Mister 8

As I’ve written before, Jason @ Spy Vibe is running a fantastic series on set design, part of the stylishness of 60s spy cinema that influenced the creation of the term for which Jason named his site. As part of this series, he’s asked a bunch of spy fiction experts and aficionados to submit their top five lists for publication on the site as well, yours truly included (in the aficionados category, certainly).

Now Jason didn’t specifically instruct us to choose from the worlds of film and television, but I’m willing to wager that most of his respondents did just that. But while giving my own list some thought, I wondered about spy fiction in other mediums, and began to think about my favorite non-film and TV “sets.” I thought I might make a series of posts here on the subject, presenting maybe my top two from each “other” medium, or at least discussing a few things, and to solicit your opinions on the matter as well.

Today, I want to spotlight two sections in two books that I love, to demonstrate different methods of scene-setting. Set in a book doesn’t work the same way as it does when it can be physically represented, as in a film, or television, or a play. Settings are filtered through the narrator, the tone of the book, the mood of the characters. The best scene settings read like poetry, as in one of my favorite sections from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana:

He walked home. The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and misted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago. Women passed him in the street marked on the forehead with ashes as though they had come up into the sunlight from underground. He remembered that it was Ash Wednesday.

This selection describes the atmosphere of pre-revolution 1950s Havana–the mixture of old and new world, the juxtaposition of nightlife and battlefields–and relates quite effectively the personality of Wormold, despite only mentioning his name once. I don’t want to spoil the book for you, because you should go out and read it. Greene has a knack, in most of his books, for providing only those perfect details of place, and no more. Writing is not a process of addition, it’s an exercise in subtraction, paring down the words until only the most essential truths remain.

For the more fantastic, and this certainly fits in more with Jason’s concept of “spy vibe,” turn to Ian Fleming’s Moonraker:

It was like being inside the polished barrel of a huge gun. From the floor, forty feet below, rose circular walls of polished metal near the top of which he and Drax clung like two flies. Up through the centre of the shaft, which was about thirty feet wide, soared a pencil of glistening chromium, whose point, tapering to a needle-sharp antenna, seemed to graze the roof twenty feet above their heads.

The shimmering projectile rested on a blunt cone of latticed steel which rose from the floor between the tips of three severely back-swept delta fins that looked as sharp as surgeons’ scalpels. But otherwise nothing marred the silken sheen of the fifty feet of polished chrome steel except the spidery fingers of two light gantries which stood out from the walls and clasped the waist of the rocket between thick pads of foam-rubber.

Where they touched the rocket, small access doors stood open in the steel skin and, as Bond looked down, a man crawled out of one door on to the narrow platform of the gantry and closed the door behind him with a gloved hand. He walked gingerly along the narrow bridge to the wall and turned a handle. There was a sharp whine of machinery and the gantry took its padded hand off the rocket and held it poised in the air like the forelegs of a praying mantis. The whine altered to a deeper tone and the gantry slowly telescoped in on itself. Then it reached out again and seized the rocket ten feet lower down. Its operator crawled out along its arm and opened another small access door and disappeared inside.

“Probably checking the fuel-feed from the after tanks,” said Drax. “Gravity feed. Ticky bit of design. What do you think of her?” He looked with pleasure at Bond’s rapt expression.

“One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” said Bond. It was easy to talk. There was hardly a sound in the great steel shaft and the voices of the men clustered below under the tail of the rocket were no more than a murmur.

Drax pointed upwards. “Warhead,” he explained. “Experimental one now. Full of instruments. Telemeters and so forth. Then the gyros just opposite us here. Then mostly fuel tanks all the way down until you get to the turbines near the tail. Driven by superheated steam, made by decomposing hydrogen peroxide. The fuel, fluorine and hydrogen” (he glanced sharply at Bond. “That’s top-secret by the way”) “falls down the feed tubes and gets ignited as soon as it’s forced into the motor. Sort of controlled explosion which shoots the rocket into the air. That steel floor under the rocket slides away. There’s a big exhaust pit underneath. Comes out at the base of the cliff. You’ll see it tomorrow. Looks like a huge cave. When we ran a static test the other day the chalk melted and ran out into the sea like water. Hope we don’t burn down the famous white cliffs when we come to the real thing. Like to come and have a look at the works?”

Bond followed silently as Drax led the way down the steep iron ladder that curved down the side of the steel wall. He felt a glow of admiration and almost of reverence for this man and his majestic achievement. How could he ever have been put off by Drax’s childish behaviour at the card-table? Even the greatest men have their weaknesses. Drax must have an outlet for the tension of the fantastic responsibility he was carrying. It was clear from the conversation at dinner that he couldn’t shed much on to the shoulders of his highly-strung deputy. From him alone had to spring the vitality and confidence to buoy up his whole team. Even in such a small thing as winning at cards it must be important to him to be constantly reassuring himself, constantly searching out omens of good fortune and success, even to the point of creating these omens for himself. Who, Bond asked himself, wouldn’t sweat and bite his nails when so much had been dared, when so much was at stake?

As they filed down the long curve of the stairway, their figures grotesquely reflected back at them by the mirror of the rocket’s chromium skin, Bond almost felt the man-in the-street’s affection for the man whom, only a few hours previously, he had been dissecting without pity, almost with loathing.

When they reached the steel-plated floor of the shaft, Drax paused and looked up. Bond followed his eyes. Seen from that angle it seemed as if they were gazing up a thin straight shaft of light into the blazing heaven of the arcs, a shaft of light that was not pure white but a shot mother-of-pearl satin. There were shimmers of red in it picked up from the crimson canisters of a giant foam fire-extinguisher that stood near them, a man in an asbestos suit beside it aiming its nozzle at the base of the rocket. There was a streak of violet whose origin was a violet bulb on the board of an instrument panel in the wall, which controlled the steel cover over the exhaust pit. And there was a whisper of emerald green from the shaded light over a plain deal table at which a man sat and wrote down figures as they were called to him from the group gathered directly beneath the Moonraker’s tail.

