiction. They were the last of the old-fashioned sensational adventure thrillers in the Imperialist tradition of John Buchan and “Sapper” and at the same time, through the character of the professional spy, anticipated the more realistic work of John le Carré and Len Deighton. We tend to think of Bond as being about megalomaniac master criminals, and that’s what the books became, but Casino Royale is a more realist-styled story featuring a double agent and internal treachery within the Secret Service that has some affinity with le Carré.
CHARLES ARDAI
(editor/founder, Hard Case Crime)
Despite being just as cruel and capable of violence as the villains around him, Bond puts his skills to use in the service of his employer—his country. And that makes all the difference in the world. He is helping preserve order, not to create chaos; the bloodshed he indulges in helps keep ordinary civilians safe. In this respect, he’s like any other soldier, or like a cop, and that’s certainly something he has in common with Philip Marlowe or Hammett’s Continental Op. A detective in Chandler’s formula is someone who walks the mean streets, but isn’t himself mean. Well, Bond is pretty mean. But he’s mean for a good cause. And that makes it possible for us to cheer for him. He’s our representative in a dangerous, nasty world—like the big brother that keeps us safe from all those neighborhood bullies, with their razor-edged hats and so forth.
JEREMY DUNS
There’s been a lot of assumption that the stuff that Fleming has done over the years is his creation, whereas, actually, a lot of this stuff existed already and he was just kind of going back to it, if you’d like. For example, you know the thing that Austin Powers parodied a lot where Bond is captured by a villain and the villain then reveals all his plans? That is something we definitely think of as a parody of James Bond, but when Fleming was doing this, it was already old hat. This was already something that had been parodied by Leslie Charteris in the Saint novels where, in the ’30s, he had Simon Templar captured by a villain and the villain then says, “I expect you think that I’m going to give you a whole speech about feeding you to the alligators while telling you my whole plan. Well, I’m not going to do that. That’s something that only happens in really bad thrillers.”
THOMAS CULL
It’s fair to say that Casino Royale, published in 1953, was a game-changer in the genre. Fleming’s influences certainly came through in his writings, but he modernized some of these thriller conventions. In fact, the likes of Eric Ambler, Dennis Wheatley, and Hammond Innes still sold well in the early 1950s, and it wasn’t until From Russia with Love that Fleming’s Bond truly hit the zeitgeist. The “adventure thriller” was more popular, but Fleming’s entry breathed new life into the “spy thriller,” and Bond’s arrival meant that Clubland British hero types quickly went out of fashion.
JEREMY DUNS
Another cliché found in Fleming that might seem obvious if you think about it—though many people don’t—is in the movie version of Goldfinger, with the famous laser scene, which in the book, of course, is a buzz saw. That’s something from silent movies, like the girl on the train tracks. The secret agent tied down with the buzz saw coming toward him is a very, very old cliché. So there are lots of these things that he took from previous writers. It’s not really been written about how much The Saint influenced James Bond, but I think this is partly because of the confusion of Roger Moore and everything. But The Saint obviously predates James Bond by quite a way; there was a whole series of successful films in the ’40s and he is a dashing, tuxedoed kind of rogue who speaks lots of languages. It’s a really obvious influence, but it’s kind of brushed aside.
