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As a long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area I am most certainly a long-time fan of Caen's. These snippets were first class, @Revelator! Thanks as always...
You're welcome as always! I regret that by the time I moved the Bay Area Caen had passed away. I should buy a collections of his columns someday. I worked as a columnist for my college newspaper and it was tremendous fun, so Caen surely had one of the best jobs in the world. I'm reading through Fleming's Atticus columns right now and hope to post a few excerpts after this thread has run its course.
By Ian Fleming
Have you murdered anyone lately? All right. How do you know you haven’t?
Watching the Halford-Hewitt Tournament the other day, I remembered my first visit to Deal twenty-five years ago and the murder, or at least culpable homicide, in which I participated.
My accomplices and I, tenderloins in golf and life, stood on the first tee. Halfway down the fairway, moving slowly and hitting the ball erratically, were two elderly gentlemen. One of the caddies said: “You’ll never get through them. That’s Captain Smith and Colonel Jones. They never let anyone through.”
For five holes, despite first courteous requests, then unheeded shouts of “Fore!” and finally mild bombardment, we could only creep forward like angry snails. Finally, at No. 6, Colonel Jones sliced into the shingle and there they both were, scrabbling for their one sphere amidst a million others—but still not waving us through. We played that hole as if it was a fast hockey match, calling sarcastic “Thank you, sirs” as we sprinted past.
When, later, we came out from luncheon for our second round, we expressed the fervent hope that we would not find the Colonel and the Captain ahead of us again.
“No, you won’t that,” said my caddie.
“Why not?”
“Colonel Jones is dead!”
“Good heavens, what happened?”
“He was that mad after this morning, sir, when he finished his round he got into his car and drove off like crazy. When he got to the sharp turn on to the esplanade he stamped on the accelerator by mistake for the brake and went over into the sea.”
As certainly as if with a gun, we had slain Colonel Jones.
To be serious, people, just as unwittingly, are killing their neighbours every day all over the world—by an act of bad driving, after which, perhaps far behind, there is the distant crash of a collision; by blowing germs into people’s faces; by bathing and mountain-climbing “accidents” for which, however remotely, they were the indirect cause. And then there is the slow homicide, by cruelty, neglect, hate, lack of charity.
To go back to the beginning, how do you know you haven’t?
True and Blue
I have no connection with the company (except, that is, for using their products for the past thirty years) so I can’t be accused of payola if I reveal that Gillettes have a splendid new razor blade—the Extra-Blue—coming on the market in a few days’ time. Indeed I almost severed relations with them recently when I found them responsible for squandering some of my small stock of virtue.
All those years, after shaving, I had meticulously washed my razor and carefully cleaned the blade, sneering at the unkempt razors in other people’s bathrooms. Not long ago, I began frequently to cut myself shaving. Reluctantly, because I hate the noise they make, I consulted my chemist about electric razors. He asked me if I had recently changed houses—as in fact I had—and suggested that probably the water in the new house was much harder than in my old. (This turned out to be the solution.) He also asked suspiciously if I cleaned the razor blade after use.
“Of course,” I said proudly.
“Well, you shouldn’t. You blunt the blade. You should just rinse the razor under the tap.”
I was, and still am, aghast at the oceans of virtuous diligence I have wasted because this vital piece of intelligence (confirmed by Gillettes) was excluded from my education. A few printed words by the bewhiskered patriarch on those packets would have saved me thirty years of doing dutifully, laboriously, the right thing—and being utterly wrong!
No Medals
A murrain on the Governor and Company of the Bank of England for slaughtering our pound notes—and so soon after slaying our beautiful fivers. A murrain also on the Big Five, to whom I understand the new design was submitted, and a murrain re-doubled on the Treasury, who lord it over the Bank when it suits them but now publicly disown responsibility for the Bank’s vandalism.
I personally believe that it is nothing but an act of self-aggrandisement by the Bank of England. Not only has she given herself a type several points larger, but she has managed to get her own name on the new notes something like 300 times instead of only twice on the old bit of lettuce.
Only two aspects of the new design commend themselves—the smaller size of the note, slightly more commensurate with its purchasing power, and the “how-dare-you!” expression on the face of Her Majesty the Queen.
Scrambled Ego
I write thrillers whose “hero” is a secret agent called James Bond. Not long ago I was invited to play golf for an Old Etonian side against the school. My young opponent was called Ian Bond. Amused by the coincidence, I asked him if he had ever heard of a man called James Bond. “Oh yes,” he said politely. “That's my uncle. He lives in Essex.”
Anyway, people were killing other people all the time, all over the world. People were using their motor cars to kill with. They were carrying infectious diseases around, blowing microbes in other people's faces, leaving gas-jets turned on in kitchens, pumping out carbon monoxide in closed garages. How many people, for instance, were involved in manufacturing H-bombs, from the miners who mined the uranium to the shareholders who owned the mining shares? Was there any person in the world who wasn't somehow, perhaps only statistically, involved in killing his neighbour?
