Dr. No by Ian Fleming

Quarrel had smelled his death.  Yet he had followed Bond unquestioningly.  His faith in Bond had been stronger than his fear.  And Bond had let him down.  Would Bond also be the death of the girl?

At the end of From Russia, With Love, James Bond, the world's greatest secret agent, loses consciousness and collapses because he has been poisoned by Rosa Klebb, the world's most dangerous lesbian and the Soviet Union's expert on torture and murder!  I thought From Russia, With Love the best of the first five 007 novels--let's hope the sixth, Dr. No, can match it!  I am reading a 2012 printing of the 1958 novel that I borrowed from the Baltigore County Public Library.  This copy has illustrations by, presumably, the child of somebody who borrowed it before I did.

In my early teens I read Dr. No in the Pan edition with the spiderweb cover, which I think I found in my paternal grandparents' house and which I guess is probably still someplace in my parent's house or my brother's apartment.  Unlike Live and Let Die, which I read in my youth and almost completely forgot about, I actually remember many key scenes from Dr. No.  I am curious to see if my memory of various things is accurate or has been distorted by the passage of time and exposure to the cinematic version of Dr. No.

In Live and Let Die, James Bond, while pursuing Soviet agent and smuggler Mr. Big, worked with John Strangways, the top British agent in the Caribbean.  In the first chapter of Dr. No we find ourselves in Jamaica, where we witness Strangways, and his No. 2, Mary Trueblood, get murdered by four "Chigroes," men with both Chinese and African ancestors.  The men use revolvers with silencers (which people who know about firearms will tell you weakens the credibility of the story) to kill the British spies, and then bundle them into a hearse and burn down their HQ, destroying all their documents.

It is common in military and espionage fiction for the protagonist to despise his superiors and for him to be portrayed as a better person and a better fighting man than those in charge.  The commander or the politicians are always sending him off on foolish operations or starting immoral or unwinnable wars, and it is made clear that the protagonist is more brave, is a better leader, and is a better strategist and tactician than those higher than he in the hierarchy.  We don't really get too much of that in James Bond.  Rather than seeing M as an old man who sends young men off to die pursuing the interests of the bourgeoisie, James Bond loves and respects M, with Fleming comparing their relationship to a marriage.  The first scene of chapter 2 of Dr. No, in which veteran naval officer M talks to his driver, a veteran sailor, demonstrates M's concern and care for his subordinates and his good relationship with them.

If you've been in a marriage, you know there are rough spots.  Well, 007 and M are going through just such a rough spot.  M is irritated that 007 almost got himself killed by Rosa Klebb, and he blames Bond's irrational affection for the .25 Beretta.  So he makes Bond start carrying around the Walther PPK 7.65 mm and a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver.  Then he sends Bond to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of Strangways and Trueblood.  The "Chinese negro" killers expertly covered their tracks, so everybody thinks that Strangways and Trueblood were lovers and ran off together, and M figures he is sending Bond on an easy job that will allow him to get back in the groove after his months of hospital time following the Klebb episode.  Bond, however, resents being given a "cushy assignment," seeing it as a humiliating punishment.

Call me old-fashioned, but if you are
going to put an attractive woman on the
cover of your book, I think you should show
her face.

Bond is only in Jamaica about ten minutes before it is clear that this is no easy job, that lots of people, Chinese women, to be specific, are keeping an eye on him.  And it is only a few hours before it seems likely that Strangways and Trueblood were murdered by a mysterious half-German, half-Chinese, guy who owns Crab Key, a guano- and jungle-covered island thirty miles north of Jamaica.  Jealous of his privacy, this joker, name of Dr. Julius No, uses radar and machine guns to keep people away from his island.  Many of the clues that point to No come from Quarrel, a character from Live and Let Die with whom Bond reunites, a charming and courageous native of the Cayman Islands and an expert swimmer and sailor.  Like so many of the characters in the Bond novels, Quarrel is of mixed race, a black man with the grey eyes of some adventurous English ancestor--Bond speculates that Quarrel is descended from a pirate or a Cromwellian soldier.  As a well-liked working-class black man, Quarrel knows all kinds of things that Bond's white contacts in Jamaica, like the Governor and the Colonial Secretary, with whom he spends much of chapters 5 and 6, don't know.

While he's in Kingston, Dr. No's agents try to murder Bond with poisoned fruit and a centipede (always with the poison!) and by driving his car off the road and down a cliff.  Cleverly, Bond and Quarrel are not in the car as it careens down the cliff to destruction--they hired a beggar and a clerk who did the books for a whorehouse to impersonate them and it is these gentlemen who go to hell in our heroes' stead.  I think this is the most ruthless and cold-blooded thing Bond has done thus far in six novels.

Bond and Quarrel move to the north shore of Jamaica, where Quarrel trains Bond, getting him back into shape.  Then, under cover of night, the two men canoe to Crab Key, where they meet a beautiful teen-aged blonde with a crooked nose who is also trespassing on the island, Honeychile Rider--Rider is collecting rare shellfish she sells to somebody in Miami via the mails.  In between hiding from, fleeing, and fighting Dr. No's half-Chinese, half-black henchmen, Rider tells Bond all about her strange, Edgar Rice Burroughs-style life.  (Bond thinks of her as "Girl Tarzan.")  Her family was among the wealthy Jamaican elite for centuries, but had fallen on hard times by the year of her birth.  Orphaned by a fire, Honeychile lived in the ruins of the family home with her black nanny.  Because she tamed the snakes and scorpions and other animals that infested the decayed estate, the local blacks thought she had magic powers ("obeah") and avoided her.  Her nanny died when she was fifteen, and Honeychile was pursued by a white man, an overseer, who got drunk one night and knocked her unconscious, breaking her nose, and proceeded to rape her.  She achieved her revenge by sneaking into his house and putting a black widow spider in his bed, which killed him.

Eventually Bond and Rider are captured by some of Dr. No's thugs who ride around the island in a wheeled, armored vehicle decorated so that gullible and superstitious blacks will think it is a dragon and avoid the island.  (This Scooby-Doo stuff makes no sense--rumors of a dragon would attract attention from intrepid educated people, like journalists, scientists, and hunters, just the kind of people Dr. No would want to keep away from his island.)  Poor Quarrel is burned to death by the vehicle's flame thrower; 007 and the teenager who is already falling in love with him are handcuffed and given a lift on the dragon back to Dr. No's underground lair, which is done up like a luxury hotel or spa, complete with a staff of pretty and attentive Chinese women who call the prisoners "patients."

Bond and Honeychile have dinner with Dr. No, who tells them his biography (one career highlight: as a young criminal in a New York "tong," some other criminals chopped off his hands, so he now has metal pincers for hands) and describes his operations on Crab Key--not only does he sell the guano, but he is working with Moscow to jam the signals of American long range guided missiles and even take control of the missiles.  He could, he claims, redirect US missiles fired during tests or in war to land back in the US or in British Caribbean territories.  Finally, he explains why he has allowed 007 and the sea shell collector to get a good night's rest and eat a healthy meal--Dr. No is studying pain and human endurance, and he wants to test Bond and Rider to the breaking point.  He recently fed a black woman to an army of crabs (Jamaican "land crabs" or "black crabs.")  This "negress" expired after three hours exposure to the crabs--she died of fright.  Dr. No wants to see how a white woman's endurance compares to that of the black woman's.  When he realizes Dr. No is going to feed Honeychile to crabs, Bond calls Dr. No all kinds of names and says he will "fry in hell for this" but doesn't have the presence of mind to inform the doctor that his sample size (just two women!) is going to be way too small to yield reliable results.  I personally wouldn't take Dr. No's research results seriously until he had fed ten women of African ancestry and ten women of European ancestry to these crabs.