Gazing up this pastel column, so incredibly slim and graceful, it seemed unthinkable that anything so delicate could withstand the pressures which it had been designed to meet on Friday-the howling stream of the most powerful controlled explosion that had ever been attempted; the impact of the sound barrier; the unknown pressures of the atmosphere at 15,000 miles an hour; the terrible shock as it plunged back from a thousand miles up and hit the atmospheric envelope of the earth.

Drax seemed to read his thoughts. He turned to Bond. “It will be like committing murder,” he said.

A perfect merger of science fiction and the thriller, encapsulated in a stroll through a rocket chamber. This is, perhaps, the closest to Ken Adams that Fleming’s writing ever gets, or perhaps later, when Bond and Gala Brand are…well, as I said before, I don’t want to spoil it for you! Read the book!

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

I found this article in the NY Times Historical Database, and thought it might be a good introduction to discussing The IPCRESS File (remember, our discussion starts on Monday!). This is a brief overview of the state of spy fiction a few years after publication of Len Deighton’s first novel, with astute commentary by mystery writer / editor / Borges translator / reviewer extraordinaire Anthony Boucher. There are inevitably a number of thoughts and questions this article raises, that I’d be happy to discuss in the comments, although I plan on touching upon them in my discussion of IPCRESS.

* * *

Originally published: June 7, 1964

There’s A Spy Between the Covers

By Anthony Boucher

Close observers of the bestseller list on page 8 have noticed an unprecedented phenomenon in recent months: the persistence in the top sales brackets of three novels of espionage–John Le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” Helen MacInnes’s “The Ventian Affair,” and (until quite recently) Ian Flemings “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

Actual sales figures on these books are even more impressive. The Fleming has sold over 70,000–well above any previous Fleming. The MacInnes has sold over 80,000 (and is still selling over 1,000 a week)–again well above any of the author’s earlier books. And “The Spy” has sold around 163,000, or probably about 25 times the sales of both previous Le Carré novels. The initial print order on the paperback edition will be in the neighborhood of 750,000. His first spy novel, “Call for the Dead,” is now in paperback in an edition of over half a million. The softcover edition of “O.H.M.S.S.” will be one million, bringing the total of Ian Fleming in print in this country to over 12 million.

Spy novels, even those of the acknowledged master, Eric Ambler, have never sold like this before, nor is this strictly an American phenomenon. A recent London Daily Mail bestseller list of 10, fiction and non-fiction, includes four novels, all of them dealing with espionage. (The just-mentioned Le Carré and MacInnes titles, plus the new Fleming, “You Only Live Twice”–to appear here in August–and Gavin Lyall’s “The Most Dangerous Game.”)

A spy writer, the late Jean Bruce, is the most successful popular novelist in France since Simenon; and espionage novels make up an even larger part of publishing in France than they do here, where they seem to constitute almost half of my reviewing duties in the suspense field. Two of the annual French literary prizes are awarded solely for romans d’espionnage (One of them is attractively named, in honor of the most entertaining spy of World War II, Le Prix Cicéron). And there is even a Russian spy novelist Lev Ovalov (but he got a bad review in Pravda–his American secret agent was properly sinister but much too capable).

Spy stories we have always had with us. Like everything else, they can be traced back to the Bible. (See for instance, Joshua ii for the fine story of Rahab the harlot and the spies of Israel.) There are spy narratives in the Sherlock Holmes canon (including the classic “His Last Bow”); and even before World War I there flourished such specialists in spy fiction as E. Phillips Oppenheim and the earlier and even less remembered William Le Queux.

This was all (save, of course, the Biblical accounts) in the unrealistic school of glamour-espionage to which Fleming still adheres. Still colorfully theatrical, but with some closer adherence to the laws of both life and literature, were the magnificent pursuit stories of John Buchan (”The Thirty-Nine Steps,” 1915). The first reasonably realistic stories of espionage may be in “Ashenden” or “The British Agent” (1928) by Somerset Maugham, who had himself served the Foreign Office during the war.

It was in the late 1930’s with the people of England and America becoming more and more aware of international politics ander their implications, that the spy novel came of age. First there was Eric Ambler with “Background to Danger” (1937), then Graham Greene with “The Confidential Agent” (1939); and it became apparent that a spy novel could be as well written and meaningful as an other form of fiction.
With the approaching rumbles of World War II, a number of admirable writers turned for the first time to chronicling international intrigue. Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Helen McCloy, Ngaio Marsh and many others, most notably Michael Innes, saved the free world from fascism in skillfully written entertainments; and Peter Cheyney, in this “Dark series, starting with “Dark Duet” (1943), brought the bitter techniques of Hammett to this most suitable of topics. Even Kay Boyle joined the throng.

Afterwards (one is tempted to say, “between wars”) these writers returned to their usual more private violences; and it is only in the past few years that the publication of spy stories has equaled and even surpassed (in quantity, and once in a while in quality) its wartime level.

Now there are a number of writers devoting apparently full time to such fiction. Most noteworthy, aside from those already mentioned, are England’s William Haggard, who possesses, in addition to a dry wit, a fine eye and ear for the subtle intricacies of top-level political intrigue, and America’s Donald Hamilton, who demonstrates, in a series of paperback novels about a professional killer in counter-espionage, an authentic toughness of mind unmatched in this field since Cheyney (and possibly in any field since Hammett). On the more flamboyant and colorful side are England’s Desmond Cory and John Blackburn and America’s Edward S. Aarons and Stephen Marlowe.