We're all murderers then, though some of us are more murderous than others.
Miscellaneous thought: Ian Bond certainly knew of more than one man called James Bond after 1964!
By Ian Fleming
The Fourth of June. By David Benedictus. (Blond. 18s.)
I don’t think the old music-hall gag is inappropriate. In this brilliant first novel Mr Benedictus has swallowed his public school life and regurgitated it because some of its bones stuck in his throat.
It was inevitable that before long we should have an angry young Old Etonian, and Etonians, wincing as they will beneath the author’s lash, will at least admit that the cane is being wielded by a supremely talented hand.
Perhaps The Fourth of June should have been reviewed by one of the author's own generation. The last book on Eton I read, apart from the scintillating fragments by Connolly and Orwell, was One of Us, a romantic novel in verse by Gilbert Frankau, some thirty years ago. To older generations of Etonians, Mr Benedictus’s bubbling, steaming brew of adolescent life, peppered with the á la mode four-letter words, will be almost unrecognisable. But only almost, because beneath the author’s vicious brush-strokes the ancient brickwork, the remembered totems and taboos come through, often with exquisite brilliance.
Briefly, the story is of Scarfe, a grammar-school boy bent and finally broken by the snobbery, sadism and sexuality (hetero-, homo-, and auto-) which, in the Benedictan view, are the devils in the machine of an Eton education, and this theme, for a man with as sharp a pen as the author’s, is, of course, a natural.
Knowing nothing of the strains and stresses suffered by the modern Scarfes beneath the weight of Eton and its customs, it is difficult for an older Etonian not to argue that in his day the psychologically halt and lame boys also went to the wall, and he might complain, I think legitimately, that the author has outstripped the bounds of truth in laying Scarfe’s downfall to the three S’s mentioned above.
I cannot, for instance, swallow the Bishop with his militant religiosity combined with voyeurism. I do not believe in the sadism of Defries, Captain of the House, in the strangulation of the hero’s pet bird, nor in the pusillanimity and downright venality of the housemaster and the headmaster (in a foreword Mr Benedictus makes plain what is obviously true, that none of his characters have any relation to any living person) when faced with blackmail by a boy’s mother who finally pays off the housemaster with her body.
These, and many other incidents, however brilliantly described—an elder boy who hires out his younger brother is a sharp and disagreeable case in point—are sheer caricature, and to give poor Scarfe festering wounds which sent him to the sanatorium after being tanned by the Captain of the House as a punishment for a breach of the rules, which both culprits could have explained, is, to this former target of cane and birch, incredible.
And was it really necessary to be so much involved in the angry swim as to need to direct a harsh side-kick at Royalty?
But these are criticisms of a reader who was fascinated by one of the most brilliant first novels since the war, written with rapier wit, acute observation and a perceptive eye for each of the lesser characters. The style is sharp and professional (though Mr Benedictus will kindly write out “éminences grises”—page 21—a hundred times) and the whole devastating package is embellished by the Jacket of the Year.
We shall hear more of Mr. Benedictus, so I informed myself about him. He is 23, the son of the managing director of a famous London store, and he was Captain of his House at Eton. Then came Balliol and the State University of Iowa to learn play-writing . He is now with the B.B.C.
Which of these institutions will bend next to the harsh block?
The reason Ian Fleming reviewed this novel apparently was its "Jacket of the Year" by none other than Richard Chopping, Fleming's favorite Bond book cover artist:
For more information, consult the article "Blessed by Fleming, Adorned by Chopping – ‘The Fourth of June’".
My crude guess is that Chopping asked Fleming to review The Fourth of June as a favor, and though Fleming hated the novel's portrait of Eton and said so, he sweetened his review with some blurbable praise ("one of the most brilliant first novels since the war").
Interested potential readers should be informed that the most recent reprint of the book dispenses with Chopping's cover. Speaking only for myself, I've never been crazy about Chopping's trompe-l'œil book covers, even for the Bond novels.
by Ian Fleming
I have various qualifications for writing an introduction to this series of distinguished and highly entertaining essays.
First of all, I invented the idea of the series when, a couple of years ago, I was still a member of the Editorial Board of the London Sunday Times. This Board meets every Tuesday to comment on the issue of the previous Sunday, discuss the plans for the next issue and put forward longer-term projects.
It is quite a small Board of seven or eight heads of departments—I was Foreign Manager at the time—together with the Editor and the Proprietor, Mr. Roy Thomson, and we are all good friends, though at this weekly meeting, beneath the surface of our friendliness, lurk all the deadly sins with the exception of gluttony and lust. Each one of us has pride in our department of the paper; many of us are covetous of the editorial chair; most are envious of the bright ideas put forward by others; anger comes to the surface at what we regard as unmerited criticism, and sloth, certainly in my case, lurks in the wings.
