60 (yes, 60) Years of Bond

Oh my, all the hype and hoopla about 2012 being the semicentennial or golden jubilee anniversary of James Bond, Agent 007 with a license to kill and thrill in defense of the British Realm. Life Magazine has even risen from dormancy to publish a special issue dedicated to the man with the Walther PPK and all those tricky cars; if you're a fan, I greatly recommend the Life effort despite the hefty cover price and the error made in You Only Live Twice: the editors claim Bond did not drive any vehicle in the film when, of course, he piloted a small one-man helicopter ("Little Nellie"), brought to Japan by her Uncle Q. All the hustle-bustle about the 50th Anniversary is to spark more interest in the latest Bond film, Skyfall. The problem is, this is not the 50th anniversary, but the 60th, the diamond jubilee, or, more appropriately, the sexagennial. Yes, Commander James Bond may have first graced the silver screen in 1962 when Slyvia Trench became the first Bond Girl (sorry, Honey Ryder comes after her) in Dr No, but Mr Bond was first released on a dangerous Cold War world in Casino Royale, written in 1952 and published the following year. It may surprise those who know James Bond only from the great (and some not so great) films, but Bond made ten book appearances before the first film, and his father was Ian Fleming (1908-1964) writer and real-life WW2 spy.

American readers in the 1950s and 1960s encountered the exploits of James Bond in Signet editions, and those are the editions (except for some British numbers) I have in my own collection. They were published in such great numbers that they are still easily found both on and off line. It's probably more of an emotional/nostalgic connection but I prefer these over the later editions, especially those reissued as a film tie-in. James Bond was for me a literary character before I saw my first Bond film, and that's what I think of him as first, even though the fellows who strut across the screens are the ones who will have the enduring public legacy. My hope as a bibliophile, of course, is that the films will lead people to read the books, just as Guy Ritchie's frenetic Sherlock Holmes films led some people to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In addition to Fleming's own books, however, there are some other related tomes well worth tracking down.

First and foremost in your ancillary James Bond library should be O.F. Snelling's 007 James Bond: A Report, published in 1964. Snelling was a Bond fan from the very beginning, with the publication of that "remarkable book" Casino Royale in 1953; additionally, he was an expert on antiquarian books and worked for several prestigious auction houses including Sotheby's. It's natural, then, that his biography concentrates on Bond as revealed in Fleming's tales. As Snelling wrote the book, he knew he was in a race with Kingsley Amis, who was writing his own critical analysis of the Bond novels; beating Amis into print assured the bestselling status of his own book (hitting the stands at the very apex of Bond fever) but it meant he also beat the publication of You Only Live Twice, which contained an obituary (rather premature, as it turned out) for James Bond, issued by MI6 in an effort to set the record straight about certain "high-flown and romanticized caricatures of episodes in the career of an outstanding public servant." He did not rewrite the paperback edition of the book, but did include footnotes here and there. You Only Live Twice is a good place to stop with Bond, since the true identity of the author of The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) is muddled at best, and the less said about Octopussy & The Living Daylights (1966) the better.

The aforementioned Kingsley Amis was a good friend of Ian Fleming and wrote three books in the vein that of importance. The first, The James Bond Dossier (1965), was his own take on the novels, and although the essay from which the book grew was written somewhat earlier, it was Snelling's book that reached the public first, taking away a bit of the thunder which this book deserves. Amis' own status as a literary giant and a Renaissance man gives his book a depth lacked by Snelling's, as well as a hefty dose of dry British humor. The second is The Book of Bond (Every Man His Own 007), published the same year as Dossier and is a foray more solidly into humor, instructing men how to be like James Bond, using extensive quotes from the books as illustrations; the first edition of this British book featured a slipcase entitled The Bible to be Read as Literature, presumable so agents of SMERSH or SPECTER would not be able to spot their wannabe adversary. The third book to consider is Colonel Sun, first of the non-Fleming James Bond adventures, which Amis wrote under the pen name Robert Markham. Bond, in tracking down the kidnappers of M, foils a plot by Communist China to create an international incident. Not Fleming, but a good novel nonetheless, and much more readable than many of the many novels that followed from other hands.

