Revelator

The cinematic references in the Bond books to suggest that Fleming was a casual moviegoer--Milton Crest has Humphrey Bogart's voice, Tatiana is compared with a young Garbo, North by Northwest is mentioned in TB (though in his letters Fleming said it had too much humor and favored The Wages of Fear as a better model for the Bond films), and Bond recalls childhood memories of Douglas Fairbanks in YOLT. But on the larger scale, I don't see enough influence from specific films to back up Vidal's claim. And unlike the much-missed Spynovelfan, Vidal wasn't expert on the traditions and history of the spy novel. Thus he likely mistook the influence of other thriller writers for that of the movies.

This week the New York Review of Books reprinted an excerpt from Gore Vidal's famous essay “The Ashes of Hollywood,” a review of the books on the New York Times fiction best-seller list of January 7, 1973. Vidal complains that many of the bestsellers are influenced by bad old movies, and that...

Except for the influence of the dead Ian Fleming (whose own work was a curious amalgam of old movies in the Eric Ambler–Hitchcock style with some sadomasochist games added), these books connect not at all with other books.

I'm not sure that Vidal is right in this case. Fleming doesn't seem to have been a great moviegoer, and his books are influenced more by Ambler's books than by the films made from them.

Here are two items.

The first is amusingly mistaken. The Huffington Post has an article on "Four Books Ideal For Summer." One of the selections is Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, which "was much-loved and admired by Ian Fleming." Not so! Fleming reviewed the book for The Spectator and complained that the pacing was slow,  the villains were feeble, and that the book belonged more in a mariners' library than with spy thrillers.

And now for our second item, found in the Nov. 8, 2011 edition of The Telegraph. The article, by literary critic Alan Massie, is titled "Why James Bond will go on and on." Some excerpts:

 

I came to Bond early, in my teens, which was probably the right age. My attention was drawn to him by a review of either his first or second novel in The Sunday Times. It was written by Raymond Chandler and that was recommendation enough. I’ve wondered since how sincere Chandler’s admiration was. He had praised Dashiell Hammett for giving murder back to the sort of people who commit it, and must surely have seen the strong element of sheer fantasy in Bond: 007, licensed to kill and all that. (But then Chandler admitted to a similar “element of burlesque” in his own writing.) It’s probable however that he over-egged the pudding. Fleming admired him; so he returned the admiration like the well brought-up public schoolboy (Dulwich College) that he always, in one part of himself, remained. Moreover, Fleming was on the staff of The Sunday Times and may well have solicited the review.

Be that as it may, the early Bond books were very good, the first four or five anyway, before inspiration flagged and self-parody took over. Fleming was a very good journalist and, as is not unusual with writers of his sort of books, the first half of the novel was usually better than the second, when the action took over and span out of control into absurdity. What one remembers are the splendid set pieces – the game of baccarat in Casino Royale, and, best of all, the bridge game in Moonraker. The villains were better in the early books too; it was sad when Cold War détente persuaded him to ditch SMERSH for the wildly improbable SPECTRE and the grotesque Blofeld. I suppose the best of them is From Russia With Love, despite the creaking mechanism necessary to get the book going. It has by far the best villains, Red Grant and Rosa Klebb, best because almost wholly credible.

Fleming wrote well in a plain and lucid style, influenced, I should say, by Somerset Maugham. He had a gift for the memorable line. The description of the Chegroes (Chinese Negroes) as “a tough forgotten race", and my own favourite, a throwaway judgement worthy of Buchan, “The Turks of the hills are all right, the Turks of the plains are no good.”

The later books are weak, and I think he had had enough of Bond by the time he died, aged only 56, but he had given a lot of people, including me, a lot of pleasure, and he had done something that is rare: creating a figure like Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes, capable of escaping from fiction into a sort of modern myth. And so the films roll on and there seems no reason why they shouldn’t have a longer life than Fleming’s own. Indeed they have almost done so already.

The Chandler review Massie remembers is probably of Diamonds Are Forever. As for Chandler's sincerity--the biographies of him and Fleming make clear that the two had a genuine Bond, though Chandler privately told Fleming that his books had "disimproved" since Casino Royale and that he'd gone easy on DAF.

I agree with Massie that FRWL is probably Fleming's best novel, but I think the later books are better--especially the Blofeld trilogy that Massie abhors. He places too much of a premium on probability and so forth.

Being half-Turkish, I've long been puzzled about Fleming's preference for highland Turks. The best explanation I can give is that Turks of the hills tended to be nomadic tribesmen--unlike their softer, sedentary countrymen on the plain--and thus more conformable to the tough romantic bandit stereotype that Fleming used for characters like Draco and Darko Kerim.

May his books still be read 105 years from now!

I thought Kingsley Amis liked Spillane's work.

 

That's quite possible--Amis was more broad-minded in dealing with genre fiction than most other members of the literary establishment. My own feeling is that Spillane was seen as rather down-market and seedy on both sides of the pond. An example is from Simon Raven, who often reviewed and championed Fleming's work but knocked Spillane by saying that Mike Hammer was an unlikable fanatic. I'll be posting Raven's Bond reviews soon.