The same pattern is probably followed at all executive meetings in all branches of business. When someone else puts up a bright idea, however useful or profitable it may be to the business concerned, traces at least of Envy, Anger and Covetousness will be roused in his colleagues. Yet, on the occasion when I put forward this particular "bright" idea for the future, I seem to remember nothing but approbation and a genial nodding of heads.
The project was outside my own sphere of action on the paper and I heard nothing more of it until I had left the Sunday Times to concentrate on writing thrillers centered round a member of the British Secret Service called James Bond. So I cannot describe what troubles the Literary Editor ran into in his endeavours to marry the Seven Deadly Sins to seven appropriate authors. So far as I can recall, the marriages I myself had suggested were closely followed, except that I had suggested Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge to write on the theme of Anger on the grounds that he is such an extremely angry man. In the event, as you will see, Mr W.H. Auden was the brilliant choice.
My next claim to introduce these essays was my suggestion to Mr. Lawrence Hughes, a friend of mine and a Director of William Morrow & Co., that he should publish them in a book. Usually when one makes brilliant suggestions to a publisher, a dull glaze comes-over his eyes and nothing happens. But in this case Larry Hughes was enthusiastic and, despite all kinds of copyright problems, energetically pursued my suggestion and gathered these seven famous English authors together between hard covers—no mean feat if you know anything about copyright and literary agents.
So you might think I could justifiably allow myself a modest indulgence in the deadly sin of Pride. You would be mistaken. I have read and re-read these essays with pleasure and profit, but their moral impact upon me has been uncomfortable. To be precise and truthful, the critical examination of these famous sins by some of the keenest brains of today has led me to the dreadful conclusion that in fact all these ancient sins, compared with the sins of today, are in fact very close to virtues.
To run through the list. I have always admired the Pride of Dame Edith Sitwell, the pride which, with her proudful brothers, has carried this remarkable literary family through battles of opinion and taste reaching back to my youth.
The Covetousness of Cyril Connolly, which he takes off so brilliantly in his piece of fiction, is one of his most endearing qualities and he would be a smaller and less interesting man without it.
The Gluttony for life, food, drink and women of Patrick Leigh-Fermor are the essence of his tremendous zest for everything. Lust? If Christopher Sykes is lustful, may he, and I for the matter of that, long remain so.
Envy has its ugly sides, but if I, as a second son amongst four, had not been envious of my older brother and his achievements I would not have wished all my life to try and emulate him. As for Anger, surely we all need more rather than less of it to combat the indifference, the "I'm all right, Jack" attitudes, of today.
Of all the seven, only Sloth in its extreme form of accidia, which is a form of spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy, so brilliantly examined by Evelyn Waugh, has my wholehearted condemnation, perhaps because in moments of despair I have seen its face.
How drab and empty life would be without these sins, and what dull dogs we all would be without a healthy trace of many of them in our make up! And has not the depiction of these sins and their consequences been the yeast in most great fiction and drama? Could Shakespeare, Voltaire, Balzac, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy have written their masterpieces if humanity had been innocent of these sins? It is almost as if Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt and Van Gogh had been required to paint without using the primary colours.
The truth, of course, is that generally speaking these Seven Deadly Sins were enumerated by monks for monks, and one can easily see how mischievous and harmful they could be within a monastery.
We do not live in a monastery, but in a great pulsating ant heap, and this brings me back to the moral confusion into which I have been thrown by these essays and which amounts to feeling that there are other and deadlier sins which I would like to see examined by authors of equal calibre in a companion volume to this.
I have made a list of these Seven Deadlier Sins which every reader will no doubt wish to amend, and these are my seven: Avarice, Cruelty, Snobbery, Hypocrisy, Self-righteousness, Moral Cowardice and Malice. If I were to put these modern seven into the scales against the ancient seven I cannot but feel that the weight of the former would bring the brass tray crashing down.
But is this loose thinking? Could it perhaps be argued that if we are free of the ancient seven we shall not fall victim to their modern progeny? I personally do not think so, but it would need better brains than mine and a keener sense of theological morality than I possess to pursue the argument. As a man in the street, I can only express my belief that being possessed of the ancient seven deadly sins one can still go to heaven, whereas to be afflicted by the modern variations can only be a passport to hell.
And by the same token, what about the Seven Deadly Virtues?
What about the anal-eroticism which the psychologists tell us lies at the base of Frugality? How much is Charity worth when it springs from self-interest? Is political acumen a virtue as practised by the Communists? What hell Sociability can be! Where is the line to be drawn between Deference and, not to use a more vulgar, hyphenated word, Sycophancy? Neatness in excess becomes pathological, so does Cleanliness. How often is Chastity a cloak for frigidity?
But I have held you for too long from these wonderful, and each in its different way exciting, essays and I must at all costs avoid that deadliest of all sins, ancient or modern, a sin which is surely more durable than any of those I have enumerated—that of being a Bore.