The most austere chronicler of the slogging day-by-day dullness of much spy-activity is Simon Harvester; Len Deighton, on the strength of one book (”The IPCRESS File,” 1963) seems to be developing an odd and unclassifiably amused viewpoint of his own. Gavin Lyall (mentioned above as an English best seller) is unrivaled for vigor of storytelling and clear complication of plotting. Michael Gilbert, who has written in almost every type of suspense, is now creating a memorable series of espionage short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

The spy story is, by and large in good shape today. So is what Julian Symons calls “the modern crime novel”–which attempts, and so often successfully, to combine the mainstream novel’s probing of character with the whodunit’s ability to puzzle and surprise. Yet there is no comparable build-up for Mr. Symons or Margaret Millar or Charity Blackstock, who are as good in their way as Le Carré. Why these phenomenal sales for only one aspect of the widely variegated “novel of suspense”? Why is everybody suddenly reading spy novels?

There are certain obvious contributory factors; such as President Kennedy’s endorsement of the work of the then only moderately successful Ian Fleming, or the superb promotional job that an enthusiastic publisher performed for “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” But let me venture a more basic guess.

Espionage is a reality closer to the average man than at any previous time in history. The C.I.A. has had far more detailed news coverage than did ever the O.S.S. We are more aware of the spy behind the arras when we read of international affairs, and the reality of espionage presses upon us even more closely than that. Our businesses have their own methods of spying upon each other, and upon us. We know, thanks to George Orwell in prophecy and Vance Packard in recent reportage, that few moments of our lives are inaccessible to someone’s spy. We have, in short, come to accept espionage as part of the certain human condition, and thereby to accept is as a normal part of any kind of fiction.

According to Boucher’s Third Law, the microcosm repeates the macrocosm. Within the spy novel, you will find everything that you find in the novel itself, from extravagant romance to sober realism, form trash to serious literature. And all these aspects are no longer ghettoized as The Suspense Novel: Subdivision X, Espionage. Today, they are subsumed into general fiction, and sell just as they would if they were about–

Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said, “I write about love and money; what else is there?” In this world of 1984 minus 20, make it love, money and espionage.

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

Snobby Wiltons lobster

We’ll hopefully have a more in-depth post on The IPCRESS File tomorrow, but tonight, I need sleep as soon as possible. So let’s zoom out a level and look at our author Len Deighton again, and his interactions with another famed thriller, Ian Fleming. This will be the first in a series of pieces where we compare the two franchises of Palmer & Bond, and examine instances where they “cross over.” Sort of.

To start, I want to cite sections of LeRoy Panek’s The Special Branch; the British Spy Novel, 1890-1980, where Panek discusses what he believes to be the key difference between Deighton and Fleming, their literary heritage:

Both these writers rely, to a large extent, on reproducing mechanical, external elements of the hard-boiled hero without understanding the deeper significance of the figure. Deighton is different. For one thing he does not derive his inspiration from degenerate heirs of the hard-boiled story, like Spillane, as Fleming does. Instead he was lucky enough to start writing late enough to take in Raymond Chandler–a later-comer to the form, writing well into the fifties. Deighton learned much from Chandler. He alludes to him–through Philip Marlowe–in Spy Story, and it is evident that some of Deighton’s habits of description were learned from Chandler, as a passage from An Expensive Place to Die can illustrate:

“Summer rain is cleaner than winter rain. Winter rain strikes hard upon the granite, but summer rain is sibilant soft upon the leaves. The rainstorm pounced hastily like an inexperienced lover, and then as suddenly was gone. The leaves drooped wistfully and the air gleamed with green reflections. It’s easy to forgive a summer rain; like first love, white lies or blarney, there’s no malignity in it.”

Short sentences, similes, personifications, alliterations: this is figurative prose like so many passages in Chandler. In An Expensive Place to Die Deighton also makes a pretty clear comment on the other side of the hard-boiled tradition. Here a windy English writer holds forth in a bar on the subject of James Bond:

“‘But I have always immensely adored violence. His [Bond's] violence is his humanity. Unless you understand that, you understand nothing.’”

Whereupon someone punches the speaker into insensibility with great technique and precision. Only an imbecile or an anthropoid would, this incident says, love violence. Sam Spade does not love it; Marlowe does not love it. Even if deviants like Mike Hammer love violence, Deighton’s hero does not. What counts in the original hard-boiled writers is style, and here Deighton understands Hammett and Chandler better than shoals of smaller fish have. The essence of the hard-boiled story lies in placing a man in a perverse relationship with authority and circumstances. That man’s responses in word, thought and deed mark him off as a hero–as someone from whom readers can learn important things.

I hadn’t yet made the connection to Chandler myself until yesterday, when thriller novelist Jeremy Duns commented that, “Deighton wrote like an angel, and there are single lines in IPCRESS that are more exciting and evocative than whole novels by other writers.” This is also how I feel about Chandler, and I also feel that the shortcomings of The IPCRESS File — the reactionary, sometimes passive narrator who has to explain the holes in the plot at the end — mirror the shortcomings of much of Chandler’s work. But like Duns, I find it easy to overlook these elements in favor of the quality sentence-to-sentence writing.

Scholars of Fleming, including Kinglsey Amis and O.F. Snelling, cite other influences, most frequently Bulldog Drummond, but the difference in influences is still notable.

* * *

In my review of The IPCRESS File, I called the narrator character the opposite of James Bond.  Duns took me to task for this, noting that, “There are as many Bondish elements to the books as there are counters: he loves his food and appreciates other cultures, exotic locations, beautiful women throw themselves at him, gadgets in cars, technical expertise, a feeling of getting the inside scoop on espionage, etc.” With the caveat that I’ve only read one of the Deighton novels so far, I would agree with Jeremy to a point. The Deighton character, I feel, treats these elements more…I hesitate to use the term, but at this hour, I can’t think of another…realistically.