As for Bond, Dr. No tells him he has the honor of being the first man sent through his brand new "obstacle race, an assault course against death."  Over the course of two chapters, Bond crawls and climbs through this maze, tortured by electric shocks and broiling heat, forced to fight hand-to-hand against a swarm of tarantulas and, at the end of the course, a giant squid.  When he busts out of the death maze he finds he is near the island's dock, where Dr. No is supervising the loading of a ship with tons and tons of guano.  Bond assassinates the guy manning the crane that is directing the guano-disgorging tube, grabs the controls, and then buries Dr. No in guano, drowning the maniac in bird shit.  Then he reunites with Honeychile, who has escaped the crab horde--she knew something about crabs that Dr. No didn't know, that they don't really eat live people and, being Girl Tarzan, lover of creepy crawlies, she was not in the least bit scared of them.  While Bond was battling the tarantulas and the giant squid, Honeychile was slowly freeing herself from her bonds.  (Dr. No's experiments don't make any sense, because nobody was watching Bond or Honeychile with a stop watch and a rifle to see how long they survived or to catch them if they managed to overcome their invertebrate opponents.  Who the hell builds a death maze and doesn't bother to watch the contestant fight the level boss?)

Bond shoots down several "Chigroes," seizes the dragon, and chauffeurs Honeychile to the south end of Crab Key, where Quarrel's canoe is hidden, and they escape to Jamaica.

Dr. No is not bad--the sex and violence and espionage elements are good enough--but it is far weaker than From Russia, With Love.   Quarrel is a decent character, but not as interesting a doomed friend of James Bond as Darko Kerim, and Honeychile Rider is OK, but no better a character than Tatiana Romanova.  (Romanova, with whom I thought Bond was in love, isn't even mentioned in this book.  I wonder what kind of life she is leading in the West.)  As for the villains, next to the terrific Red Grant and Rosa Klebb, Dr. No is kind of underdeveloped.  (By the way, M tells a guy who asks that Klebb is dead, but I hope he was lying!)

Then we have setting and atmosphere; compared to Fleming's sinister depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain and in anarchic Istanbul in the fifth 007 novel, the Jamaica of the sixth book is a bore.  It's hot and there are bugs?  Come on, man!  You can do better than that!  Maybe Fleming should have explored the underworld of the "Chigroes," the way he explored the African-American underworld in Live and Let Die, or included more "yellow peril" stuff--the enemies are all Chinese, but Fleming didn't make use of any specifically Chinese cultural or historical characteristics in the story that I can remember.  This is a sad contrast to Moonraker, where there was plenty of "Germans are robots" stuff, Diamonds Are Forever, in which Bond unleashed a barrage of hilarious slander against Italian-Americans and harsh criticism of Las Vegas, and of course Fleming's masterpiece From Russia, With Love, which is full of specific observations of Russian communists, Turks and gypsies.

I can't deny that my interest in James Bond has waned a little bit.  It may be a while before we check out the next 007 novel, Goldfinger.

From Russia, With Love by Ian Fleming

On what Bond had seen, could he believe that she was the sort of girl to fall in love with a photograph and a file?  How could one tell? Such a girl would have a deeply romantic nature.  There were dreams in the eyes and in the mouth.  At that age, twenty-four, the Soviet machine would not yet have ground the sentiment out of her.  The Romanov blood might well have given her a yearning for men other than the type of modern Russian officer she would meet--stern, cold, mechanical, basically hysterical and, because of their Party education, infernally dull.

Property of the Baltimore County Public Library

The fifth James Bond novel by Ian Fleming is From Russia, With Love, which may or may not have a comma.  I drove some distance to borrow a library copy of a 2012 printing of the 1957 novel, an edition with a cover that is reminding me of my 2003 hardcover edition of Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way.

One of the issues one might raise about some of the first four 007 novels is that Fleming didn't do much to flesh out the lead villains.  For example, we spend very little time with the Spangs, the twin brothers who head an American crime family in Diamonds Are Forever before Bond sends them to hell with his .25 caliber Beretta or a handy 40mm anti-aircraft gun.  Well, you can't make that complaint about From Russia, With Love because we spend the first 93 pages of the 268-page book  becoming intimately familiar with the villains!

First, we meet Donovan "Red" Grant, Fleming giving us the lowdown on his life, psychology, and, in a scene in which he gets a massage from a topless girl who can sense how evil Grant is, even though Grant has never spoken to her, every inch of his superb body.  Grant is a monster in every sense of the word.  The product of a 15-minute tryst between a German weight-lifter travelling with a circus and an Irishwoman who died in childbirth, Grant never met his parents.  Early on he was distinguished by his superior physique, which he used to bully others and which lead him to a career as an amateur boxer.  At an early age Grant began experiencing a lust to kill, a lust that flares up at the full moon!  At first Grant satisfied his insane desires by killing domestic animals, but as a teen he began bicycling all over Northern Ireland, seeking out women to murder.  Drafted into the British Army in 1945, he turned to drink when he could find no safe outlet for his murderous urges.  While his regiment was in Berlin during the 1948-9 Soviet blockade he decided to defect to the communist side:

He liked all he heard about the Russians, their brutality, their carelessness of human life, and their guile, and he decided to go over to them.  But how?

Fleming describes how Grant got over to the Soviet sector of Berlin, how he convinced the commies to accept him and to give him a job as a killer, his education and his first assassination and execution jobs.  As the novel begins he has been working for the Soviet State for ten years, and is now "Chief Executioner of SMERSH."

We then spend time among the heads of the Soviet intelligence services, who feel that a major terrorist act is needed to cripple the most threatening of the Western intelligence services, that of Great Britain.  They don't want to simply kill some British agent, but to discredit him, as a means of ruining the morale of the British intelligence community and Her Majesty's Government as a whole.  They select as their target James Bond, the man who eliminated Le Chiffre, Mr. Big, and Hugo Drax, and give the job of destroying Bond's reputation and ending his life to two of the USSR's top operators: Rosa Klebb, an ugly little woman who is the head of SMERSH Operations, reputed to be a sadistic torturer, and apparently a lesbian, and Kronsteen, the "Wizard of Ice," a chess master and head of SMERSH's planning department, an inhuman genius and master of manipulation and prediction:

Kronsteen was not interested in human beings--not even in his own children.  Nor did the categories of 'good' and 'bad' have a place in his vocabulary.  To him all people were chess pieces.  He was only interested in their reactions to the movements of other pieces.  To foretell their reactions, which was the greater part of his job, one had to understand their individual characteristics.          

Kronsteen and Klebb select for their Bond-destroying mission Grant, and, to serve as bait, a beautiful young translator fluent in English and French, Tatiana Romanova, whom everybody says looks like Greta Garbo.  Romanova isn't told Bond will be destroyed, only that she is to seduce him and go to England with him, so she provide false information to the British and in turn can observe and report back on conditions in the UK. 