Fleming hoped his Seven Deadlier sins would be "examined by authors of equal calibre in a companion volume to this." 57 years later he got his wish...sort of.
At my suggestion, the website Artistic Licence Renewed has run a series of article on Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins, to examine how they apply to the Bond books and whether Fleming or Bond were guilty of them. It would have been impossible to assemble "authors of equal calibre" (especially since I was part of the new team), but the results are a worthy examples of literary criticism, in my obviously biased view.
The master page for the entire series is here. And here is the roster of Ian Fleming's Seven Deadlier Sins:
AVARICE, by Wesley Britton
HYPOCRISY, by Edward Biddulph
SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, by Michael May
MORAL COWARDICE, by Benjamin Welton
MALICE
CRUELTY
SNOBBERY
The last three sins were written by me. I had originally intended to write only "Malice," but had to pinch-hit after some authors became unable to work on the project. "Snobbery" was began by my editor @007InVT -- he deserves co-credit but is too modest to give it to himself.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about the Fleming's Deadlier Sins. If you think we've missed any examples of them, please say so!
By Ian Fleming
An essential item in my ‘Desert Island’ library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me each Friday by a well-trained albatross. If forced to produce some reason for my affection for the journal, I would lamely say that I am nearly always interested by its front page article, by the letters, although there are not enough of them, and, being myself a book collector, by its back page of bibliophily. But, less lamely, I would praise the anonymity of its writers and reviewers which surely lies at the root of the unshackled verdicts that are, sometimes to the point of splendidly savage denunciation, to be found in the T.L.S.
Not long ago I was flying over the Nevada Desert on my way from Los Angeles to Chicago. It was one leg of a lunatic journey round the world in thirty days writing about its thrilling cities for the Sunday Times. My mail had caught up with me at Los Angeles and it included two issues of The Times Literary Supplement. In contrast with the mushy infant food of the American newspapers and magazines that had been my daily fare since arriving in America, I cannot describe the thrill of excitement with which I read a particularly devastating review of Miss Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed: I remember that the slashing broadside made me almost lightheaded with pleasure.
All this is to explain the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book which would not have occurred had I not, as a matter of course, read a leading article which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of April 14th, 1961, and some of which, by permission, I now reprint.
Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among ‘lost’ books, this short novel by the shadowy, unsung Hugh Edwards, and now, fortified by The Times Literary Supplement, I returned to the attack. The reply was unexpected. Yes, they would do it—if I would write an introduction. I will not discuss here my mixed reactions to this suggestion, but one thing was clear the rebirth of this book now lay, rightly or wrongly, with me. I had only to say "Fly again, little bird", and it would fly. So, of course, I accepted and asked Capes for any material they had about the book and the author. The result was extremely meagre, but among the yellowing scraps, mostly ecstatic reviews, there was one treasure—an introduction by James Agate to the author’s next book Helen Between Cupids. I cannot remember much of this or any other of Hugh Edwards’s books, but what Agate has to say about All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is so apt to the theme of what I now write that, risking the criticism that all my words are other people’s, I must repeat here some of what Mr. Agate had to say twenty-five years ago.
The rest of the introduction to Helen need not concern us. Suffice it to say that, despite rave reviews when All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s was first published in 1933, and despite Mr. Agate's powerful reminder in 1935, it took more than four years for the modest edition of fifteen hundred to be sold. The author earned £31.3s. and the publisher barely covered his costs, having rashly spent over £50 on advertising.
In 1937 the book was reset and republished in the "New Library" edition at 2s. 6d. (Edwards was in good company here. "The New Library" included Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and O’Flaherty’s The Informer) and this edition of a further three thousand sold out in seven years, earning £43.17s.9d. for the author. Edwards’s total reward for his "little masterpiece" thus amounted to just under £7 a year over eleven years, to which was later to be added a modest windfall of ten guineas when the little book was published in a Services paperback edition by Guild Books in 1943...
Hugh Edwards died in 1952 at the age of 74. At first I could find out nothing about him except, from his elderly sister, the widow of an Admiral, the following bare bones. He was born in Gibraltar in 1878 of a Naval family, was educated privately and then at Sandhurst whence he joined the West India Regiment and saw service mostly in the West Indies and West Africa. After twelve years in the army, he was invalided out and retired to his sister’s cottage in East Prawle in Devon. A forlorn attempt to render service in the First World War resulted only in a brief spell as an officer of the garrison of Cork. His health proved quite unequal to military duty and he returned to seclusion.
Encouraged by the success of former contributions to his regimental magazine (for which, incidentally, he had designed the cover) he had set about writing professionally, but it was some twenty years before Capes accepted his first novel, Sangoree. This was followed by the present book, then by Crack of Doom (Jonathan Cape, 1934), Helen Between Cupids (Jonathan Cape, 1935), and Macaroni (Geoffrey Bles, 1938). After that, silence! Hobbies: painting, polo, bridge and chess.
