Moonraker by Ian Fleming

She glanced at the ruthless brown face of the man beside her.  Did he have moments of longing for the peaceful simple things of life?  Of course not.  He liked Paris and Berlin and New York and trains and aeroplanes and expensive food, and, yes certainly, expensive women.  

I don't know about your computer,
but when I scroll down on my computer
this image looks really freaky

In our last episode I vowed to avoid Signet editions of the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming because I noticed that paragraphs, sentences and phrases I saw in the 1978 Panther paperback edition of the second 007 novel, Live and Let Die, had been wholly expurgated from Signet's 1963 printing of the book.  But when I looked up the third James Bond novel, 1955's Moonraker, at the internet archive I saw that the Signet edition was the only scan available. So I crossed county lines to borrow from a public library many miles away a 21st-century edition of Moonraker, one put out by Thomas & Mercer, who I guess are owned by amazon or something, in 2012. I can only hope this printing presents the text of the British first edition.  Don't let me down, amazonians!

The first chapters of Moonraker give us insight into Bond's life in London, what his work is like when he's not on an assignment gambling and killing people, and how he spends his free time.  We learn he is the best shot in the Secret Service, and that he regularly has sex with three different married women.  Don't ask me what happened to Solitaire, the Haitian-born Frenchwoman with psychic powers Fleming seemed to be suggesting was a love match for Bond in the last novel.  Maybe her psychic powers, which didn't protect her from getting kidnapped by the kind of guys who feed young ladies to barracudas, protected her from getting involved with a guy who has no respect for the sanctity of marriage?

M calls Bond into his office to talk about a dude he plays bridge with at his club, Sir Hugo Drax.  This is only the third James Bond novel but Fleming, we see, is already reusing his gags.  Do you remember how in Casino Royale the villain was a guy who (allegedly) suffered amnesia because of some tragedy in the war and then went on to become a mover and shaker in French society?  Well, Hugo Drax, who let's pretend we don't yet know is the villain of this one, is a guy who (allegedly) suffered amnesia after getting severely injured in a German attack on his British Army unit during the war and then went on to become a mover and shaker in British society.  Drax got rich and famous by buying and selling rare metals that are valuable because they are needed for making jet engines, and then started throwing his money around London, donating to charities and so forth, making himself a hero of the people.  Drax's latest exploit has been to design and build a missile, the Moonraker, and gift it to the British people to serve as Britain's deterrent against foreign attack!

M tells Bond that he is sure Drax is cheating at bridge, but he can't figure out how.  Bond being the best gambler in the Secret Service, M asks 007 to come to dinner at his club (Fleming spends a few pages explaining how awesome this club is--it is "probably the most famous private card club in the world," after all) and play with him and Drax and see if he can figure out how Drax is cheating.  M and Bond admire Drax, and want to prevent this hero from besmirching his reputation, especially since he has become a critical part of the United Kingdom's defense establishment!

The way to get Drax to quit cheating, so he and the best club in the world and the best missile in the world aren't embarrassed in front of the whole world, Bond decides, is to outcheat him and beat him.  Hopefully this will shock him into behaving like a gentleman.  When Bond meets this titan of industry, this pillar of the free world's nuclear defense, Bond is amazed to find he is no gentleman, but a loudmouth boor who bites his nails and sweats a lot.  Putting on his psychiatrist's hat, Bond figures Drax is under some terrific tension.

Bond is so offended by the guy's bad manners that 007 enters the game of bridge against Drax with gusto, hoping to teach this bounder a lesson.  (One of the subtler nuances in Moonraker is the fact that Bond himself, were Drax not there, would probably be the least gentlemanly person in the club--people who see him are always thinking he looks tough and ruthless and dangerous.)  Bond gets so caught up in the excitement--or maybe it is the booze and benzedrine he takes before the bridge game--that he bets more than his entire year's salary against Drax.  But he is a better cheater than Drax, and Bond wins something like ten times his yearly salary.

(Benzedrine is a recurring element of these Bond novels--Le Chiffre in Casino Royale used lots of benzedrine, and Bond used it in Live and Let Die before attacking Surprise Island and the Secatur.  Like the limpet mine used in that operation, benzedrine is a kind of call-back to WWII, when servicemen would take benzedrine to stay alert during long periods of duty.  Bond and so many of the people he interacts with, in the first three 007 novels at least, are what you might call products of the cataclysm of the Second World War.)