This section of the book is not only a catalog of sinister creepos and the people they hold in the grip of fear, but a chilling portrait of Soviet society.  SF fans often talk about "world-building," how some science fiction and fantasy writers create a strange but believable fictional world.  World-building, of course, is not limited to SF--among the virtues of Moby Dick and In Search of Lost Time is how Melville and Proust vividly portray life aboard a whaling ship and among the cultured French bourgeoisie and aristocracy.  Here in From Russia, With Love, Fleming succeeds in constructing a compelling world beyond the Iron Curtain, a world of suspense, fear, and cruelty.

Part One: The Plan ends on page 93 and Part Two: The Execution starts on page 97 with Bond in London, bored because he has been doing desk work for a year and Tiffany Case, after being his girlfriend for some months, left him for a major of the United States Marines in London on a diplomatic mission.  M tells Bond an incredible story: a beautiful Russian intelligence officer, Tatiana Romanova, currently working in the cipher department of the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, has approached the head of British intelligence there and told him she fell in love with Bond while she was working as a file clerk in Moscow and saw their file on 007!  She wants to defect, and will bring with her the top secret Soviet code machine known as "the Spektor."  But only if it is Bond who will meet her and carry her to the Free World!

This seems like an obvious trap, but Bond and M's attitude is that women are always acting crazy so maybe this whole thing is legit--anyway, they can hardly pass up an opportunity, no matter how far-fetched, to get a working Spektor machine.  To make taking this insane risk seem more believable, Fleming reminds us several times that Bond and M are gamblers, and that English people love games.

Many of these reminders come in the dialogue of Darko Kerim, head of British intelligence in Istanbul, whom Bond meets when he arrives in the Turkish capital.  (The trip to and stay in Istanbul give Fleming a chance to do the thing he does in all these Bond novels, give us a lot of travelogue stuff detailing what aircraft and automobiles Bond rides in, what food he eats, what booze and coffee he drinks, what cigarettes he smokes.)  Kerim, who is half-English and half-Turkish, grew up in Turkey, the son of a tough fisherman who had a lot of women, talks a lot about the Turkish national character as well as the English character--today much of this, particularly his discourse on how women are treated by Turkish men, including him, would be considered very racist or xenophobic or whatever and/or very sexist.  Bond immediately takes a strong liking to Kerim, an exuberant man full of life and a sense of adventure, and remembering how many people Bond made friends with in the last four books ended up getting shot, blown up, or thrown to the sharks, I hoped Kerim's health insurance and life insurance policies were all paid up.

In the 17th chapter of this 28 chapter book Bond gets his first glimpse of Tatiana Romanova, as he and Kerim are spying on the Soviet office through an elaborate peephole--Kerim has had a tunnel built under the building the Soviet government is renting.

Istanbul is wracked by a sort of gang war between gypsies (keep in mind if you are talking to your friends at university about From Russia With Love that nowadays you're supposed to call them the  Roma) and Bulgars (I guess you can still call them Bulgars); the Bulgars are working for the USSR and Darko Kerim has allied with the gypsies against them.  (The Bulgars all ride Lambrettas; using them to shadow Darko Kerim's car and transport themselves from one crime to another, an odd little detail that brought to mind The Who's masterpiece Quadrophenia.)

There is a wild chapter in which Kerim takes Bond to a gypsy restaurant on the edge of town (where there are no cops) and Bond witnesses a formalized fight to the death between two beautiful young women who claw and bite kick each other; they are in love with the same man and this fight is how the gypsy leadership has decided to resolve the issue--otherwise a long feud will result that will weaken the tribe for a long time.  This gruesome contest is interrupted by a sneak attack from the Bulgars, who turn off the engines of their Lambrettas and coast down the hill unheard.  After the attack is repelled, torture of a prisoner reveals that the Bulgars were supposed to kill Kerim and the leader of the gypsies, but be careful not to kill Bond.

Later that night, in the next chapter, Bond accompanies Kerim when he snipes the leader of the Bulgars.  Whereas the gypsy camp scenes aren't that great--the over-the-top girl fight is a naked appeal to readers' lust and sadism, and the attack by the Bulgars is sort of underrealized and uninteresting--the assassination of the Bulgar, after a long walk through deserted and filthy Istanbul streets, is quite good.  Fleming brings the Istanbul setting to life, here and in the tunnel scene--like his portrait of Soviet Russia, it is a portrait of an oppressively tense place, a place characterized by fear, but whereas the USSR is a monolithic top-down society bound in chains, Istanbul is a swirl of chaos where anything goes.

Unfortunately, Fleming seems to make a mistake in the assassination scene.  Bond regrets being involved in a killing in cold blood, which is fine in and of itself (Bond expressed regret over having to kill so many people in the last 007 novel, Diamonds Are Forever), but it is suggested that Bond himself had never killed a man in cold blood.  However, in Casino Royale, we are told Bond's first kill was sniping from a fortieth-floor window in a nearby skyscraper a Japanese cipher expert who was working on the thirty-sixth floor of Rockefeller Center.  Oh, well.

Tatiana Romanova sneaks into Bond's hotel room to seduce him--she finds herself falling in love with him, for real, at once.  And the feeling is mutual--this chick is gorgeous!  Romanova has been instructed to insist Bond take her to Britain not an some stodgy aeroplane, but the romantic Orient Express--a trip of over four days!  (James Bond stories are full of trains, which is OK by me--I like trains.)  Bond, Kerim, and the Russian-bred knockout ride the train west.  Bond is in suspense--on the train he and Tatiana live as lovers, and she has brought the Spektor with her as promised, but this surely must be a trap, mustn't it?  There are three Soviet agents on the train, with whom Kerim deals, though he pays for his friendship with Bond and allegiance to Great Britain with his life.  (Who could have seen that coming?)  Tatiana didn't seem to know about the Red agents, or what they were up to, so maybe she herself is on the level?  Maybe they are home free now that those three are eliminated?

The muscleman Red Grant, disguised as a British agent sent to help Bond, gets on the train.  The scenes of Bond dealing with him, certain that he is an ally but disquieted by oddities in his behavior, are quite good--Bond doesn't realize this guy is to be his nemesis until he and Tatiana are in Grant's sadistic clutches.  Grant gloats to Bond about how he and Tatiana will be killed, and about the elaborate measures SMERSH will take that will make it look like Bond himself murdered Tatiana because she was blackmailing him and then committed suicide--this will discredit Bond and the entire British intelligence community!  Bond overcomes Grant, of course, and in Paris keeps the appointment Grant had with Rosa Klebb for a final showdown!

Of the five James Bond novels I have read over the last month or so, From Russia, With Love is my favorite.   And that is not just because I think it is more fun for Bond to be grappling with communists than American crooks (though yeah, I definitely think that.)  As I have been suggesting throughout this blog post, Donovan Grant, Rosa Klebb, Kronsteen, and Darko Kerim are interesting characters, and Fleming's sinister depictions of the USSR and Istanbul are quite effective--the characters and settings in this book are markedly superior to those in the earlier 007 books.  If we except the gypsy scene, the sex and violence aspects of From Russia, With Love are about as good as those in the earlier books--the assassination of the Bulgar and Bond's fight with Rosa Klebb are particularly good.