Among the more odd oddities of books about Ian Fleming's literary creation is one written by Benjamin Pratt, a retired pastor of the United Methodist Church. In Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins & 007's Moral Compass: A Bible Study With James Bond Pratt sees Fleming's tales as modern parables. In seven lessons, complete with biblical references and discussion questions, Pratt examines Fleming's complex spiritual allegories. As Pratt said in an interview with CommanderBond.Net: "...at the core, each Bond tale reflects choices between moral courage and moral cowardice. This is not only reflected in the characters James Bond pursues, but in Bond, as well. When he is true to his duty and mission, his choices are morally courageous. But, like most of us, he gets world-weary (accidie) and he fails to stay true to course. He becomes self-righteous, hypocritical, snobbish, and cruel or lust driven, his most infamous moral struggle. He is constantly battling the inner spiritual and moral war, as well as the war with the deadly demons he pursues." Perhaps the oddest thing about this book is that it actually succeeds in its purpose, and will be of interest to both truth seeker and thrill seeker.

Although there are numerous other books about James Bond (and most of them dwell on nothing but the films), there is just one other book to suggest for your collection of vintage Bond. For Bond Lovers Only (1965), was compiled and edited by Sheldon Lane. Although 19 of the 29 photos in the center of the book are great looking girls from the films (the other photos are of even better looking guns), the real emphasis is on the Bond books, the Bond character, and on Fleming as a writer. Most of the selections have no date or place of original publication, but I think they were either magazine or newspaper features. While the stars of some of the writers have slipped into unfortunate obscurity, many still have prominence today in the fields of spy and crime writing -- in an interview, Raymond Chandler tells what he thinks of Fleming as a writer and James Bond as a tough guy ("a little too tough"); French writer Georges Simenon discusses "the thriller business" in general and Fleming in particular; Jack Fishman interviews Fleming about who Bond is and where he came from; former Communist and espionage expert Bernard Hutton recalls how Fleming interviewed him for an article about spies; and former CIA Director Allen Dulles (The Craft of Intelligence) tells of the Ian Fleming he knew and how he was given his first James Bond book (From Russia With Love), a book he liked not just for its writing but because he lived in Constantinople after the Great War, by Jacqueline Kennedy. More than any of the other books, this one is like sitting down with a few old friends and gabbing about a mutual love.

I don't discount the importance and popularity of the films, and I fully realize that if Bond is around in other 40 years (joining Sherlock Holmes in the Centennial Hall of Fame maintained in the Diogenes Club) it will be because of the influence of the films. Still, I have hopes that people will from time to time return to the source waters of the character, and feel refreshed and enlightened for having done so. And so...

To Live & Die in Istanbul...or is it Constantinople?

A good city for a murder is London where, according to detective fiction published since the 19th Century, one third of the city is trying to murder another third, while the remaining third solves the crime. And there's New York, where the NYPD will track you down; and Los Angeles, where Harry Bosch of the LAPD will not let you get away with anything; and San Francisco, more known for private eyes than competent police, except Harry Callahan, and the team of Lieutenant Stone and Inspector Keller. Paris is okay for a murder, but only if you're French...it's just the way they are. Other cities have their charms (even Magoddy, Arkansas, I suppose), but for an off-the-beaten-path murder you might consider Istanbul.

Istanbul is not the capital of Turkey (that distinction belongs to Ankara) but it is the most important city in the country economically and culturally. When first founded, it was called Byzantium, from which we derive "Byzantine," the most common term for the Eastern Roman Empire as well as a description of all plots and plans having a complex or duplicitous twist. Byzantium was also very much an allegory for William Yeats, but that's a discussion for another time. Later, it was called Constantinople, after Emperor Constantine, even after its conquest by the Turks in A.D. 1453, a name which persisted through the 1930s when the Turks finally said, "Enough is enough! Call it what we call it -- Istanbul."

No matter what you call it, it's an exotic city, all modern and bright and electrical on one hand, while, on the other, retaining narrow streets, ancient citadels, thronged bazaars, and a nature that can be downright...byzantine. Even when the action of a story is not set directly in Istanbul, just mentioning it can lend an aura of mystery. In both Graham Greene's Stamboul Train and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express the plot never really leaves the train, but the Istanbul terminus creates a journey into darkness. The Orient Express linked London with Constantinople in 1883, a fact which annoyed me to no end when researching The Quest for the Copper Scroll, which is set in 1882. Because of that, my characters had to journey to Constantinople via steamer out of Liverpool, a long trek which involved stops in Malta, Italy and Greece -- picturesque, yes, but annoying because all locations had to be researched, not to mention steamer schedules. Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon mentioned Constantinople as the home of the old General who had rooked Casper Gutman and company of the Black Bird, becoming an ending and a beginning.