The next day Bond, still playing head shrinker (he does his psychoanalyzing several times in the novel), decides that Drax must be paranoid, a victim of delusions of persecution and delusions of grandeur.  Luckily Drax is no business of his anymore...oh, wait, Drax is his business.  Last night one of the fifty Germans working on the Moonraker project murdered the head of security for the project, a British government official, and then committed suicide.  M has decided that Bond should fill the vacancy left in the Moonraker security office!

Bond finds that, on the job, Drax is not the jackass he was at the club, but an efficient manager and skillful leader of men with a deep knowledge of rockets and associated subjects.  Drax hosts a dinner where Bond meets the German scientist at the top of the Moonraker project, Walter, Drax's German assistant (Drax says he's like a "dogsbody" or "A.D.C.") Krebs, and Drax's secretary, Gala Brand, a beautiful Englishwoman.  Brand, as Bond knows but Drax presumably does not, is a Special Branch undercover police officer who was insinuated onto Drax's staff to act as a spy for the British government.  After dinner Drax shows Bond the missile, which will be test launched in just a few days.  Bond goes back to admiring Drax for conceiving and managing such a large, complicated and groundbreaking project.

Bond, now living at the Moonraker site, does detective stuff involving fingerprints and going through files and all that.  He tries to get help from Gala Brand, but she is cold to him, resenting the fact that a foreign operative--a ruthless killer, no less!--instead of a fellow domestic cop got the position of head of security at the Moonraker site.  "...why had he been sent down instead of somebody she could work with, one of her friends from Special Branch, or even somebody from M.I.5?"  Suspicion centers on Krebs, who is a snooper whom both Brand and Bond find looking through their personal things, but is Krebs a saboteur working for the commies, a trusted member of Drax's team who is acting as an additional, secret, layer of security at Drax's orders, or just some neurotic with a compulsive need to go through people's drawers and bags?     

The Moonraker site is on the coast, and while investigating the beach below a chalk cliff to consider the way a Soviet commando team might attack the site, Bond and Gala Brand are almost killed by an avalanche that Bond is certain was no natural accident but an attempt to murder the two English spooks.  (Getting buried in chalk fragments is just one of the numerous instances of Bond and Brand getting bruised and lacerated over the course of the three or four days they work together.  Bond is like a bad luck charm, just ask Felix Leiter!)  Who is responsible for this assassination attempt?  A small group of the Germans?  All of the Germans?  And are they working against, or in concert with, British hero Drax?

Brand does a little detective work on her own, picking Drax's pocket, and figures out that on test day--tomorrow--the missile will not be launched into the ocean but into the heart of London!  Krebs spots her pretty English fingers in Drax's pocket as she is trying to return the evidence, and, lickety-split, the lady police officer finds herself tied up in the room of the house in Central London with the transmitter that will guide the missile into the city from the coast.

HQ knows about this rarely used house of Drax's (they just figure he has sexual liaisons there) so when Brand is missed Bond knows to look there.  He arrives just as Krebs and Drax are bundling the policewoman into Drax's Mercedes, and a car chase ensues, Bond's British Bentley pursuing Drax's German machine.  This car chase is very good, very exciting, the best scene in the novel.  As with the exciting car chase in Casino Royale it ends with triumph for England's enemies and Bond a captive of the villain.

Drax, as the reader may have been anticipating, was not a British soldier who lost his memory after being caught in an explosion during a German attack.  Rather, he was one of the German attackers severely injured by his own men's explosives while disguised as a Tommy.  As Bond and Brand sit, tied to chairs (getting tied to a chair is a normal occurrence in these 007 books), Drax tells them the story of his amazing career, from young German aristocrat studying in England to one of Otto Skorzeny's commandos, to a man missing half his face who is taken for a working-class English soldier suffering amnesia.  Once patched up and set loose in post-war London, he robbed a Jewish moneylender to get the cash to start his metals business.  Once established, he launched his ambitious scheme of revenge!  With Soviet help, he assembled a fifty-man crew of hardcore Nazi technicians and brought them to England to build the Moonraker rocket and install atop it a Soviet nuclear warhead.  (In return he sends to Moscow all the British scientific instruments that were supposed to be in the missile nose cone.)