It's good bye to 007 for a little while, but I'll definitely read Dr. No, the sixth James Bond novel, when a copy finds its way into my hands.

Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming

During the excellent dinner that finally materialized Bond wondered about the evening ahead and about how he could force the pace of his assignment.  He was thoroughly bored with his role of probationary crook who might, if he found favour in the eyes of Mr. Spang, be given permanent work with the rest of the permanent adolescents who made up the gang.  It irked him not to have the initiative.  He resented having been ordered to Saratoga and then to this hideous sucker-trap at the say-so of a handful of bigtime hoodlums.  Here he was, eating their dinner and sleeping in their bed, while they watched him, James Bond, and sized him up and debated whether his hand was steady enough, his appearance trustworthy enough, and his health adequate to some sleazy job in one of their rackets. 

007 is back, here at MPorcius Fiction Log. You may recall that I thought that Moonraker, the third of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, was recycling some of the memorable parts of Casino Royale, the first--Bond gambling against a Soviet operative who claimed to have forgotten his past due to war-induced amnesia, and then unsuccessfully chasing this villain in a car after he had kidnapped a female British agent. Let's hope that the fourth 007 adventure, Diamonds Are Forever, first printed in 1956, has some new ideas.

I have expressed skepticism of Signet's editions of the James Bond books after noticing major differences between the text of Signet's version of Live and Let Die and that of British editions, but the only handy copy of Diamonds Are Forever is an internet archive scan of a 1964 Signet paperback, so I'm biting the bullet and reading that one.  Maybe I can take comfort in the legend on its cover: "COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED."

In Casino Royale, we met a communist torturer who almost left Bond unable to have children.  That was one scary dude.  In Live and Let Die we had a voodoo priest who threw people, including CIA agent Felix Leiter, to the sharks.  Another fearsome individual.  In Moonraker there we observed Nazi scientists aiming a nuclear missile at London.  Chilling!  But I think we can all agree that Diamonds Are Forever takes the cake when the first person we meet in the novel is that figure of terror who haunts the dreams of every one of us--the dentist!

This Afrikaner dentist is employed at a diamond mine in South Africa, but he is more than a medical professional devoted to the struggle against plaque and gingivitis.  Oh, so much more--this plier of probes and drills is also a vital cog in the world's most lucrative smuggling machine!  You see, the black miners who extract the raw diamonds from the Earth like so many diseased molars will secrete diamonds in their mouths, go to the dentist on some pretext, and then exchange the stolen ice with the dentist for cash.  Every month, on the night of the full moon, the dentist rides a motorcycle across the countryside to meet a veteran of the WWII Luftwaffe, who lands his helicopter on a flat stretch of ground and receives the contraband jewels.

In Chapter 2 we are in London with James Bond and M--the highest levels of the British government want this diamond smuggling stopped!  It seems that the smuggled diamonds come to England, and then are shipped by a mule to America.  The British authorities have captured the guy who was going to transport the latest packet of stolen diamonds, a Peter Franks, and M wants Bond to impersonate this Franks, take the shipment to the USA and learn whatever he can about the smuggling operation.  When M's Chief of Staff warns Bond that the Mafia may be mixed up in this whole diamond smuggling business, 007 cavalierly dismisses them as a bunch of goombah goofballs:

"There's nothing so extraordinary about American gangsters," said Bond.  "Anyway, they're not really Americans.  Mostly a lot of Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meatballs and squirting scent all over themselves."

Bond, in the role of career criminal Peter Franks, a burglar just starting in the smuggling game, makes contact with the member of the smuggling ring who will accompany him to New York, a sexalicious American blonde named Tiffany Case.  When he first meets her she is just wearing her underwear, a fact immortalized on the covers of many editions of Diamonds Are Forever.  Bond also receives some clues from British police that suggest that the powerful American crime family headed by twin brothers Jack Spang and Seraffimo Spang and known as "The Spangled Mob" are closely involved in this diamond smuggling business.  Bond is not worried:

Seraffimo.  The name of a night-club waiter or an ice-cream vendor.  But these people were like that.  Cheap and theatrical.

Bond hands the diamonds (hidden in golf balls) to The Spangled Mob's man in Manhattan, a red-headed hunchback named Michael "Shady" Tree, and convinces the hunchback to consider hiring him on as a permanent employee of the Spang organization.  007 then runs into Felix Leiter, who now has a hook for a right arm and an artificial left leg.  Leiter left the CIA because he couldn't do field work without his gun hand, and the former Marine is now a Pinkerton investigating Shady Tree.  What a coincidence!  One of the things Shady Tree does for the Spangled Mob is fix horse races--in fact, the hunchback paid "Peter Franks" by giving him a tip on a big race, telling Bond to bet on the horse which the gangsters have, by devious means, made sure will win.  Leiter is investigating this very scam.

Leiter also knows all about Tiffany Case.  Case's mother ran a brothel in San Francisco, but she refused to pay the local mob protection money, so mobsters busted up the place and gang raped Tiffany, then sixteen.  The girl ran away from home and drifted into a life of crime; she fascinates men like Seraffimo Spang because she has no interest in men due to the psychological scars left by the gang rape.  Of course, expert womanizer Bond begins worming his way into that cold heart, partly because he actually likes her, partly because she may be able to provide him the info about the diamond smuggling operation he came to America to get.

Leiter, in his Studillac, drives Bond up to Saratoga Springs, where this big crooked horse race is going to take place.  Remember how, in Live and Let Die, Fleming included a long (and boring!) excerpt from The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor about voodoo?  Well, here in Diamonds Are Forever, Fleming includes two pages of a newspaper article about Saratoga Springs penned by sports columnist Jimmy Cannon.  Zzzzzzz....

In Saratoga Springs we witness the race the mob has fixed--in the same way that the world's best secret agent James Bond is impersonating loser hoodlum Peter Franks, the Mafia has murdered weak horse Shy Smile and replaced it with a superior horse that looks just like Shy Smile.  The Pinkertons have been hired by a coalition of horse owners to make sure the Mafia doesn't corrupt the race, and Leiter blackmails and bribes the jockey who will be riding the bogus Shy Smile into throwing the race.

Nota bene: Amsterdam is not even mentioned
in the copy of Diamonds Are Forever
I read

The jockey's disloyalty to the mob leads to a creepy and somewhat homoerotic scene in which Bond goes to a place where black men provide medicinal mud baths.  As a patron of Acme Mud and Sulphur Baths, you lay naked in a coffin-like box and one of the "Negro" attendants covers you with heated mud (110 degrees Fahrenheit!) and then binds you up tight in a shroud-like blanket so you can't move.  Bond goes to this monument to alternative medicine and human gullibility to do Leiter a favor--he is to pay off "Shy Smile"'s jockey for throwing the race; the diminutive equestrian is a regular at Acme Baths, and we even see him joshing around with the attendants like they are old friends.

But nobody is laughing when a masked gay couple, Wint and Kidd, the Spangle Mob's most ruthless enforcers, come in while Bond and the jockey lie helpless in their mud boxes!  These jokers beat up one of the attendants and torture the jockey before Bond even has a chance to give him his bribe.  (Leiter later mails the money to the jockey's hospital room, quipping that maybe it will make the torture victim feel better!)