With these scraps of biography my researches had come to a full stop when, by chance, Commander and Mrs. E. J. King-Bull heard of my interest in Edwards and swam into my ken.
Commander E. J. King-Bull (who is, incidentally, a descendant of the character said to be the original ‘John Bull’ of old England) is a well-known writer and producer for the B.B.C. and has, with his wife, close connections with members of the Edwards family, notably the Leonards who, as children, sat at the feet of Hugh Edwards and listened to their uncle’s stories.
King-Bull was a great admirer of Edwards and, enjoying All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s as much as I do, turned the book into a radio play and persuaded the B.B.C. to allow him to produce it in the Third Programme in 1950. The play was conceived as a tribute not only to the memory of Hugh Edwards but also to the memory of King-Bull’s friend, the late Captain R. F. Leonard, D.S.C., R.N., from whom King-Bull had heard so much about Edwards. The play was a tremendous success, and was broadcast four times.
From what King-Bull told me it is clear that a whole book could be written about Hugh Edwards, but I have insufficient space here to do more than mortar together a few of the loose stones I have already put on display.
Having been at Sandhurst myself, and being thus able to imagine the regimental snobbery that must have permeated the place around about 1900, I was surprised that Edwards had joined the West India Regiment. But apparently about that time his parents lost most of their money and he had to accept a commission in an unfashionable regiment to protect his shallow purse. He was rewarded by seeing the West Indies in their last rip-roaring days, and his memories of the barbaric splendor—a compound of blood, champagne and pretty quadroons— were to inspire all he wrote, culminating in the Kingston earthquake which features in his Crack of Doom. To Hugh Edwards the cataclysm may well have seemed to presage the vanishing of the only era in which he was to live any other than a kind of ghostly existence.
It was the custom in those days for one battalion of the regiment to alternate between the Caribbean and Sierra Leone, and it was while exploring the hinterland of Sierra Leone that Edwards contracted blackwater fever, as a result of which he was invalided out of the army with a meagre pension.
With this, and with his sister to keep house, he retired to the tiny fisherman's cottage in
East Prawle in which he lived the life of an eighteenth-century recluse, confining himself to one attic in which there was nothing but a large bed and hundreds of books. It was at about this time that he inherited from a relative, who had been in his day a West Indian planter, a stack of old documents and diaries of the eighteenth century in which Edwards immersed himself to that extent of total rapport that emerges almost supernaturally in the story from which I am holding you.
It is interesting, perhaps, that he should have been stationed for a while at Cork, that fair Atlantic seaport which, in the heyday of eighteenth-century trade, had had long associations with the West Indies, and which forms part of the back-cloth to more than one of the novels.
At Prawle he lived the remote life of his imagination for many years, reading, writing and composing albums of illustrated nonsense rhymes for the numerous nephews and nieces and cousins who came there for the holidays. One catches a glimpse of the man from the fact that, as I am told, he began the draft of an autobiography, never to see the light of day, by addressing in affectionate gallantry a bevy of his charming nieces and their friends.
In his Edwardian youth he had been, by all accounts, a young blade of tremendous dash and virility and with a zest for all the wine of life, but one of the terrible side-effects of blackwater fever is that it rids a man of all appetite for these things, and there is no doubt that the romantic sexuality and the background of high life to All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s are sentimental memories of the young rake-hell he had once been.
Perhaps also the poignancies of this story, which so pierce the heart, are in part tears shed for his brief youth. But these and other secrets of this strange and in some curious sense ghostly figure have gone to his grave with him and will, I fancy, never be disturbed.
I, at any rate, have come to the end of my brief researches into the story of the man who wrote All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s and it is now time for him to speak in his own strange and beautiful words.
Note: I read All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s several years ago and must confess that it didn't make much of an impression on me. But you can decide its merits for yourself, since the book is available for free online at the Internet Archive.
Interestingly, Fleming's opening line about The Times Literary Supplement was actually quoted in ads within the TLS itself during the 2008 Fleming centenary. Part of the only article Fleming wrote for the TLS, 'Questions of Colour' [1954] (on race in Jamaica) was also reprinted there for his centenary, and @Revelator posted it here in full a while ago.
Ironically, the TLS has rarely been complimentary about Fleming--its reviews of Lycett's biography and Harling's memoir have in fact been downright hostile towards their subjects.
Oh thank goodness - me neither. Don't tell Mr Artistic Licence Renewed.
I knew a Benedictus at university, and he too is now a writer. I bet they're related.
I lightly broached the subject with him, but we moved on to other topics! I can't say my taste is in covers is great though, since the Berkley editions are still my favorites.