One of the greatest books set partly in Istanbul is Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios (or Coffin for Dimitrios in the USA) which details a mystery writer's quest for the real nature of a mysterious man who turns up dead in the Istanbul morgue. Though the novel's plot soon propels it to Athens and beyond, as the writer tracks down clue after clue, Ambler's descriptions of the city and its people are some of the best put down on paper. Personally, I think The Mask of Dimitrios is one of Eric Ambler's greatest works, even better than another good book of his set in the intrigue of Istanbul -- The Light of Day, one of those books also with an American alias (Topkapi...named for the film made from the book). In it, a man is hired to drive a car from Athens to Istanbul, but is arrested for drug transportation, and the only way he manages to avoid one of those notorious Turkish prisons (not really as bad as portrayed in Midnight Express) is to fall in with a group of odd ducks planning to rob an Istanbul museum.

An exciting and well written book set almost entirely in Istanbul and its environs is From Russia With Love by former WW2 spy Ian Fleming, one of the best in the series about Bond...James Bond (voted one of film's most famous catchphrases by the AFI), 007, the spy licensed to kill for Her Majesty's Secret Service. Like all the Bond books, this one was made into a film, but, despite its accolades and the presence of Rosa Kleb and Grant, I consider it the weakest of the Sean Connery outings; still it's far above the films made by the pretenders who followed, for, just as there can only be one Highlander, there can only be one Bond, and for both roles there can be only one Connery. As a book, though, From Russia with Love is the best of Fleming's work. Fleming generally loses himself in sport (as he did in Strangway's card game in Doctor No and the put-by-put description of the golf game in Goldfinger), but in From Russia with Love, Fleming sticks to the story and its characters, and Istanbul. Considering what an ace job Fleming did with Istanbul, it's a little surprising he did not include Istanbul in his travelogue book Thrilling Cities, but since those were originally commissioned essays for newspapers, he may not have had a choice.

One modern writer who has grabbed Istanbul by the throat is Barbara Nadel, a former West End actress turned author. She has written (and is still at it) an extensive series of mysteries set in Istanbul, featuring Inspector Cetin Ikmen of the Istanbul Police Department. Miss Nadel did not just happen to choose Istanbul as an interesting setting for some books; instead, it appears the books arose from her love of the city and its people. More than thirty years ago, she started trekking to Istanbul, one of those students with a backpack one sees all over Europe when the schools set loose the inmates, and she kept coming back; when she retired from the stage for the life of a writer, Istanbul was a natural choice. The advantage of a series in a city like Istanbul is that each book can explore a facet of the city -- the Jewish Quarter, a modern office building or a street out of time. In a city like Istanbul, the chain-smoking Inspector Ikmen is never lacking for work.

Not all books about Istanbul involve murders, spies or screams in the night. There is no end to nonfiction published about the city, and a great many of those are travel tomes, some written by people who have actually visited Istanbul. While I've read my share of those, from Edmondo di Amicus' 1878 observations in Constantinople (my copy is a first, bought from a UK seller, but nowadays you can read the same thing in Google Books -- technology stinks) to the latest output from Lonely Planet. One of my favorite books in this vein, however, is A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat by Jeremy Seal. First, I have to say, a fez is cool...I'm wholly in agreement with the Doctor on that. Also, one of the joys of this book, aside from observations of Istanbul and Turkey made through unjaded eyes, is observing the changes wrought in this young man's life by the journey. He starts out very much a worrywart: when will we get there, how will I get around, where will I eat, where will I stay, what if no one speaks English...and the list goes on and on till you wish you could reach into the book and just slap Jeremy; by the time you close the book, your guide is all grown up and not at all worried about what will happen beyond the bend in the road. This book was published in 1996, and I feel it was this quest that enabled Seal to become the very adept traveller and travel writer he is today.

There are lots more books about or set in Istanbul/Constantinople than mentioned above, but these were a few of my favorites. If I ever get around to publishing Quest for the Copper Scroll, there will be one other to join the crowd. Until then, here's a little slide show I made for those who want to experience something of the mystery, intrigue and beauty of Istanbul...