Bond and Leiter proceed to Las Vegas--Shady Tree has directed Bond to go to the Tiara, the casino the Spangled Mob owns, and Leiter's boss has told him to go looking for the bones of the real Shy Smile, like he's Roy Chapman Andrews or something.  Even though we've been told in earlier books that Bond loves gambling and loves casinos, he hates Las Vegas and the Tiara.  Fleming doesn't come right out and say it, but I feel like this is a denunciation of American democracy and America's essentially middle-class, business-oriented, nature.  Unlike the European gambling venues Bond frequents, which I guess are haunts for the rich that are bedecked in an aura of tradition and sophistication (remember how in Moonraker Fleming went on and on about how M's cardplaying club had such a long and respected history?), Las Vegas casinos are brand new in 1956, and are unabashedly businesses that cast a wide net and succeed in drawing customers from all levels of society.  Bond is dismayed by the sight of the unfit bodies of ordinary Americans at the pool ("only about one percent of the customers should be allowed to wear bathing suits") and by the sight of so many women addicted to the slot machines ("elderly women of the prosperous housewife class...they reminded Bond of Dr. Pavlov's dogs....")  In America, ordinary people have opportunities (including opportunities to do things that are risky or stupid!) only the elite have in other societies, and everybody is shameless about chasing a buck, and Bond finds this all "vulgar," "obvious," and "inelegant."

I'm trying to remember a scene like this in
the novel...maybe that is Wint or Kidd seizing
Tiffany Case aboard the Queen Elizabeth

Bond, hoping to "win the initiative" and "force the pace of his assignment" by pissing off the Spangs, plays roulette and wins $20,000.  One of the interesting things about the Bond novels is that Bond, while a genius at killing people, in situations outside of fights often succeeds only due to dumb luck or by getting bailed out by his friends.  Roulette is a case in point--roulette isn't like poker where you can use math skills or a good memory or psychological tricks to get an edge, it is just as much a matter of luck as the one-armed bandits.  Anyway, Bond gets three five-thousand-dollar bills from the cashier, and five one-thousand-dollar bills--I have to admit, I hadn't even known there ever were $5,000 bills, but, as with the Studillac, Fleming did not just make these up.  The real world is full of more cool stuff than we sometimes give it credit for.

Diamonds Are Forever is 160 pages long in this edition, and for 100 pages it moves forward smoothly and pleasantly enough, but with limited danger and excitement (unless you are a jockey.)  But then in the last 60 pages things shift into gear and we get the car chases and gunplay we crave, along with another helping of torture.  Seraffimo Spang gets a telegram from England that informs him that the real Peter Franks is in the custody of the British police and so the Peter Franks who is in his casino must be some kind of cop or private eye!  Spang has his thugs bring Bond to him at his own private town, Spectreville.  (Before he is caught Bond leads the mafia muscle on a merry car chase that sees one of Felix Leiter's friends, who is helping Bond, get shot.  It is hell being one of James Bond's friends!)  Spang is a Wild West buff, and Spectreville is an old ghost town that he has had refurbished to look like it did in 18-whatever; he has even spent a pile of money on restoring a beautiful old Victorian train called The Cannonball.  Spang, wearing chaps, spurs, and ivory handled revolvers, orders Wint and Kidd to put on what Bond and Fleming call "football boots" (I guess most Americans would call them "cleats") and stomp and kick Bond until he is a bloody unconscious wreck.

Tiffany Case helps Bond escape Spectreville in the dark of night--they ride a little maintenance car along the railway used by The Cannonball.  (Fleming calls it a handcar, but it has a gasoline engine.)  Behind them follows The Cannonball, driven by Spang; this chase and its climax are pretty good--Spang dies in his beautiful locomotive as it crashes and goes all to pieces.

It's nice to see Seraffimo Spang in his
cowboy outfit, but I wish the artist had
included The Cannonball in the background

Felix Leiter picks up 007 and Case in the desert and the three ride the Studillac to Los Angeles.  Bond finally admits that the Mafia of the USA is more than just "a bunch of Italian greaseballs who filled themselves up with pizza pie and beer all week and on Saturdays knocked off a garage or a drugstore so as to pay their way at the races."  Leiter books the Englishman and the American blonde on a flight to New York and a cruise ship to England.  But the Mafia is connected, and knows about our heroes' movements, and as the Queen Elizabeth sets sail also aboard are the sadistic Wint and Kidd!

During the L.A. to UK trip we get most of the novel's love story, which I can't say is very convincing or moving.  Bond is impressed that Case can play cards well (she was a black jack dealer at the Tiara) and he likes that she doesn't paint her fingernails, which I guess is sort of interesting--I'm always telling my wife that women don't paint their nails to impress men, but to impress each other.  There is a saccharine bit in which Bond tells Tiffany that he would like to marry a woman who can make a Bearnaise sauce, and so Tiffany goes down to the galley and convinces the chef to let her use his kitchen to make a Bearnaise sauce for Bond--this scene had me saying to myself, "Boy, those gay guys are sure taking their time murdering these lovebirds."  (Now, as I copy edit this post, I am wondering where Tiffany Case, black jack dealer and smuggler for the mob, learned how to make a Bearnaise sauce.  It would have been funnier and more appropriate if she had made Bond a pizza pie!)

Fortunately for us readers, when Wint and Kidd go into action and Bond has to rescue Case from their cabin Fleming provides us some pretty good scenes of suspense, violence and melodrama.

In the last chapter of Diamonds Are Forever, Bond is in South Africa with some local police, waiting to ambush Jack Spang, Seraffimo's twin brother and the head of the diamond smuggling operation.  Spang has left his base in London and taken the place of the German helicopter pilot--now that the American end of the diamond smuggling operation has collapsed, Jack is killing everybody on the European and African side who might be able to finger him as the top crook.  Jack murders the dentist, and then when Bond tries to arrest him, he jumps back into the chopper and tries to fly away.  Luckily the truck Bond and the South Africans brought to the smuggler's meeting place is equipped with a Bofors gun, with which Bond shoots down Spang's copter--Spang dies in the burning wreck.

The excerpt from the New York Post about Saratoga Springs and the romance on the Queen Elizabeth are a little hard to take (it makes sense that a psychologically damaged woman surrounded by murderous freaks might fall in love with a halfway decent guy who protects her, you know, like Solitaire did in Live and Let Die, but I didn't feel like Fleming gave us a good reason for Bond, a man who has had many women, to finds this one special enough to fall in love with) but all the spy stuff and all the violence and chases are good--like every healthy boy, for me derailing locomotives and shooting a 40mm anti-aircraft gun at people are the stuff of which dreams are made.  (I wonder if any Allied servicemen in World War II ever had the opportunity to shoot a Bofors gun at a moving train--now there is the thrill of a lifetime!)  I'm a little disappointed that there were no communists in this one; I really thought the secret leader of the diamond smuggling gang would turn out to be a SMERSH agent, not just the other Spang.  Casino Royale's ending gave me the idea that the first seven 007 novels would be about Bond's crusade against SMERSH, but this crusade has not eventuated.  Well, maybe in the next Bond novel, From Russia With Love, we'll see SMERSH take center stage!