After Drax is finished telling them his life story he leaves our heroes in a room that will be exposed to the incinerating exhaust of the missile test firing tomorrow.  Bond frees them by operating a blowtorch (one of Krebs's torture implements) with his mouth.  As Drax's secretary, Brand is very familiar with the gyros that control the missile's course, and knows what settings Drax has been sharing with the British government, settings that would guide the missile to the North Sea where a test target awaits.  She tells Bond how to reset the gyros and he sneaks into the missile and changes the settings from that London building to the target zone.  So, when the missile is launched it takes the course the British public listening to the radio expect, not the one the Germans expect.  The Germans, as the missile is taking off, are picked up by a Soviet submarine disguised as a Royal Navy sub.  I'm not sure it makes any sense, considering the disparate speeds of a supersonic missile and a submerged submarine, but somehow the Soviet sub with Drax and Krebs aboard is in the target zone when the Moonraker missile arrives and the atomic explosion sinks the sub, killing all on board.  In the last chapter of the novel M tells 007 that the British government is going to somehow cover up this whole mess--part of the cover up is sending Bond and Gala Brand out of the country on paid leave for a month so nobody asks why they are covered in bandages.  Bond hopes that Brand will become his girlfriend, but she is engaged to be married and Bond has to go to France alone.  (I guess none of those married women can get time off.)

This Croatian cover successfully
captures a memorable scene in which
Gala Brand looks up at the missile and
Bond notices the beauty of her throat

Above, and when I wrote about Live and Let Die, I mentioned the shadow cast on these 007 novels by World War II, and this is true of Moonraker even more than the others--it's a chance for the British to defeat German aggression yet again, with Allied World War II vet Bond in a struggle over the fate of London with Axis World War II vets Drax and Krebs.  In Live and Let Die Fleming presented stereotypes about blacks--e. g., that they are superstitious--and here in Moonraker he has Bond and other British characters voice stereotypes about Germans--they are "robot-like" and "precise," for example, and Drax's voice when giving orders is the essence of "Prussian militarism." 

Another of the recurring themes of the three James Bond novels I have now read has been the depiction of a United Kingdom in decline that requires US help to stay afloat.  In Casino Royale, Bond's operation is facing disaster until it is saved by an influx of American cash.  Here in Moonraker, the British government isn't capable of developing its own deterrent to Soviet attack and expects a private businessman to foot the bill and even manage the development of the necessary weapons!  As Bond puts it to M early in the novel, "...when you think what he's [Drax] doing for the country, out of his own pocket and far beyond what any government seems able to do, it's extraordinary...."  Near the end of the novel Drax calls the English "Useless, idle, decadent fools...too weak to defend your colonies, toadying to the Americans with your hats in your hands...."  Ouch! 

Because Moonraker is set entirely in England and Bond is sort of stuck in one place trying to figure out who the bad guy is among a bunch of foreign weirdos and jerk offs, it feels less like an adventure and more like a detective story.  The car chase is very good, but it feels like a revision of the car chase in Casino Royale, with Fleming whipping out some of the same striking images (e. g., the sound of the Bentley's exhaust reverberating from buildings along the road and Bond grabbing his Colt revolver* and laying it beside him in preparation for blasting the other car's tires.)  The bridge game is more confusing and less exciting than the baccarat game in Casino Royale, and calling Germans a bunch of robots isn't as shocking or edgy as the talk about African-Americans in particular or America in general in Live and Let Die.  Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and Felix Leiter, Quarrel and Solitaire in Live and Let Die are more interesting people and have more interesting relationships with Bond than does Gala Brand.  I liked Moonraker, but I think it the weakest of the first three Bond novels, though I know there are those who think it the best of those first three.

More James Bond soon, but I haven't got my hands on a copy of Diamonds Are Forever yet so we'll take a different tack in our next blog post.  After a long series of posts on spy thrillers and weird tales and space operas we'll take a look at what you might call mainstream or paradigmatic science fiction stories, stories that first appeared in Astounding in the early 1950s.

*[UPDATE: September 15, 2019: Other readers think the Colt Bond has secreted in his Bentley is an automatic, as a commenter below points out.  In a 2017 article, Michael Connick discussed this issue, and other firearms mentioned in the 007 novels.