Bond is, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy hero (one critic, I can’t remember who, posited that writing the 007 novels prevented Fleming from going out and attempting to live the fantastic Bond lifestyle himself), and thus cannot veer from the course of the adventure. For instance, while it is clear that Bond appreciates the places he visits during his missions, his appreciation seems to come in the form of a dossier with bullet points — here’s the local history, the relevant landmarks, a handful of observations about the local folk — before he has to go off and shoot someone. The narrator’s enjoyment of, for instance, Adem’s house in Lebanon seems to go deeper. He is taken aback by Adem’s visits to see the animals don’t involve shooting — with either guns or cameras — but later, after a sort of sublime moment staring out at the landscape and listening to the opening bars of Mozart’s Symphony 21, he thinks to donate to Adem’s preservation fund. I’m not sure if the Fleming character, detached and often cruel, is capable of having a sublime moment.

There was a particular passage in IPCRESS that I thought interestingly mirrored a passage from Fleming, when Dalby takes the narrator to lunch:

Dalby didn’t fool about with expenses; we went into Wiltons and settled for the best of everything. The iced Israeli melon was sweet, tender and cold like the blonde waitress. Corrugated iron manufacturers and chinless advertising men shared the joys of our expense-account society with zombi-like debs with Eton-tied uncles. It was a nice change from the sandwich bar in Charlotte Street, where I played a sort of Rugby scrum each lunch-time with only two Ph.D.’s, three physicists and a medical research specialist for company, standing up to toasted bacon sandwich and a cup of stuff that resembles coffee in no aspect but price.

Over the lobster Dalby asked me how things were going in the work on Jay. I told him that it was going just great and I hope someone will tell me what I’m doing some day. I wouldn’t have remembered Thursday at all, apart from the fine lobster salad and carefully-made mayonnaise, if it hadn’t been for what Dalby then said. He poured me a little more champagne and crunching it back into the ice bucket, said, ‘You’re working with the same information that I am. Unless I’m wrong we are moving in from opposite ends to the same conclusion.’ Then he changed the subject.

…Which might be compared to the early chapter in Moonraker where M takes Bond to dinner at the private Blades club. Bond jumps at the opportunity, and is treated to an exquisite meal:

The head steward was already behind Bond’s chair. He placed a broad menu card beside his plate and handed another to M. ‘Blades’ was written in fine gold script across the top. Below there was a forest of print.

“Don’t bother to read through all that,” said M., “unless you’ve got no ideas. One of the first rules of the club, and one of the best, was that any member may speak for any dish, cheap or dear, but he must pay for it. The same’s true today, only the odds are one doesn’t have to pay for it. Just order what you feel like.” He looked up at the steward. “Any of that Beluga caviar left, Porterfield?”

“Yes, sir. There was a new delivery last week.”

“Well,” said M. “Caviar for me. Devilled kidney and a slice of your excellent bacon. Peas and new potatoes. Strawberries in kirsch. What about you, James?”

“I’ve got a mania for really good smoked salmon,” said Bond. Then he pointed down the menu. “Lamb cutlets. The same vegetables as you, as it’s May. Asparagus with Bearnaise sauce sounds wonderful. And perhaps a slice of pineapple.” He sat back and pushed the menu away.

“Thank heaven for a man who makes up his mind,” said M. He looked up at the steward. “Have you got all that, Porterfield?”

“Yes, sir.” The steward smiled. “You wouldn’t care for a marrow bone after the strawberries, sir? We got half a dozen in today from the country, and I’d specially kept one in case you came in.”

“Of course. You know I can’t resist them. Bad for me but it can’t be helped. God knows what I’m celebrating this evening. But it doesn’t often happen. Ask Grimley to come over, would you.”

“He’s here now, sir,” said the steward, making way for the wine-waiter.

“Ah, Grimley, some vodka, please.” He turned to Bond. “Not the stuff you had in your cocktail. This is real pre-war Wolfschmidt from Riga. Like some with your smoked salmon?”

‘Very much,” said Bond.’

“Then what?” asked M. “Champagne? Personally I’m going to have a half-bottle of claret. The Mouton Rothschild ‘34, please, Grimley. But don’t pay any attention to me, James. I’m an old man. Champagne’s no good for me. We’ve got some good champagnes, haven’t we, Grimley? None of that stuff you’re always telling me about, I’m afraid, James. Don’t often see it in England. Taittinger, wasn’t it?”

Bond smiled at M.’s memory. “Yes,” he said, “but it’s only a fad of mine. As a matter of fact, for various reasons I believe I would like to drink champagne this evening. Perhaps I could leave it to Grimley.”

The wine-waiter was pleased. “If I may suggest it, sir, the Dom Perignon ‘46. I understand that France only sells it for dollars, sir, so you don’t often see it in London. I believe it was a gift from the Regency Club in New York, sir. I have some on ice at the moment. It’s the Chairman’s favourite and he’s told me to have it ready every evening in case he needs it.”

Bond smiled his agreement.

“So be it, Grimley,” said M. “The Dom Perignon. Bring it straight away, would you?”

Even here, in the area of gourmet cooking where Deighton and his character are famous, I feel there’s a recognizable difference in the authors’ treatment of the menu. In Fleming’s novel, the food is near-unattainable, and much is made of rarity and ages and dates. In Deighton’s, the narrator recognizes his good fortune and is thankful he’s not eating a bacon sandwich (I also feel that, in addition to utilizing Deighton’s knowledge of cooking, the gourmet tendencies of the narrator are a form of over-compensation stemming from his class issues, but more on that in a later post).