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. 

Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

Never before in his life had there been so much to play for.  The secret of the treasure, the defeat of a great criminal, the smashing of a Communist spy ring, and the destruction of a tentacle of SMERSH, the cruel machine that was his own private target.  And now Solitaire, the ultimate personal prize.

1978 Panther

Here's the second James Bond novel, Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die from 1954.  I definitely read this one as a kid, but all I remember about it is that it was the first time I ever encountered the term "negress" and that M tells Bond that "...the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions--scientists, doctors, writers.  It's about time they turned out a great criminal."  I've seen the silly but spectacular Roger Moore movie, of course, which has so many recognizable faces (Jane Seymour, Yaphet Kotto, Geoffrey Holder) but I doubt much of the book made it into that two-hour extravaganza.

I read a scan at the internet archive of a 1978 Panther paperback with a white-gripped automatic pistol and a woman in a red dress (not to scale) on its cover.  Chapter V of this British printing was titled "Nigger Heaven."  I glanced at a scan of a 1963 American edition by Signet and there Chapter V bore the title "Seventh Avenue."  A scene of two pages in Chapter V of the UK printing in which Bond listens in on the conversation of two African-Americans in a Harlem restaurant and Fleming laboriously reproduces their accents and lingo ("Guess ah jist nacherlly gits tahd listenin' at yah") was absent from the US paperback.  Flipping back and forth between the scans, I found another instance where text containing "the n-word" had been excised for American publication, as well as changes to the text the purpose of which I cannot fathom.  I will have to avoid these Signet editions as I continue to read the Bond novels. 

Signet 1963

In dribs and drabs here and there--but most frequently in Harlem and Florida--a large quantity of sixteenth and seventeenth century gold coins is turning up on the US market, sold to curio shops and pawnbrokers by black people.  CIA, the FBI, and the British Secret Service think Mr. Big, "probably the most powerful negro criminal in the world" has found the buried treasure of pirate Henry Morgan in Jamaica and is liquidating it.  Mr. Big is not just a gangster--he's also the leader of a voodoo cult and a Soviet agent, a member of SMERSH trained in Moscow!  The money gained by the selling the gold, laundered through a multitude of innocent African-Americans, is probably being used to finance communist espionage in the USA.  Bond is eager to exact revenge against SMERSH, and so is happy to lead the British half of the joint US-UK investigation of Mr. Big and is soon on a plane to New York where he meets Felix Leiter, CIA man, whom he knows from his recent adventure in France (chronicled in Casino Royale.)

In New York, Bond receives American clothes and a little training in how to act like an American, and learns more about the Haitain-born, half "negro" and half French Mr. Big and about voodoo. Bond reads a travel book about the Caribbean, The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Fleming generously (and perhaps pointlessly--these long extracts are by far the most boring parts of Live and Let Die) reproduces three and a half pages of text from it that describe a voodoo ceremony.  Mr. Big already knows Bond is in America and why he is there, and Bond receives some menacing mail at his hotel room.  Leiter, who loves jazz and says he likes black people, takes Bond barhopping up in Harlem so Bond can get an idea of what African-American life is like, and in hopes of getting a look at Mr. Big holding court at one of the many night spots he owns.

In Casino Royale and here in Live and Let Die, Fleming does not limit himself to presenting only Bond's point of view or to only writing scenes in which Bond himself appears.  In Casino Royale there were a few scenes with M and S (head of the division of the British Secret Service devoted to the USSR) and Moneypenny in which Bond was absent, and a scene inside Le Chiffre's automobile while Bond was pursuing him in his Bentley.  Sometimes we are privy to the thoughts of characters besides Bond.  Here in Live and Let Die, Fleming includes scenes of Mr. Big and his head of communications, The Whisper, and other Harlem residents--Fleming uses these scenes to demonstrate to us that Mr. Big has all of Harlem under his thumb and knows everything that happens in Harlem.  Mr. Big rules by fear, and by taking advantage of how superstitious black people are--they believe that Mr. Big is a zombie, one of the living dead and thus unkillable.

Bond and Leiter are captured via a trapdoor mechanism and Bond finds himself separated from the American spy, bound to a chair in the book-lined office of the very tall, very broad Mr. Big, a man of intelligence and education and extreme ambition.  Mr. Big has a beautiful Haitian-born French woman, purportedly a telepath, come in to assist in his interrogation of 007.  Bond senses that this woman, called Solitaire because she has rejected all male companionship, is attracted to him and may want to help him.  ("Solitaire" is also apropos because she uses tarot cards to liven up her telepathy act.)  Unfortunately, she can't prevent Tee Hee, a guy who giggles in a falsetto while he tortures people, from breaking Bond's left pinky finger at Mr. Big's order.

Mr. Big doesn't want to kill 007 or Leiter, just hurt them as a warning and an incentive to stop investigating him, so he lets them go.  Tee Hee is supposed to toss Bond in a pond in Central Park, but Bond outwits the torturer, killing him and two other of Mr. Big's thugs and getting back to his hotel in a car he steals from the criminals.  Leiter is supposed to be beaten severely, but the man in charge of him goes on easy on Leiter because they share a love of Duke Ellington and other jazz greats.

Bond takes a train south for St. Petersburg, Florida, while Leiter takes a plane.  St. Petersburg is where Mr. Big's yacht, Secatur, unloads the gold coins from Jamaica.   Solitaire, who hates the "nigger gangsters" (as she calls them in the British version, but not the American one) she has been shut up with for a year sneaks away from Harlem and contacts Bond, who agrees to take her with him in his private compartment on the train.  But most of the black people in NYC are working for Mr. Big and Bond's movements are observed, and an enemy is on the train, waiting to strike!  Luckily, a brave and decent black train employee warns 007 and he and the French psyker get off the train early, in Jacksonville, and transfer to a different train.

The Florida section of Live and Let Die sees Fleming unleash a lot of criticisms of the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Bond, an expert on fine foods, bitches about American eggs and coffee; an expert on cars, he bitches about the automatic transmissions and spongy suspensions on American cars which render driving a breeze instead of a challenge to one's athletic ability.  There's a crack about how the US is a land covered in junk and litter.  Solitaire and Bond both react with horror to St. Petersburg, which is full of gossipy old people and the young people who figure out ways to part the geezers from their retirement funds.  Solitaire complains that it is too easy to make money in America, which she says leads to poor customer service, and Bond calls North America the "great hard continent of Eldollarado."  . 

Bond and Solitaire reach St. Petersburg halfway through the novel and are immediately spotted because of Solitaire's foolishness.  (Remember how in Casino Royale Bond declared that working with women was dangerous?)  While Bond and Leiter are away from their rented cottage doing a preliminary recon on Ourobourous Worm and Bait, the live bait and sea shell company which they believe is where the gold coins are warehoused, Solitaire is kidnapped.  Then while Bond is asleep Leiter goes off on his own to infiltrate the Ourobouros warehouse, and is brought back by Mr. Big's henchmen a broken man--the CIA op is barely alive after having lost an arm and a leg to Ourobouros's ravenous man-eating shark!  (I guess this shark doesn't give two shits about Duke Ellington!)  At night Bond sneaks into the warehouse, where he discovers that the gold coins from Jamaica are smuggled in in fishtanks holding poisonous fish that the Ourobouros peeps are ostensibly importing to sell to scientists.  Bond gets in a fight with the guy who manages Ourobourous; this joker falls in the water with the shark that maimed Leiter, and doesn't come out again.               

