I don’t think Fleming was trying too hard to cover all the relevant points as you put it, at least not in the main. There is a bit of box-ticking from time to time, but my point was that he often gets pretty stuck into the local culture, in a way most thriller-writers did not. There’s a very insiderish tone to his detailed descriptions of locations, many of which are decidely off the beaten track (St Petersburg in Florida, for instance, in LIVE AND LET DIE). Even with landmark cities he often has an unusual take, as in this description of Paris from his 1960 short story FROM A VIEW TO A KILL:

‘Bond glanced across the pavement at the shiny black ribbons of cars off which the sun glinted painfully. Everywhere it was the same as in the Champs-Elysées. There were only two hours in which you could even see the town — between five and seven in the morning. After seven it was engulfed in a thundering stream of black metal with which no beautiful buildings, no spacious, tree-lined boulevards, could compete.’

But we do indeed agree. The inner life of Bond – the capacity to experience the sublime moment, as you put it – is really not comparable to that of Deighton’s ironically nameless narrator. Bond rarely loses his temper, or his cool, and is the master of most situations. I just think that the idea that the two writers were diametically opposed to each other ignores that Deighton was offering, to a large extent, a spin and a play on the Bond novels. So perhaps a better way of putting it would be that Fleming took the boilerplate thrillers of the 30s and 40s and expanded their almost entirely plot-driven universes by having a character with very nuanced tastes and views living in a much more richly textured and delineated world; and that Deighton took much the same approach to what became the Fleming formula. A thought, anyway.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I would like to say it’s because I contain multitudes, but it’s probably just an issue of sleep deprivation and not being able to clearly define what I’m trying to say.

I do need to re-read FRWL, as it’s been at least eight years since my last. And perhaps these points are also colored by my most recent Fleming read, Diamonds Are Forever, and the fact that, for once, I’m familiar with a place where Bond has traveled. Perhaps what I’m trying to say about Fleming and what you’re trying to say are similar — or, in Dalby’s words, “Unless I’m wrong we are moving in from opposite ends to the same conclusion.” Where you say that, “In a Bond novel, the main agenda is the travel,” etc., I sometimes feel that in places, the novels are travelogues that become more like travel guides. When I mention the bullet points, I don’t mean brevity, but a sense of, “Let’s make sure we cover the relevant points about this locale: 1. The history, 2. The cuisine,” etc. (again, I’m struggling to think of other passages beyond those in DAF).

Whereas all that we know of Lebanon comes from Palmer’s observations and experiences. It’s a much less comprehensive viewpoint, but in a way, it makes the description seem more…authentic, maybe? Granted, it’s probably also a consequence of the first-person narration of Deighton and the third-person of Fleming.

I tell you what. Let’s come back to this after I read Horse Under Water, and maybe then I’ll be able to figure out what I’m trying to say!

Yes, I think Deighton was strongly influenced by Chandler – worth noting, though, is that Fleming also greatly admired him (very clear in their fascinating 1958 on-air discussion: http://bit.ly/p4UDT). I think Amis and Snelling got Fleming’s influences a bit wrong, but that’s for another time, perhaps! I think the major difference between the passages you quote from IPCRESS and MOONRAKER are attitude: nearly every sentence in Deighton’s excerpt is loaded with a crack at someone’s expense – Dalby’s, the chinless wonders, his colleagues, the standard of his usual coffee – and he uses very unexpected and sharp metaphors, such as the melon being ‘sweet, tender and cold like the blond waitress’. He’s doing a lot of work in a very few words there, and I would say that it reads more like an Auden poem than Chandler!

The passage from MOONRAKER is a straight-out aspirational fantasy, and was the sort of thing Amis lampooned pretty comprehensively in his Dossier, but I think it goes against your other point, that Bond experienced cultures as a series of bullet points. Yes, this is in England, but it’s the high life, and this dinner with M goes on for a very long time, lingering over every detail of the meal and hardly advancing the plot at all. Perhaps one could say that neither Fleming or Deighton were interested primarily in plot but in the atmosphere of the spy novel: both took many of the traditional elements of it, but instead of trying to construct fast-paced, suspense-filled cliff-hanger-loaded thrillers from them, as the likes of Peter Cheyney or Dennis Wheatley had, they wrote novels that used all the ingredients as background material. Have another read of Bond’s arrival in Turkey in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and his subsequent meeting with Kerim Bey – it’s far more than bullet points. In a Bond novel, the main agenda is the travel, the food, the drink, the culture, the women, the gadets, the faces of the villains and their back-stories: the plot was really just a disguise for him to explore all of this.

My feeling is that Deighton was a great admirer of Fleming’s: indeed, there’s a short line in one of the essays in London Dossier in which he mentions the glamour of spying Fleming and a mysterious woman dining in a hotel. I think he disliked the class stuff, but then even in that scene in Blade’s Bond is an outsider, looking too tanned and unEnglish to be a member. Deighton worked on at least two Bond films, and I think that scene in AN EXPENSIVE PLACE TO DIE is also partly saying that Fleming has become such a part of the cultural landscape that he is now being misunderstood by pompous academics.