Tag: Ian Fleming

The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

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This was the first biography of Ian Fleming, published in 1966 two years after his death. Pearson had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times. The great advantage of this is that Pearson was able to interview in person most of the people who had known Fleming at the various stages of his life. Much of what they said is quoted in direct speech, bringing Fleming vividly to life.

The slight disadvantage is that Fleming’s widow Anne was still alive when Pearson was writing the book and certain details of Fleming’s private life had to be left out.

It is a fast-paced, gripping read and Pearson never gets bogged down in the detail, evoking the various worlds that Fleming moved through without boring the reader. It is not like the modern style of biography, more dependent on archive material, that never quite comes to life.

In proper journalistic fashion he answers the questions that the reader might have about some of the more mysterious episodes in Fleming’s life. For example, just how was it that a former journalist working as a city stockbroker was appointed to a senior position in naval intelligence at the beginning of the second world war? You will find the explanation here. Where did Fleming’s interest in underwater swimming that found its way into the Bond books come from? That, too, is explained.

Pearson takes the view that the Bond Books were a sort of fantasy projection of Fleming’s own character and pre-occupations. It is Fleming’s friend Robert Harling who recalls him saying “I’m going to write the spy novel to end all spy novels.”

The long, slow process of turning the Bond books into best sellers is described, with Anthony Eden’s stay at Goldeneye being a key event that brought Fleming’s name to a wider public. It’s fascinating to learn, by the way, just how primitive the accommodation at Goldeneye actually was.

In the end, the film deal that made Bond a household name came too late as by then Fleming’s health was in decline and he couldn’t really enjoy the success he had worked for.

Pearson looks at Fleming’s attitude to money as the second son of a wealthy family whose widowed mother controlled the purse strings. It is suggested here that M was what the Fleming children called their mother. I would have liked a bit more about Fleming’s relationship with his mother, perhaps the source of his rather odd attitude to women.   

This is not really a critical biography, but what Pearson does have to say about the Bond books is shrewd and interesting. He considers Casino Royale to be the best, but that Fleming put so much of himself into it that he couldn’t repeat it. He suggests that Fleming rather lost interest in the later books and he has less to say about those.

Almost hidden away in here is some fascinating stuff about the origins of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I didn’t know that Fleming had been a keen skier in his youth and was actually buried in an avalanche in Switzerland. He brought home a Swiss fiancé but his mother vetoed the marriage. Henry Miller is quoted as saying that Fleming wrote quickly like Rider Haggard and with the same direct access to his subconscious. There was a later girlfriend, not named, who was killed in the blitz. Are we looking at the real-life equivalents of Vesper Lynd and Tracy here? Years later the Flemings went on a nostalgic skiing holiday, just before Fleming wrote the book. Perhaps there was as much of Fleming in this book as in Casino Royale.

Despite later biographies, the reputation of this one has remained high. All in all, a fascinating and highly entertaining read for anyone who likes the Bond books.

 

Age shall not weary them, but perhaps it should

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I once read in an interview with Agatha Christie that she felt she had made a mistake with Poirot and made him too old. He had already retired by the time of his third appearance, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). I suppose it never occurred to her that the demands of the public and her publisher meant she would be writing about him for the next fifty years. Poirot therefore had to be permanently suspended in late middle age, while the world he moved through changed around him. This is quite effective; the books set in 1960s England are very different to those set among international travellers in the 1930s.

There are occasional references to his age, though. At the beginning of Five Little Pigs (1942) his would-be client looks at him quizzically. Poirot realises that she thinks he is too old for the job. He explains that the “little grey cells” are still working perfectly. Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) begins with Poirot reflecting on what is now his greatest pleasure, the dining table, and lamenting that there are only three meals in the day. But Christie could never have aged him realistically; He was a first world war refugee, after all, and Captain Hastings was recovering from wounds when Poirot met him. Even if he was only in his forties then, Poirot would have been in his nineties in the books set in the 1960s.

Poirot contrasts sharply with John Buchan’s hero, Richard Hannay, who made his first appearance in The Thirty Nine Steps in 1915. He ages realistically over the course of his five adventures and in the last, The Island of Sheep (1936), he has been knighted, become an MP and his teenage son takes an active role. This may have something to do with the fact that in the books set in the first world war, Hannay gains promotion, ending up as a senior officer. You can’t really have a character who progresses up the military hierarchy without them ageing. We can see this in C S Forester’s Hornblower series, where Hornblower starts as a midshipman and ends as an admiral. He must therefore age. Of course, both Hannay and Hornblower are parents, so if they did not age, their children could not, either.