In a way, these areas that Deighton’s character and 007 seemingly have in common actually do more to clearly delineate the differences between the two. But, as I said before, I make these observations with the admission that I’ve only read one book in the Deighton series.

Next time around, we’ll reprint a tongue-in-cheek account of the first meeting between Deighton and Fleming, written by journalist Peter Evans for The Guardian, later reprinted in the book For Bond Lovers Only, and examine reports that Fleming and Deighton discussed establishing their agents as part of the same narrative world.

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

I must admit that I thought we’d have about 20 posts overall in this series, so I’m very delighted that we’re on File 015 and haven’t even gotten to the films yet! I’m also fairly happy that we’ve stayed on schedule, but want to warn you that posts might be delayed or even non-existent over this weekend as my wife and I travel to Chattanooga, TN (home of the famed Choo-Choo, and Rock Mountain!)  to see my wife’s sister get married. I’m taking the notebook PC with me, and let’s keep our fingers crossed that the hotel has a wireless connection, but the real issue might be having time to post.

In any case, let’s proceed with the second of our series on areas where Bond/Palmer and Fleming/Deighton cross-over, shall we? Much of today’s post is taken from an enlightening conversation at the wonderful James Bond fan/news site Commander Bond.net, where, in a forum post, the user Silhouette Man asks the question:

In the 2000 Updated edition of ‘The Bond Files’ by Andy Lane and Paul Simpson, there is a piece which states that Fleming and Deighton had discussed co- ordinating their novels together. Here is the quote from page 394,

“Fleming enjoyed Deighton’s books, and once suggested (perhaps not entirely in jest) that they co-ordinate their books so that Bond was disparaging about ‘Palmer’ and ‘Palmer’ returned the favour at more or less the same time.”

Now I’ve never read this anywhere else and I was wondering whether anyone else at CBn knew any more. In Lycett’s biography it said that when Fleming was ill he returned Deighton’s ‘Funeral in Berlin’ when he was asked to review it.

User Atticus17 kindly obliges by reproducing the essay “Rendezvous with the Man From the IPCRESS File” from the book For Bond Lovers Only (my laziness led to my finding this series of posts — originally, I was just going to type up the account for you all, but I decided to Google to see if someone else had done the work for me!). This was written by Peter Evans, the journalist and friend of Deighton’s whom I’m sure you remember from The Truth About Len Deighton, and who was one of the first to interview Deighton even before the success of The IPCRESS File.

For Bond Lovers Only

He selected a cigarette, placed it in his ebony holder and lit it with a gold lighter. It was all done with the studied rhythm of a man playing for time while thinking of exactly what to say.

“I look forward to meeting this fellow,” Ian Fleming said finally, tilting his head toward the ceiling and gently blowing smoke after his words.

With one finger he pushed aside the curtains of the private room over the restaurant not very far from Tottenham Court Road and looked down into the street.

“Yes, indeed,” he said after another long moment, “it should be a most fascinating encounter. Even perhaps memorable.”

Indeed. For the missing guest was Mr. Len Deighton, the author whose first spy book, The IPCRESS File, had made him the biggest threat to the suave Mr. Fleming and his equally suave hero James Bond since SMERSH.

Deighton’s unnamed agent has been acclaimed by the critics, snapped up by Bond’s own publishers, Jonathan Cape, and signed by the same producers who filmed Doctor No.

What is even more fascinating is that where Mr. Fleming is reputed partly to have modelled Agent 007 on himself, so Deighton’s fumbling, cheapskate hero has more than a touch of his illustrious creator.

Mr. Fleming, who himself nominated The IPCRESS File among the “Books of the Year”, said: “I simply have to meet him, you know. It is important to know the kind of fellow you are up against.”

Some fifteen minutes late, Deighton arrived — an untidy man in one of those 1963 suits with the 1957 price tags. He made it look lumpy. On his cufflinks were colour pictures of Littlehampton. He is a man who looks in a perpetual state of surprise.

“This is a bit posh, isn’t it?” he said, shaking Fleming’s hand. “They very nearly didn’t let me in downstairs.”

Mr. Fleming arranged his face into a bleak smile. “It is rather a pleasant little restaurant,” he said, searching his rival’s face like a map-reader searching for a bearing.

There was the kind of sharp silence that occurs in the first round of a boxing match, when the crowd is waiting for the first punch to be thrown.

Mr. Fleming got up. “My favourite restaurant is Scotts, actually. Almost got arrested there during the war, as a matter of fact. They suspected I was a German spy. Awfully amusing.

“I was working for Intelligence and giving some U-Boat commander a slap-up lunch. The idea was to pump him full of scotch and stuff, then pump him for information. Cost about £25 AND the blighter didn’t talk. Saw right through it, obviously,” Fleming admitted pleasantly.

“Anyway, the waiters heard us yapping away in German and in no time we were surrounded by police. I got a most frightful rocket when I got back to my office.”

Deighton’s head began to rock slowly backwards and forwards, as if mesmerised by Mr. Fleming’s story.

“You were in intelligence yourself, weren’t you?” Mr. Fleming put the question across like an angry schoolmaster who has caught one of his pupils dozing.

“Yes. Air Intelligence,” admitted Deighton.

“I guessed as much,” said Mr. Fleming, a look of satisfaction seeping over his face like a blush. “You get pretty near the knuckle in some parts, I must say. Anyway, I realised you knew what you were talking about — as indeed I do.”

“Your next book,” said Deighton slowly, “is set in Japan.”

“Correct,” said Mr. Fleming, his face a mask. “It’s called You Only Die Twice. I’ve just been to Tokyo actually. Ran over on the old willow pattern route. Very jolly. Sake and kimonos and all that damn bowing amuses me enormously. Ever been to Tokyo?”

“Yes,” said Deighton.