Wanted: Good Bad Guys

The measure of any good guy in mystery, adventure or spy fiction is the caliber of his opponent. Ian Fleming's James Bond was bedeviled by Goldfinger, Doctor No, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Scaramanga, Emilo Largo and sundry agents of SMERSH. Without his oh-so-memorable villains, 007  would have been just another grey,  underpaid, faceless fellow going in and out of Thames House and getting his teeth kicked from time to time for Queen and Country. Sherlock Homes without the spectre of Professor Moriarty? Quiller or Harry Palmer without their neo-Nazi revivals and cold war boffin brokers? Nero Wolfe without the ruthless Mr X? The Saint without either The Tiger or Chief Inspector Claude Eustus Teal? Doc Savage without John Sunlight, or The Shadow without the mob bosses of Chicago and New York? Dennis Nayland Smith without the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu? Jack Ryan without the KGB and various Islamic dictators? Without proper bad guys to bring out the best in them, our literary heroes are just gumshoes, keyhole peepers and civil servants. Today, though, a good bad guy is hard to find.

Doctor Fu-Manchu, great criminal mastermind of London's East End, based upon a real Chinatown crime lord named Mr King, was not really popular beyond the 1950's, by which time he had transformed into a quasi-ally in the fight against Communism. Yes, the avatar of the "Yellow Peril" became the foe of the "Red Menace" -- I hate it when a bad guy goes good (except Superman #164, where Lex Luthor had a...moment). The deadly doctor became one of the first victims of political correctness, surviving only in the silly mustache named after him...which is odd because he was clean-shaven -- to a master of disguise, a mustache is a handicap.

Lex Luthor is such a good bad guy, I suppose he can be allowed a moment of weakness.

The Nazis were always good bad guys for adventure and suspense novels. Nobody liked them and a writer could shine the worst light possible on them without being sued. Political correctness was not the enemy here, but time. After the war, Nazis popped up as malefactors more often than the Reds. As time went on, we had aging Nazis, reinvented Nazis, and sons of Nazis. Valentine Williams ended his nemesis Clubfoot's life while in service to the Nazis in North Africa; in Frederick Forseyth's The Odessa File, we have Germans hiding a Nazi past; and by the time we get to Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil, we have to clone the bad guys. Except for period pieces like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Captain America, if you want a novel with the best bad guys of all time, it's going to be set in a rest home or hospice.

Not so scary anymore

If only true...
they were such good villains.

The Soviets were excellent foes in their time. In fact, during the Cold War (of fond memory) the agents of the KGB, the NKVD, Stasi and SMERSH were so good as bad guys they existed almost in a genre of their own. What happened to them? "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Well, the Wall fell, so did the "evil empire," and there went the bad guys. Russian terrorists are still around, Russian mafia and the Russian Federal Security Service, but they're just small potatoes, just a patch to the KGB. For great thrillers you need great bad guys. True, shirtless Russian strongman Vlad Putin is trying to resurrect the bad old days, but, trust me, it just won't be the same.

I suppose that among the best of fiction's villains, we must include General Zaroff of Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, who had the vision to consider humans as big game animals long before the Predator came from the stars to hunt the governor of California, and Wisconsin's chief executive for that matter. Unfortunately, the bad general appears only in that story, and his opponent (Sanger Rainsford) is not so much a "good guy" as just the better hunter.

More in the running for best bad guy of all time must be Cthulhu, cosmic creation of  fantasist H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Cthulhu was one of the Elder Gods who ruled the Earth before the coming of mankind and before they were banished to the Dark Dimensions. Cthulhu is said to reside in the underwater city of Ryleh, where he has a call-in talk show and dreams of a time when "the stars will be right" and he and the other Elder Gods will return to wreak havoc in the universe and devour humans like Pringles at a frat party. The main problem with Cthulhu is that he while he's the ultimate bad guy, he has no contentious hero to vex him -- all his opponents either die or go stark barking mad...very frustrating. So frustrating, in fact, that Cthulhu has apparently given up his traditional methods to destroy the world for a more efficient path -- politics.