The Honoured Society by Norman Lewis (Collins 30s)
By Ian Fleming
The Mafia, the Chinese Tongs and the assassination Apparat of the Soviet K.G.B., great grandspawn of the TCHECKA, are the only deeply evil phantoms of the past that still haunt the world. I have left out America gangsterdorm, for all its many-sided horror, because it is a mere stripling in the sudden-and-slow-death markets and only gained its “official quotation” in this century (unless we count the rough house “Tweed Mob” of the 1870s which, I dare say, was pretty bad news in Keystone Cop days ). The others have been buying and selling murder almost since markets in other world commodities—wheat, bullion, insurance—organised themselves (for greater efficiency) into cooperative groups.
The secrets of the Mafia were bound to be cracked first. Its cohesion was, paradoxically, too tightly knit, its family ties too incestuously woven, its geographical boundaries, though it tried with some success to extend them to the United States, too confined. It had not got the vast backgrounds of China or Russia into which to disappear when the heat, momentarily, was on. The Mafia’s fate was in danger when it began eating itself, stealing its own funds, betraying itself. The phase will no doubt pass.
Norman Lewis is not writing the Mafia’s obituary, only an interim appendix to one secret chapter of contemporary history. “Cosa nostra”—that chummy password from the dripping shrubberies of some schoolboys’ gangland—will continue to be “Our Thing” so long as Sicily stays harsh and poor and its tough people bite back at the world like cornered hounds. But I admit that, in my life-time, I never expected a writer to tell me with quiet, unjournalistic authority what the Mafia is, how it operates, with names and dates, and what it has been up to since the war.
To give a synopsis of the book daunts me. The families, the politicians, local and national, the tortuous double role of the police—of everybody down to A.M.G.O.T. officials—cannot be summarised. Even the foursquare figure of Giuliano, the famous bandit, grows further sides—six, eight, ten—as you tread among the crosses and double-crosses of which he was now the architect and now the pawn. But what interested me as a writer of crime fiction was how in the name of heaven Norman Lewis was able to open this grim and closely guarded safe deposit and get away with the contents. And, since so many of the host who will read this book will ask the same question, here is what I have elicited from him and his publishers.
Norman Lewis served throughout the Hitler war in the Intelligence Corps in the Mediterranean area. He is bilingual in Italian and his first marriage was to a Sicilian from an aristocratic Palermo family who, as automatically as any Lampedusa character, was privy to the secrets of the Mafia. From this and other more secret sources he was able to proceed to the detective work which has occupied him for the past two years. It was then only a question of putting the story down in the exciting narrative style Norman Lewis’s many admirers are accustomed to, and one’s only disappointment is that he didn’t spend another year in America expanding on his over-brief references to the overseas, and particularly American, operations of the Mafia and the links between its empire and its Sicilian motherland.
As I have suggested earlier, Norman Lewis is not greatly impressed by the recent clean-up and the “exile” of Genco Russo. Many Mafiosi have put up the shutters or even pulled out, just as happened to the London gangs who rapidly dispersed into temporary retirement when the heat generated by the Great Mail Robbery was at its height. Unless manna falls from heaven on Sicily, it will be “business as usual” within a matter of months and every Sicilian will once again be in that business at least up to his elbows.
Note: A week after this review's publication, Fleming wrote the following to his Sunday Times editor Leonard Russell:
"I’m afraid I entirely agree with your criticism of my critique of Norman Lewis’s book, but I was not nearly as well up on the subject of the Mafia as you--strangely--appear to be. And though I never see him I am devoted to Norman and am sorry that he always just fails to come off."
Fleming's review was published little more than months before his death, which makes it the last article or literary work Fleming ever wrote. And so this thread comes to an end. For over a year I have had the pleasure of sharing Fleming's literary journalism with you, and the result has been this book length series. Thanks to everyone who commented, and see you around the board.
How to Write a Thriller
President Kennedy’s favorite fiction writer, the creator of secret agent James Bond, offers his recipe for best-selling suspense.
by Ian Fleming (Show: The Magazine of the Arts, August 1962)
“The only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money.”
In this disarming memoir the British journalist who, in a dozen thrillers, has given the world a hugely successful combination of E. Phillips Oppenheim and Mickey Spillane, discusses some problems of his craft. He also shows how they cause him to be keenly aware of the world around him, and “this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.”
The craft of writing sophisticated thrillers is almost dead. In this age of higher education, writers seem to be ashamed of inventing heroes who are white, villains who are black, and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink.
I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged man. I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are not designed to find favor with the Homintern. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds.
I have a charming relative who is an angry young littérateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semifriendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. He was engaged in “The Shakespeare Stakes.” The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport. “I bet you call yourself an Author,” I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. “Just so,” I said. “Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists and then again there are writers and painters.”
This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of the Establishment, whilst stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman from the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don’t now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money.