“Fly?”

“BOAC,” said Deighton.

“Pleasant?”

“I was a steward,” said Deighton.

Again that circling, first-round silence. “I have a rotten feeling,” said Deighton moodily, “that my car’s going to be towed away.”

“What do you drive, old boy?” asked Mr. Fleming, perhaps sensing a common bond in cars.

“A beaten up old Volkswagen actually,” said Deighton, adding brightly, “but I’ve installed a telephone. Yours?”

“I’ve just got one of those new Studebaker Avantes. Nought to 60 in 4.5 seconds, 175 miles an hour with four passengers up. Supercharged, of course. I must say I adore it,” said Fleming.

Silence. Then; “You know what we should do?” asked Mr. Fleming suddenly. “We should start a running joke in our books. Like those chaps Crosby and Hope. I’ll get Bond to knock your chap — you really should give him a name, you know — and you can get him to tear the hell out of Bond.”

“Super,” said Deighton. “I’d love to knock Bond. You remind me of him in many ways.”

A thin smile traced across Mr. Fleming’s face. “Really? Well, I do identify myself with him in a few things.”

Mr. Fleming smiled a sad smile. “But of course Bond has a far better digestion than I have, and his prowess with women is considerably greater than mine, unfortunately. Needless to say, he has more guts.”

Deighton asked: “Do you honestly like Bond?”

Mr. Fleming thought about this question for a minute, then: “I began by disliking him intensely. I’ve grown to like him. To be honest, I think your fellow is rather more solid — indeed, Bond is often quite cardboard — but I have put him through so much it would be too disloyal not to like him now.”

It was, as Mr. Fleming predicted, a most fascinating encounter.

The user spynovelfan follows up with an extended selection from An Expensive Place to Die, which we wrote about yesterday:

On a staircase, a wedge of people were embracing, laughing like advertising photos. At the bar, a couple of English photographers were talking in cockney and an English writer was explaining James Bond.

A waiter put four glasses full of ice cubes and a half-bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table before us. ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

The waiter turned away without answering. Two Frenchmen at the bar began to argue with the English writer and a bar stool fell over. The noise wasn’t loud enough for anyone to notice. On the dance floor a girl in a shiny plastic suit was swearing at a man who had burned a hole in it with his cigarette. I heard the English writer behind me say, ‘But I have always immensely adored violence. His violence is his humanity. Unless you understand that you understand nothing.’ He wrinkled his nose and smiled. One of the Frenchmen replied, ‘He suffers in translation.’ The photographer was clicking his fingers in time to the music. ‘Don’t we all?’ said the English writer, and looked around.

Byrd said, ‘Shocking noise.’

‘Don’t listen,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Byrd.

The English writer was saying ‘…a violent Everyman in a violent but humdrum…’ he paused, ‘but humdrum world.’ He nodded agreement to himself. ‘Let me remind you of Baudelaire. There’s a sonnet that begins…’

‘So this bird wants to get out of the car…’ one of the photographers was saying.

‘Speak a little more quietly,’ said the English writer. ‘I’m going to recite a sonnet.’

‘Belt up,’ said the photographer over his shoulder. ‘This bird wanted to get out of the car…’

‘Baudelaire,’ said the writer. ‘Violent, macabre and symbolic.’

‘You leave bollicks out of this,’ said the photographer, and his friend laughed. The writer put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Look my friend…’ The photographer planted a right jab into his solar plexus without spilling the drink he was holding. The writer folded up like a deckchair and hit the floor. A waiter grabbed towards the photographer, but stumbled over the English writer’s inert body.

‘Look here,’ said Byrd, and a passing waiter turned so that the half-bottle of whisky and the four glasses of ice were knocked over. Someone aimed a blow at the photographer’s head. Byrd got to his feet saying quietly and reasonably, ‘You spilled the drink on the floor. Dash me, you’d better pay for it. Only thing to do. Damned rowdies.’ The waiter pushed Byrd violently and he fell back and disappeared among the densely packed dancers. Two or three people began to punch each other. A wild blow took me in the small of the back, but the attacker had moved on. I got both shoulder-blades rested against the nearest piece of wall and braced the sole of my right foot for leverage. One of the photographers came my way, but he kept going and wound up grappling with a waiter. There was a scuffle going on at the top of the staircase, and then violence traveled through the place like a flash flood. Everyone was punching everyone, girls were screaming and the music seemed to be even louder than before. A man hurried a girl along the corridor past me. ‘It’s those English that make the trouble,’ he complained.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You look English.’

‘No, I’m Belgian,’ I said. He hurried after the girl…

Silhouette Man returns with a bit from The Len Deighton Companion (I’m still waiting for this one to arrive via inter-library loan):

I recently got the hold of a copy of THE LEN DEIGHTON COMPANION by Edward Milward-Oliver and in his interview with Deighton, he mentions that HORSE UNDER WATER was published by Jonathan Cape. Deighton responds, “That’s right. And that enraged some people, who claimed I was now going to be trained as the successor to Ian Fleming, who Cape also published.”

And Atticus returns with a rare photo of Deighton, Fleming, and cover designer Raymond Hawkey who worked on both of their novels (more on him later this week!):

Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and Raymond Hawkey

Lots of nice historical background today, much more than I would have had to offer, had I not been so lazy! My thanks go to all who uploaded this info in the first place at Commander Bond!

Next up in this series: When Deighton wrote Bond.

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

John Tomlin, of the no-longer-updated-but-still-useful Unofficial Len Deighton Page, shared scans of this interesting article from Playboy, March 1966, with The Len Deighton Discussion Group on Yahoo! (where you can find the original PDFs in the file section). Written by Len Deighton, it’s an interesting look at the “spy boom,” which Deighton calls phony, the circumstances created by the Bond phenomenon, a brief bit on the creation of The IPCRESS File, and a lamentation of the wave of spy shows that Deighton feels are devoid of talent.