The characters that Christie did age realistically, in a similar fashion to Hannay, are her detective duo Tommy and Tuppence. They first appeared as a pair of bright young things in Christie’s second novel The Secret Adversary (1922). Their final appearance as a married couple of mature years was in the last novel she wrote, Postern of Fate (1973).

John Le Carré had a Poirot-like problem with George Smiley, in that he had been very specific about his age in his first book, which made him a bit too old for the later books. In Call for the Dead (1961), we are told Smiley went up to Oxford in 1925, so he would have been born around 1907. Smiley leaves the secret service at the end of that book; we assume he has returned, because he appears as a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965).

He becomes the central character in Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974), but Le Carré had to change Smiley’s past and knock some years off his age to fit him into that story. Smiley had to be much closer in age to the generation who were at Oxford in the 1930s and still young enough to be forced into premature retirement in the early 1970s. That also made him vigorous enough to appear in the next two books of the Karla Trilogy. Again, one has to assume that when Le Carré wrote Call for the Dead, he did not imagine Smiley as the central figure in a much longer and more complex novel that he would write almost fifteen years later.

Perhaps Ian Fleming came up with the best solution to this ageing problem. James Bond always seems to be about the same, unspecified age; mid to late thirties perhaps, old enough to be experienced and confident but young enough to be fit and tough. But the books link in to one another, with a consistent cast of characters. There is a chronology, and Bond is scarred by his experiences, but he is oddly ageless.

This can be seen particularly towards the end of the series. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) opens with the hunt for Blofeld, the criminal mastermind behind the atomic bomb plot in Thunderball (1961). At the beginning of You Only Live Twice (1964), the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service have left Bond a broken man, on the point of being dismissed from the service; by the end, he is missing in Japan, presumed dead. The Man With The Golden Gun (1965) opens dramatically with the brainwashed Bond returning to try and assassinate M. He is then given a dangerous mission to redeem himself.

Fleming was careful never to pin down Bond’s exact year of birth. In the (premature, as it turns out) obituary in You Only Live Twice, M writes that Bond became a commando “in 1941, claiming an age of 19”; that would make Bond’s year of birth about 1923 or so. So, if we do apply realistic time, he would have been in his early forties when he turns down a knighthood at the end of The Man With The Golden Gun, the last Bond book.

Sooner or later, Fleming would have had to solve the problem of how Bond should age, and it’s interesting to speculate what he might have done. Perhaps he would have inserted an earlier adventure into the timeline, as Conan Doyle did with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unfortunately, Fleming died at the comparatively young age of 56. Like his creator, Bond never had to cope with old age.

Site-specific reading

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I wasn’t at all well that summer. My doctor had diagnosed a balance problem and there was going to be a long wait to see the specialist.  A gentler than usual holiday was called for, so we booked a room in Broadstairs. We had asked for a sea view and there were two comfortable chairs that we moved to face the big window. One of the books I had taken with me was Agatha Christie’s N or M. I found that I was sitting in a seaside guest house, reading a second world war spy thriller about the search for a German spy in a seaside guest house. I can’t remember, though, whether I had chosen that book because of its setting or whether the match of reading and location was a happy accident.

Certainly, I was aware of other literary associations in Broadstairs. On one of the walks I was able to manage, we had a look at the North Foreland and wondered which set of steps cut into the chalk were the ones that had given John Buchan the title The 39 Steps.

On a later visit, the literary allusions came to us, without our looking for them. It was autumn this time. We went for a walk along the beach as the light was fading. As we turned to come back, we noticed a figure in the distance. The figure seemed to be following us. We stopped and the figure stopped too, moving off again as we did and keeping the same distance. We were experiencing in reality the situation from M R James. Eventually, the figure turned towards the cliffs. When we looked again, it had disappeared. Perhaps it had gone up the steps.

We stood under the cliff, discussing this strange occurrence. It was almost dark now, but on the edge of the cliff,  we could make out a sinister figure looking down at us. It appeared to have its arms folded. After a few minutes peering into the near darkness, the penny dropped as we realised that the strange figure was actually a chimney stack.

That was not the only time that I felt I had walked into the pages of M R James. We stayed at a hotel in North Norfolk, not far from the beach and with a golf course nearby. The hotel was quite old and in the past guests had come for seaside golf, like James’ characters. An old framed menu on the wall told us that dinner at 7.30 would be followed by bridge. A reassuring lack of choice in those days. There was a small sitting room, with some books on a shelf. Among them was a battered paperback copy of James’ stories. So I had the experience of reading Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad and A Warning to the Curious in a place very like the fictional locations.