I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money. I say unashamedly because writing for money was once a respectable profession. Balzac did it, and so did Dickens. In fact, when Dickens found that reading his works aloud brought in more money than writing, he more or less gave up writing. Walter Scott may have enjoyed writing to begin with, but subsequently he only turned out books to satisfy his creditors. Trollope wrote for money as strenuously and impersonally as if he were working at the coalface. And then of course there was that man, what was his name again? who obviously hadn’t the smallest idea he was writing as well as he was. He wrote for his supper in the troubadour fashion. When he became famous and “got into the money,” so to speak, he blew it all on having a coat of arms designed for himself and buying the biggest house in, where was it now? Stratford-on-Avon, and then had to sit down and churn out some reams of blank verse to pay for it.
All this is heresy, and of course there is a big difference between being respectably married to a rich muse and being a literary prostitute, but I would like to make the point that where fame is the spur for some, money is for others.
I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “Thrillers designed to be read as literature,” whose practitioners have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these.
All right then, so we have decided to write for money and to aim at certain standards in our writing. These standards will include an unmannered prose-style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in our narrative. But these qualities will not make a bestseller. There is only one recipe, for a bestseller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.
If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have this quality. You simply have to turn over the page.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this essential dynamic of the thriller. That is why I said that your prose must be simple and unmannered. You cannot linger too long over descriptive passages.
There must be no complications in names, relationships, journeys or geographical settings to confuse or irritate the reader. He must never have to ask himself “Where am I? Who is this person? What the hell are they all doing?” Above all, and this goes for so many thrillers and detective stories, there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects on, what he might have done or what he proposes to do next. There must be no wads of space-filling prose. By all means, set the Scene or enumerate the heroine’s measurements as lovingly as you wish but, in doing so, each word must tell, and interest, or titillate the reader before the action hurries on.
I confess that I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him furiously and shouting “Like this, damn you!” about something that has caught my particular fancy. But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, “Goldfinger,” three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf.
Well, having achieved a workmanlike style and the all-essential pace of narrative, what are we to put in the book—what are the ingredients of a thriller?
Briefly, the ingredients are anything that will thrill any of the human senses—a absolutely anything. In this department, my contribution to the art of thriller writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds. For instance, I have never understood why people in books have to eat such sketchy and indifferent meals. English heroes seem to live on cups of tea and glasses of beer, and when they do get a square meal we never hear what it consists of. Personally I am not a gourmet and I abhor wine-and-foodmanship. My own favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of “Live and Let Die,” James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proofreader at my English publishers, Jonathan Cape, suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for James Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say, “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.
This business of meals may seem a small thing to worry about, but in fact it is a part of all successful writing, which consists of writing interesting words rather than dull ones. Leaving out the economic factor, that is, the actual price of the food, it is surely more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour—excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by homemade trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque), you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinners; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.
You may well say that all this is nonsense, and so it would be if your target was the reader’s intellect rather than his senses. However good the cottage pie and the trifle, eating them in one’s imagination, as the reader will, is a banal experience, and banality is the enemy of the English thriller writer. What I endeavor to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism.
I have not thought this theme out very carefully, nor have I reread any of my books to see if it stands up to close examination, but I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books—a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirit of the English reader—that most of the settings of my books are in themselves interesting and pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places round the world, and that, in general, a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of James Bond’s adventures. This, so to speak, “pleasures” the reader and takes him out of his dull surroundings into a warmer, more colorful, more luxurious, world. In a fashion which I suppose nowadays would be described as “subliminal,” this predisposes him favorably towards the book.
At this stage, let me pause for a moment and assure you that, while all this sounds devilish crafty, it has only been by endeavoring to analyze the success of my books for the purpose of this essay that I have come to these conclusions. In fact, I write about what pleases and stimulates me, and if there is a strong streak of hedonism in my books it is there not by guile but because it comes out through the tip of my ballpoint pen.
All right, now we have style and pace and plenty of pleasure. What other ingredients must we add?
In my case, though not in the cases of such masters as Ambler, Hammett and Simenon, my plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. Every now and then there will be a story in the newspapers that lifts a corner of the veil from Secret Service work. A tunnel from West to East Berlin so that our Secret Service can tap the Russian telephone system; Crabb’s frogman exploit to examine the hull of the Soviet cruiser; the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets; the Gouzenko case in Canada that led to the arrest of Fuchs; The Man Who Never Was—the corpse with the false invasion plans that we left for the Gestapo to find on the Spanish Coast. This is all true Secret Service history that is yet in the higher realm of fantasy, and James Bond’s ventures into this realm are perfectly legitimate. Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. This is where the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 4 1/2-litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these small details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.
Again I repeat that this technique is not, or certainly was not until I came to write about it, guileful. I am interested in things and in their exact description. I see no point in changing the name of the Ritz to the Grand Hotel Majestic, or the Dorchester to the Porchester, or a Rolls-Royce to a Hirondelle. The technique crept into my first book, “Casino Royale.’’ I realized that the plot was fantastic and I wondered how I could anchor it to the ground so that it wouldn’t take off completely. I did so by piling on the verisimilitude of the background and of the incidental situations, and the combination seemed to work.