It’s an interesting article, and it seems to me that Deighton is working through his feelings on what role Fleming and Bond may have played in his own success, and attempting to absolve himself of guilt for inspiring (through his own spy successes) other works in the “spy boom” that he feels aren’t up to snuff.  It also may be interesting to note that in May of 1966, The Avengers was just hitting its stride in the Emma Peel years, and The Prisoner had yet to debut, although The Man From UNCLE had gone downhill in its second season. The sequel to 1965’s IPCRESS File was, I believe, currently filming, debuting in December of ‘66.

Playboy May 1966

WHY DOES MY ART GO BOOM?
as the spy craze continues to spiral skyward, the author of “the ipcress file” files a personal report on the phenomenon

article By LEN DEIGHTON

What is a spy-book boom? I don’t think I like the sound of it. Does it mean that a lot of people are using the same subject matter? Then when the hell is the boy-meets-girl boom going to end?

Does it mean that books on this boom kick get sold whether they are good, bad or indifferent? Don’t expect me to get enthusiastic about that one.

Does it mean that readers are instructed to buy books that are booming? Getting warmer. Land booms are the harmonious conjunction of sucker and speculator, so why not book booms? I’ll tell you why not: Book buyers are book readers and book readers are no suckers. I’m a book reader.

There is nothing new about spying. There is nothing new about writing of it. Xenophon and Caesar wrote of it. The Bible perhaps owes a large part of its high sales to its spy stories. Other writers have tried their hand from time to time. Conrad, Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim all had a deft touch. John Buchan showed how spies could serve imperialism when the going grew too shallow for a gunboat. Eric Ambler threw an idealistic left at the fascists of the Thirties and Graham Greene wrote some of the best of all between fulfilling his contract with God.

It was Maugham’s agent Ashenden, in the opening paragraphs of The Hairless Mexican, who set a portentous note, however, when he reported back to his intelligence chief R.;

“‘Do you like macaroni?’ said R.

“‘What do you mean by macaroni?’ answered Ashenden. ‘It is like asking me if I like poetry. I like Keats and Wordsworth and Verlaine and Goethe. When you say macaroni, do you mean spaghetti, tagliatelli, rigatoni, vermicelli, fettucini, tufali, farfalli, or just macaroni?’

“‘Macaroni,’ replied R., a man of few words.

“‘I like all simple things, boiled eggs, oysters and caviare, truite au blue, grilled salmon, roast lamb (the saddle by preference), cold grouse, treacle tart and rice pudding. But of all simple things the only one I can eat day in and day out, not only without disgust but with the eagerness of an appetite unimpaired by excess, is macaroni.’

“‘I am glad of that because I want you to go down to Italy.’”

R. Was a character who came before M, but apart from superficial appeal, is there much resemblance between Ambler, Buchan, Conrad, Fleming and Greene? There is a certain pre-Nuremberg-trial readiness to shrug off irresponsible behavior on the plea of orders. Indeed, Bond’s unswerving loyalty earned him an accolade from America’s extreme political right. But did Fleming do anything that could detonate a boom?

He exploited kinky sex and doll-like women. He enthroned the WASP when the WASP’s role in the world was a little shaky. But Fleming’s importance to the business world was the way he wrote always about what he called the serial character–James Bond–pursued a tested format and made a great deal of money. Fleming boomed.

It’s a well-known fact that people don’t make money because they are clever, highly trained or brave. They make it either because they are lucky or because they have a secret.

The secret-hunters pawed through Fleming’s writings, as intent as cryptologists. They are still doing it. “Spies,” they pronounced, “that’s Fleming’s secret. Spies make money. Spies boom.” In Fleming’s case they were right, but before the first Bond film, who had Fleming earmarked for boomsville?

In the spring of 1950 I was working on my first book–IPCRESS File. I was earning enough money as an artist to write anything I chose. I chose a spy novel, as I still do. I liked to have a problem or enigma that could follow the action of the book, but I wanted the book to be ragged and untidy, as life is. I wanted the characterizations and the dialog to control the enigma, rather than the other way round as had been the case with the detective novels of the Thirties, which had become puzzles rather than stories. Above all, I was interested in the permutations of deceit and mistake.

Too many people in the fiction I had read told the whole truth all the time and never seemed to make a mistake of judgment. I decided to write a first-person narrative in which the narrator would lie to anyone if it suited his purpose. This narrator would finally make such an error of judgment that his life would be saved by a man (Ross) who he had continually told readers was a fool. I dismissed the detective story because I didn’t know enough about the regular police force, and chose a secret-agent format so that I could use the political background that interested me. My hero was bespectacled, low-salaried and slightly overweight. There was no sex interest to speak of. It owed a debt to Chandler, but was inspired by Beat the Devil, an old Bogart-Lorre film which, prodding at greed, fakery and the English class system, had produced terror and belly laughs. At the box office, it boomed.

Autumn 1962 was the publication date of IPCRESS File and the opening of the Dr. No film. The critics were generous to me and, although it sounds unbelievable today, somewhat hostile to the Bond film. The income from IPCRESS was adequate by my standards, but Dr. No buried the box office in gold. It was an attractive sound that caught the ear of a goodly number of otherwise unmusical people.

Harry Saltzman bought the IPCRESS film rights. He said, “A lot of people are going to be after your book because of the success of Dr. No,” adding, “and I’m the only producer who, you can be certain, won’t make an imitation Bond film from your book.” Saltzman, of course, had options on the other Fleming properties and so didn’t need to. The news of the film-rights sale brought more Fleming comparisons, and when I changed publishers, so that Fleming and I both had the same one, some people–not including Fleming–were enraged. Donald McLachlan, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, went into print to say that he deplored the way I had been “…brought into the select stable of Jonathan Cape where Mr. Fleming was the first thriller writer to be trained for the big circulation stakes.” I was, it seems, “…being coached by Mr. Fleming for the succession.”