Bond proceeds to Jamaica, where the final third of the novel takes place.  Bond, reflecting Flemings' own life experience, loves Jamaica and its "staunch, humorous people."  Aided by Strangways, the head of British intelligence on the island, and Quarrel, a mixed-race Cayman Islander said to be the best swimmer and fisherman in the Caribbean, Bond launches a one man assault on Surprise Island, where Mr. Big's people have set up shop excavating Morgan's treasure and where Mr. Big holds Solitaire prisoner.  (With binoculars the good guys can see that the crime boss and the telepath have arrived on Suprise Island in Mr. Big's yacht, the Secatur.)  Strangways provides equipment and oceanography books, and Quarrel trains 007 in swimming and spearfishing.  Then, on a moonlit night, while Mr. Big's men load the Secatur with the fish tanks full of gold, Bond, in scuba gear, crosses the three hundred yards of Shark Bay that lie between mainland Jamaica and Surprise Island.  He fights a huge octopus and a twenty-pound barracuda, and attaches a limpet mine to the Secatur's hull.  Then he gets captured, of course.

As a captive, Bond is witness to the efficient way in which Mr. Big's crew processes Morgan's vast treasure of (Bond thinks it worth four million pounds) and is reunited with Solitaire.  Mr. Big had hoped to marry and create amazing children with Solitaire (I suppose children with his genius and her psychic powers) but her treachery has convinced Mr. Big that she must die.  Mr. Big proposes to chain Bond and Solitaire to the back of the yacht and drag them through a coral reef so they get all cut up and then into the shark- and barracuda-infested waters beyond the reef where their blood will attract the fish.  Luckily, the limpet mine detonates seconds after the Secatur has passed beyond the reef and seconds before 007 and his psychic girlfriend reach the reef, sinking the yacht within the danger zone and leaving our heroes in the safe zone.  The blacks who survive the explosion are killed by the sharks and barracuda, including Mr. Big, who is close enough to Bond that the Englishman can see him being ripped apart by piscine teeth and hear his screams of agony.

By 2019 standards Live and Let Die seems pretty racist.  But to be fair to Fleming, Bond repeatedly stresses the similarities between whites and blacks.  He points out that most blacks are law-abiding, he says that British people ("particularly the Celts" Bond says to Leiter) are also superstitious, and says (in that restaurant scene deleted from the US edition) that blacks are like whites in that they are interested in sex and keeping up with the Joneses, the only difference being they don't bother to be "genteel" about it.  Leiter rhapsodizes about the central role played in American culture by blacks, saying that "most modern dances were invented" in Harlem, and that all the big bands Bond has heard of were proud to play in Harlem, the "Mecca of jazz and jive."  Bond finds black women attractive and finds the music he hears in Harlem mesmerizing.  I don't list these things to defend Fleming or try to convince people who are offended by the book that they shouldn't be, but to make sure I don't falsely characterize the author or his novel, which is full of black people who are villainous or gullible, but also includes admirable black characters and praise for aspects of African-American culture.

Another thing I found noteworthy about Live and Let Die, and this also goes for Casino Royale, is the large shadow WWII casts over the novel.  In both books Bond's service all over the world during the 1939-1945 war is mentioned repeatedly.  One reason Mr. Big is such an effective leader and successful criminal is that before he was trained in Moscow he was trained by the OSS and served the Allied cause in Vichy France.  When Bond requests equipment he wants things he used or learned about during the war: "And some of that shark-repellent stuff the Americans used in the Pacific....And one of those things our saboteurs used against ships in the war.  Limpet mine, with assorted fuses."

Live and Let Die is a good thriller; I thought all the train scenes were good--tense, and I liked the fight in the warehouse full of tanks of worms and venomous fish, and Bond's harrowing trip through Shark Bay.  The novel's gruesome violence is shocking (Leiter's dismemberment by a shark was a big surprise to me) and it was interesting and sometimes funny to hear a foreigner's assessments of 1950s America, its culture, landscape, and its people, white and black.  (If our English and French friends have such harsh things to say about us in these 007 books, my fellow Americans, I can only imagine what Russian communists will say if Fleming chooses to allow them to give voice to their opinions on the USA.)

On the negative side, Fleming does quite little with voodoo, socialism or telepathy beyond introducing them into his stories--these topics, rich raw material for philosophical discussion or supernatural or science fiction plot elements are mostly just window dressing.  The story would have been basically the same if Mr. Big wasn't involved in voodoo or revolutionary communism at all, but was just a gangster who ruled Harlem by murder and torture and was smuggling and laundering buried treasure and Solitaire was not a psychic but just some chick he wanted to sleep with who saw Bond as her ticket to freedom.  The voodoo/USSR/telepathy angles as written don't really detract from the book, but they feel like lost opportunities--for example, I was a little surprised that Solitaire's psychic powers neither came in handy, nor were ever debunked.

Next stop: Moonraker.

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The 1978 Panther paperback I read has an ad in its final pages for "All-action Fiction from Panther."  I was a little surprised to see science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer's name on the list among all these espionage writers; the Panther book advertised is his 1970 novel inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, Lord Tyger.  I have not read Lord Tyger, but my man tarbandu has, and he wrote about it a year ago.          

   

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

'The office was very jealous although they didn't know what the job was.  All they knew was that I was to work with a Double O.  Of course, you're our heroes.  I was enchanted.'

Bond frowned.  'It's not difficult to get a Double O number if you're prepared to kill people....How do you like the grated egg with your caviar?'  

As a kid I loved the James Bond movies with Sean Connery, George Lazenby or Roger Moore which would periodically show up on network TV full of commercials.  I even read four or five of the Ian Fleming novels, though I don't think I really "got" them, being so young, and they being so radically different than the films.  This was before puberty, so all the references to sex in the movies and in the books either went over my head or bored me.  I liked James Bond the way I liked the first Star Wars movie--I savored the ceaseless violence!

Reading Kingsley Amis recently brought James Bond to mind, so I decided to read the Ian Fleming 007 novels.  Even though Wikipedia says the county I live in is one of the wealthiest counties in America and one of the top five place to live in the USA as determined by some magazine, the county library system has no novels by Ian Fleming.  (I guess quality of life is subjective.)  So again my recourse is to the internet archive.  The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953; I'm reading a scan of a paperback published in 1983 by Berkley.  This isn't one of the books I tackled as a child, and the only Casino Royale film of which I am aware is the spoof one starring Barbara Bouchet (you loved her in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), so I have no idea what the plot of this thing is going to entail.

A dude named Le Chiffre, which is French for "The Number," is the head of a major French labor union (50,000 members!)  This joker goes by the name "The Number" because he purportedly lost his memory during the Second World War, in a Nazi concentration camp or something like that, and doesn't remember his birth name.  Le Chiffre's union is closely allied with the Soviet Union--the Reds send a pile of money to the union, and if World War III should erupt it is expected that those 50,000 working class brutes will sabotage NATO installations and otherwise pave the way for the Red Army to take over France.