So what bad guys are left as foils for the modern aspiring novelist to use who wants to raise his hero above the common herd of action figures? North Koreans? Dear Leader is a lunatic, but we don't want to offend the people, and they are oriental. Iranian terrorists? Possible, maybe, just don't mention they're also Muslim. Mafia? No, that's just an urban myth, and I'm sure the good-fellows with Sicilian surnames aren't bad-fellows at all. Gang-bangers? Maybe, if you're writing about "mean streets" and not aiming for grand crime fiction. for they are all petty pathetic punks. Evil geniuses and mad scientists? No, unfortunately they all work for the government now or have tenured university positions; besides, the world is in such sorry shape, do we really need a Doctor Evil to destroy it?

Yep, times are tough for the dashing hero who wants to save the world and make it safe for truth, justice and the American way. Where have all the villains gone?

Searching for the Dark

Spies were huge in the 1960s, and I read just about every spy novel I came across, from the books of Ian Fleming and Len Deighton to the tales of spymaster George Smiley to the serio-comic escapades of Matt Helm and those entertaining gentlemen from U.N.C.L.E. There were so many series written at the time that it was inevitable I would miss some; and with paperbacks priced at the outrageous sum of 35 cents there were books I just had to pass up -- I blame my unfair allowance and the pitiful minimum wage. It's always a pleasure, then, when I come across them later and can afford to make up for the oversight. Such was the case with the espionage novels written by James Dark, published by Signet. James Dark? Yeah, that's the problem -- who the heck is James Dark?

I admit I'm an obsessive reader, never quite satisfied with just the book. I always want to know more: skinny about the setting, reality of the spy agencies, workings of the gadgets. And I want to know the author. But James Dark is a pen name no clue to the real name. Exploits of Mark Hood, secret agent for INTERACT never rose to prominence, so there is no current following. The plots are engaging, the hero capable, and the sexcapades hot...for the times, but the thirteen books which comprise the series are potboilers. Still, they are darn good reads and I was able to snag all thirteen at once. But who was James Dark?

People make the mistake of thinking everything under the sun is to be found on the internet. That attitude has led students, as well as people who should know better, to marginalize printed resources. I get really annoyed when I read a magazine article and the references or suggestions are just a list of links -- that happened with several articles in The Writer, so I immediately cancelled my subscription. The truth is that the internet, vast and varied as it may be, contains less than 2% of the knowledge found on the printed page, and much of the information littering the internet is suspect, if not outright spurious. Any knucklehead with a computer can shout at the world -- I think I'm proof enough of that. Still, when looking for the personage behind an obscure pseudonym connected with a series of books that was all but lost among a flurry of bestsellers and a surging sea of spy fiction, the internet can be...handy. But it's still not the be-all, end-all that some technophiliacs insist.

After searching the book lists of several internet dealers I determined that the thirteen books that had come into my ownership was the entirety of the series. However, there were some books listed that had alternative titles, even though the plots were same as in the books I had. One of the titles listed, Assignment: Hong Kong, was similar to Hong Kong Incident, but others were vastly different: The Reluctant Assassin instead of Sea Scrape, and Black Napoleon instead of the lurid Throne of Satan. All the books with titles different from the Signet editions had been published by Horwitz Publications, an Australian  publisher that began in 1921, and continues today. That indicated my mystery writer was, in all probability, an Aussie, which narrows the search tremendously. The reason I believed it was not an American writer published Down Under was that, if it had been, the name would have been more recognizable.

Australia has a rich literary tradition, but few writers really become popular in America, and when they do, they are often taken for British, as with Nevile Shute, A. Bertram Chandler, and P.L. Travers. An Aussie writer currently making waves in the adventure and thriller field is Matthew Reilly, whose books are really exciting. But, back to the search for James Dark. So, a quick letter to Horowitz, followed by a long wait, and I received the answer I was looking for. James Dark was James Edmond Macdonnell (3 Nov 1917 - 13 Sept 2002), one of Australia's most prolific novelists, author of nearly 200 books, many of them having to do with the sea. The man who was described to me as "Australia's greatest writer of sea stories" was a 14-year veteran of the Royal Australian Navy, which would account for much of the verisimilitude when secret agent Mark Hood either pursues the bad guys into the watery realm, or prevents a world-destroying disaster that originate in the ocean, as he did in Operation Ice Cap.

Beginning in the mid-60's, Mr Macdonnell followed in the wake of other, perhaps better known, thriller writers of the time. While Mark Hood was no James Bond or Harry Palmer (to use the film name), he delivers the goods, saving the world from non-pc bad guys, with an automatic in one hand and a hot babe in the other. Ah, yes, the 60's...