In the autumn of 1963, my second book, Horse Under Water, was published and Saltzman bought the film rights of that, too. There was more conjecture in the press. “Out-Bonds Bond” and “Anti-Bond,” they said. Out of curiosity, I read Fleming for the first time. I could see no connection whatoever, but no one was asking me.

Fleming’s Bond was a proved success, the industry read the entrails. Famous ex-novelists began to write literary critiques about Fleming’s meaning. But the big word on the book jacket was going to be Bond.

Publishers reshuffled their lists, old reviews were scanned to find comparisons with Bond. Sci-fi was out and spy-fi was in. If Fleming was going to be deified, then Buchan could be anthologized. Reprints were artfully retitled to include words like, “spy,” “secret agent” and “espionage.”

In the autumn of 1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold appeared, its film rights sold even before publication. It climbed onto the best-seller list and stayed there a history-making period of time. The last stragglers were converted. People who had found Fleming’s work rubbish began to see it as fun. Publications that had ignored Le Carré limped belatedly into print with reviews that saw his promise.

It was settled, then: Add up Le Carré, Fleming and Deighton, divide by three and the answer is spies. There was no time for long-term tests and, like Thalidomide, the spy formula was stirred hastily and a long-suffering public told to open its throat. But the public didn’t. The most interesting thing about the spy boom is to what extent it hasn’t been accepted.

Spy scent, spy trousers, film rights and series contracts. The book ads in the Times grew larger and larger, booksellers were faced with bewildering lists of books, all of them guaranteed to home in to the best-seller list. The flacks were inserting the zeros and omitting the options so that the entertainment industry seemed to have found what it had always been looking for–a substitute for talent. But of this wave of spy-boomery that hit the beaches complete with local money and pay-war units, how many reached the finish line? One would expect the best-seller list to be riddled with spy books by now. If they are there, they are hiding behind strange titles. The assault, however, continues despite heavy casualties. When Funeral in Berlin went onto the list, the combat troops were given new heart. Mr. Conrad Knickerbocker, writing in Life magazine, said, “…the Great American Washed at last have a folk hero of their very own.” He felt that all the “new-style thrillers” needed was a bitter hero and Berlin as a locale. Mr. Knickerbocker felt that they were appearing at “the rate of one per day.”

From the other side of the counter it didn’t seem so easy. Coward-McCann (Le Carré’s publisher) growled, “If it was as simple as that we’d all be retired to our yachts months ago.”

Considering the very high percentage of spy novels being published, it is remarkable how few ever do anything. Perhaps there is no magic way. Perhaps publishers, like mushroom pickers, just have to know enough to make their own choices. Perhaps the public is doing just that–boom, phony boom or no boom at all.

But if the best-seller list has been the scene of a fine defensive actoin, the small screen has long since been overwhelmed. It’s no coincidence that the American TV industry was chosen as ground zero for the spy-boom blast. Its programs ranged from A to D, and here was a chance to narrow the choice. The ad agencies–masters of the wishful think–relished the thought of a “spy trend.” A trend made the agency role important, a trend had changed often enough to keep the cash jingling, trends meant that some agencies could be trendsetters. And trendsetters could soften up teh ground way before the next trend was announced. “Spes,” the sibilants splashed across the polished-mahogany board rooms. “Give me a child of five and tomorrow we will have eliminated those troublesome writers altogether.”

The sands of the great writerless desert that is U.S. TV stirred.

Was it to be “Secret Gunn” or “77 Sunset Spy”? What’s the difference, the same gay rogues that outwitted the guttural villains of yesterday against back-projection Bermuda, two flats and a practical door, are there still, but now they are part of the spy boom.

The phony spy boom is another attempt to relegate humans to the role of cogs. Writers are not cogs. They are not even, although some reviewers see it otherwise, mutations and subdivisions of other writers. Nor is a book a refrigerator. A house that contains a Bellow can still use a Mailer. Plenting of room for Kipling as well as Eliot. Time for Bach and time for Beatle. If the industry succeeds in selling fashionable trends instead of using and paying writers, it will do so. The skilled painstaking publishers will go to the wall and hordes of mediocrity will eliminate writers in favor of packaging. If you think I am a vested interest, you’re right. If you think it wouldn’t be so bad, switch on your TV.

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

As our friends at the HMSS Weblog point out, today is the 45th anniversary of the passing of author Ian Fleming. As we’ve noted here before, any discussion of 60s spies starts with Fleming and his creation, James Bond. Though others (Greene, Buchan, Ambler) before him wrote espionage novels, it was the popularity of OO7 that led to creations as widely disparate as Alphaville, The Prisoner and Danger: Diabolik entering the annals of popular culture.

Whatever one’s view on Bond, it cannot be denied that Fleming has a place in the conversation. Thus our continuing discussion of Fleming during a series devoted to Len Deighton. Today’s post is short, but I wanted to share a photo that I’ve…well, I pretty much swiped it from our friend Rob of The Deighton Dossier, after he posted it at the In Appreciation of Len Deighton Facebook group.

Fleming and Deighton from Funeral in Berlin slip-on

I tried to clean up the picture a little (I probably made it look worse), but if you want to see the original, please do join the Facebook group and have a look around. Rob says that this photograph was taken at the luncheon arranged by Peter Evans that we discussed previously. This blurb comes from a 1/3 wraparound on the first edition of Funeral in Berlin. From what I gather, this is an extremely rare marketing piece, and we’re thankful for Rob for sharing it!