It started to rain, and we went to the bar for a drink. We sat looking out at the hotel grounds and beyond them the now deserted beach. It seemed a far less friendly place in the wind and rain. The cloth canopy of one of the tables on the terrace flapped against its pole. As the wind and rain whipped it back and forth, it looked to me, with my imagination no doubt primed by reading James, like the ghost under the sheet in Whistle.

The hotel might well have had its own ghosts. Another old framed menu was from the second world war.  It was for a very special occasion, the farewell dinner for the officers who had been billeted there, while training for D-day.  A poignant artefact that made me wonder how many of them had returned from Normandy. I would not have been at all surprised to encounter the shade of a young subaltern on the lonely beach at twilight.

One final thing. During our stay at the Norfolk hotel, there was a fellow guest, a lady, who could be seen each evening sitting quietly and writing in a notebook. Perhaps we weren’t the only ones to find our imaginations refreshed by this stretch of coast.

Man Overboard by Tim Binding

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Tim Binding’s 2005 novel, Man Overboard, is the story of the World War 2 frogman, Commander Lionel Crabb, who disappeared, presumed drowned, during a mission to spy on a Russian cruiser in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.

The unauthorised dive caused a political furore at the time, as the Russian ship was carrying Kruschev on an official  visit to the UK. There has been much speculation over the years as to what really happened. A headless and handless corpse that washed up some months later in Chichester harbour was identified by the Coroner and buried as Crabb, but his widow insisted that it couldn’t have been him.

It’s been suggested that he was killed by the Russians, or captured and brainwashed by them. This fictionalised account of his life offers an alternative solution to the enduring mystery, which is unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved in our lifetime, as the relevant documents are not due to be made public for many years.

Crabb himself is the narrator of a comparatively short book, written in an intense and poetic prose, with suitably watery imagery. There is an awful lot packed into its 244 pages. Without giving too much away, Crabb looks back in old age from a sanatorium somewhere behind the iron curtain. He did not die beneath the murky, cold waters of Portsmouth harbour.

We get a clear picture of the sort of man Crabb is: Conservative, patriotic, royalist, religious and fatalistic. Yet he is a strange, dual personality, who needs to belong and yet somehow be an outsider at the same time. He is not one of those who believed in a better world to come after the war. It is the revelation of the Katyn forest killings that makes him realise the true nature of Russian communism.

He finds himself out of sympathy with what post-war England has become (“a land of buff-coloured envelopes”), but then he was always something of a square peg in a round hole. Although he didn’t know it, he was a man searching for something. He found his element, in every sense, when he first dived under the water in Gibraltar harbour. On your first dive, you feel as though you “have walked through a magic mirror or travelled in time”, as he puts it.

There is a touch of the visionary about him, but he undercuts his musings with a curt “lot of rot, probably”. His clipped, slightly old-fashioned language with its colourful slang seems completely appropriate for a man of his generation.

In Italy, clearing mines from the canals of Venice, he finds the catholic church and almost marries an Italian girl, but shies away at the last moment. His hesitant relations with women are something of a recurring problem. He is not gay, but oddly reticent about sex, prudish about lower-deck language. He finally seems to have found the right woman, who enjoys the pub and club life of London as much as he does, when circumstances, or rather Crabb’s patriotic devotion to duty, force them apart.

Many historical figures walk through the pages of this novel, such as Kruschev and Yuri Gagarin. Several names are familiar from spy scandals of the period; Anthony Blunt pops up from time to time and towards the end, Greville Wynne, businessman and part-time agent appears. Gordon Lonsdale and Peter Kroger, members of the Portland Spy Ring, are skilfully woven into the story. Sidney Knowles, Crabb’s wartime diving partner appears under his own name. However, Nicholas Elliott, who we now know to have been Crabb’s MI6 handler, is turned into the completely fictional “Smithy”, for reasons that become clear by the end.

There is no author’s note, so it is not clear what sources Tim Binding may have used to create his portrait of Crabb. I found myself wondering if he himself has underwater experience. Crabb does allude to the feature film that was made, The Silent Enemy, and also the biography by Marshall Pugh, both of which appeared after his presumed death.

Crabb’s wartime exploits in Gibraltar, the underwater battle with the Italian frogmen, are generally considered to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, Bond’s underwater mission to plant a limpet mine on the hull of the motor launch in the earlier Live and Let Die also owes something to Crabb. I assume that Fleming, as a senior official in Naval Intelligence during World War 2, knew all about Crabb’s adventures before the general public did.

Recent events mean that the passage where Crabb is told about the Russians’ development of an underwater special forces unit seems strangely contemporary. But then Crabb tells us that “The England you know was made in the fifties and the rest of the world too”.

I enjoyed this book hugely when it came out, and found more in it on a recent re-reading. It is a powerful and haunting novel that deserves to be better known.