One of Le Chiffre's many girlfriends is a British spy, and she alerts Her Majesty's Government that Le Chiffre has a big problem.  Le Chiffre invested most of the union's money in a chain of brothels, which you would expect to be a sort of no-brainer investment in France, but a sudden and unexpected change in French government policy has led to the gendarmes closing down all those whorehouses and the union losing all that money.  Should the commies in Moscow find out that Le Chiffre blew all the money they sent him, agents of SMERSH (the Soviet agency whose name is an acronym for "Death to Spies") will murder him, so Le Chiffre comes up with the plan of winning all the money back by gambling at a seaside casino.  (This guy's memory may be damaged but his brain is otherwise puttering along just fine--check out all the good ideas he has!)  The British government comes up with the idea of making sure Le Chiffre loses the rest of Moscow's money at the casino, which will discredit the Red union and neutralize Le Chiffre, by sending their best gambler to the casino to play against Le Chiffre.  And who is their best gambler?  James Bond, Agent 007, of course!

What kind of guy is James Bond?  We are told he is cold and all-business while on a job, and somebody says he looks like Hoagy Carmichael.  But one of the attractions of the James Bond books, and one thing they are criticized about, is the fact that Bond enjoys what you might call luxurious and sensual living, or taking advantage of the many fine goods and services a capitalist economy and the remnants of an aristocratic culture have to offer, or conspicuous consumption, and it feels like Fleming spends as much time describing the stuff of the good life Bond leads as on actual spycraft stuff.  Bond has a fancy car, a 4 1/2 liter Bentley.  He smokes seventy cigarettes a day, a special blend of tobaccos he has made by a fancy tobacconist.  In one scene he gets a massage.  Bond describes to a bartender exactly how he wants his drink constructed, telling Felix Leiter, the CIA agent accompanying him, "This drink's my own invention."  To a beautiful female colleague, Vesper Lynd, (she wears a black velvet dress that is "simple, and yet with the touch of splendour that only half a dozen couturiers in the world can achieve") he admits "I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink."  And Bond is crazy about casinos:

He loved the dry riffle of the cards and the constant unemphatic drama of the quiet figures round the green tables.  He liked the solid studied comfort of cardrooms and casinos, the well-padded arms of the chairs, the glass of champagne or whisky at the elbow, the quiet unhurried attention of good servants.            

Back to plot.  The seaside town of Royale is apparently full to the gills with French security personnel and foreign spies.  Besides Texas-born American spy and former Marine Felix Leiter and British wireless expert Vesper Lynd there is a Frenchman, Rene Mathis, who works closely with Bond.  But don't think "The Number" is outnumbered!  A multinational legion of commies and thugs is in league with Le Chiffre!  He has two bodyguards, one of whom reminds Bond of Lenny from Of Mice and Men; the other has bad teeth, a hairy body and carries a cane that turns out to be a gun.  Bond's hotel room is bugged, and a married couple called the Muntzes--he German, she Czech--is in the room upstairs listening in.  Bond's cover, that of a Jamaican millionaire, is blown before he even gets to Royale, and a pair of Bulgar assassins try to kill Bond by throwing a bomb at him but are instead blown up themselves--Bond's survival is due to pure luck, not anything Bond deserves credit for.

Luck is a theme of the novel, as you might expect it to be in a novel about gambling.  "Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued;" which sounds like something Machiavelli would say.  The second quarter or so of Casino Royale is taken up by baccarat.  Bond explains the game to Miss Lynd, which takes some pages, and then Bond has his big match with Le Chiffre.  As far as I could tell, this game is 100% luck; there's no planning or strategy or bluffing.  I guess you could count cards, but no mention of such a technique is made by Fleming.  Bond loses all of the British taxpayers' money to the Red union leader, but then the American taxpayers bail out their friends on Airstrip One--Felix Leiter gives Bond a huge wad of cash and 007 goes on to bankrupt Le Chiffre and gets all of the lost money back.

Having triumphed over one of the many tentacles of the international communist conspiracy via an all night gambling session, Bond and Vesper Lynd go to have a fancy breakfast to celebrate.  Bond, we have been told, is all business during a dangerous job, but now that the job is over he is focused on convincing the beautiful black-haired Vesper to have sex with him.  "He wanted her cold and arrogant body....to see tears and desire in her remote blue eyes and to take the ropes of her black hair in his hands and bend her long body back under his."  Bond is into what we might call rough sex--one of the things about Vesper that attracts him is how she is self-contained, independent, rather than submissive--Bond figures having sex with her will always "have the tang of rape" because she will never give up herself entirely to a man, but always keep a private inner core.

We have also been told that Bond hates working with women, that he thinks they are just trouble with all their emotional baggage--instead of helping to accomplish the mission, a woman is a distraction: "One had to look out for them and take care of them."  As the second half of Casino Royale begins, Fleming provides evidence that Bond has the right attitude as Vesper Lynd gets kidnapped from the restaurant where they are drinking champagne and eating scrambled eggs.

After a car chase Bond is captured by Le Chiffre who tortures him by hitting him repeatedly in the testicles with a carpet beater.  This is a scene with powerful sadistic, masochistic and homoerotic overtones, undertones, and in-between tones.  Le Chiffre wants to know where Bond has hidden the money he won at the baccarat table, but 007 doesn't crack up.  Le Chiffre is about to castrate Bond with a carving knife when a SMERSH agent arrives to shoot Le Chiffre in the face, carve a Shcha (щ), which I guess is the first letter of the Russian word for "spy," in Bond's hand, and leave.

In the third quarter of the novel Bond is in the hospital recovering and having doubts about the morality of his career of spying on and assassinating people as well as suffering fears that he won't be able to perform sexually after the torture he has suffered.  Matis tries to convince him that he should continue doing his part in the defense of the free world, and Vesper Lynd starts making regular visits and the two begin to fall in love.

When he is released from the hospital, Bond and Vesper go to a little seaside hotel together, where they have sex and Bond even considers proposing to Vesper, but then odd little events and Vesper's moodiness spoil the whole holiday.  All is explained by the note Vesper leaves when she commits suicide--Vesper's Polish boyfriend, an RAF hero, was sent back home to spy for the British after the end of WWII and was captured.  The commies forced Vesper to act as a double agent for years; they threatened to execute her Polish lover if she didn't regularly send them info obtained in her office at the Secret Service.  It was Vesper who blew Bond's cover and exposed him to the Bulgar bomb attack, and the kidnapping was fake, so she is also to blame for Bond getting tortured.  She fell in love with Bond, but a relationship was impossible--she would have to betray Bond to the Soviets or SMERSH would kill her with the ease with which they killed Le Chiffre.

This tragic horror galvanizes Bond's hatred for SMERSH and he decides to dedicate his life to destroying that monstrous Soviet apparatus.

Casino Royale is a fun novel.  Fleming's style is brisk and the novel, 180 pages, is a quick read.  The car chase is quite good, and I enjoyed all the talk about spy craft, and even about baccarat, about which I knew nothing.  Bond doesn't come off as a superman but as a tortured soul (he puts so much effort into having fine meals and superior booze because he is alone all the time, he tells Vesper) who gets into trouble and is saved from total disaster by his colleagues or just sheer luck.  Let's see what the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die, has to offer.