By the same token, I rarely write about places I have not seen. In “Live and Let Die,” for instance, the descriptions—of Idlewild, Harlem, an American express train, St.Petersburg in Florida, the underwater terrain of off-shore Jamaica—are technically accurate. I know these places. They have great romance and excitement for me, and I try to communicate these feelings to the reader.
Well, I seem to be getting on very well with picking my books to pieces, so we might as well pick still deeper. People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.”
I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that. We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, “Casino Royale,” there are three strong incidents in the book which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other was of blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a high explosive bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which the two assassins could escape. One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smokescreen before throwing the bomb. In fact, of course, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.
Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the identical method used in the Russian attempt on von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgars and they were blown to nothing while von Papen and Frau von Papen, walking from their house to the Embassy, were only knocked down and bruised by the blast.
As to the gambling scene, this grew in my mind from the following incident: I and my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence—Admiral Godfrey—in plain clothes, were flying to Washington in 1941 for secret talks with the American Office of Naval Intelligence before America came into the war. We were taking the Southern Atlantic route, and our seaplane touched down at Lisbon for an overnight stop. We had talks there with our Intelligence people and they described how Lisbon and the neighboring Estoril were crawling with German secret agents. The chief of these and his two assistants, we were told, gambled every night in the casino at Estoril. I immediately suggested to the D.N.I. that he and I should have a look at these people. We went and there were the three men, whose descriptions we had, playing at the high Chemin de Fer table. The D.N.I. didn’t know the game. I explained it to him and then the feverish idea came to me that I would sit down and gamble against these men and defeat them, thereby reducing the funds of the German Secret Service. It was a foolhardy plan which would have needed a golden streak of luck. I had some £50 in travel money. The chief German agent had run a bank three times. I bancoed it and lost. I suivied and lost again, and suivied a third time and was cleaned out. A humiliating experience which added to the sinews of war of the German Secret Service and reduced me sharply in my chief’s estimation.
It was this true incident which is the kernel of James Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre.
Finally, the torture scene. There were many tortures used in the war by the Germans, but the worst were devised by the Moroccan-French. What I described in “Casino Royale” was a greatly watered-down version of one of these French-Moroccan tortures known as Passer à la Mandoline, which was practiced on several of our agents.
So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one and, if I had time, I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some such real happenings as I have described.
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
A house is being demolished in the suburbs of Oxford, a Victorian villa, let us say. In the cellars, the demolition team unearths a tiny theater with a small stage and a dozen seats. Everything is upholstered in faded red velvet. There are signs of recent use. What was this little theater for? What went on there? Immediately our imagination takes off and is sent orbiting like a Sputnik in the sinister realms of black magic, Aleister Crowley, Cinemas Bleus, murdered virgins and the rest. What about that Cambodian student at Balliol? They say he eats live mice dipped in honey. Things with a capital T have been disappearing from the operating theater of the hospital. What has happened to Brunella McNought, the pretty young physicist "à la cuisse hospitalière” as the French put it so gracefully, at Lady Margaret Hall? She hasn’t been seen for weeks...and, so on and so forth. You see! We are almost there. All we need is a caricature of you for the hero, the four fried eggs, the hot-buttered toast and the large cup of black coffee and “The Blonde with a Bomb in Her Bustle” is on the bookstalls.
Haying assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathize with you. I, too, am lazy. Probably rather lazier than you. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well-chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.
In my case one of the first essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work, whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat. I am fortunate in this respect. I built a small house on the north shore of Jamaica in 1946 and arranged my life so that I could spend at least two months of the winter there. For the first six years I had plenty to do during these two months exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef. But by the sixth year I had exhausted all the possibilities inherent in these activities, I had ironed out the problem of taking on a rather difficult job as Foreign Manager to The Sunday Times of London at the end of the war, and I was about to get married—a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidgets. To give my idle hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 year as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.
But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can strongly recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions in the strange locale will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.
So far as the physical act of writing is concerned, the method I have devised is this: I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine and—I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between 6 and 7 in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.
I never correct anything, and I never look back at what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain.
By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be, and is, in my case, in around six weeks. I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.
When my book is finished I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting short passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape, and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a more or less fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.
Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a salutary dig at the author’s vanity to realize how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the jeweled words which it has taken him so many months to try and arrange in the right sequence.
But what, after all these labors, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?
First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a comparatively successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.
Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing, even if you only write thrillers whose heroes are white, the villains black, and the heroines a delicate shade of pink.
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I enjoyed reading How to Write a Thriller. I found this paragraph especially interesting:
Born and raised in SF, Herb Caen was already a glorified institution when I was growing up... never knew these two met or that he was a fan of Fleming. Great stuff.
I had the same questions you did. I'm guessing Russell thought Lewis did not dig deep enough in the topic and that Fleming let him off the hook. "He always just fails to come off" perhaps meant that Lewis had the habit of narrowly missing success in his work.
I'm a resident of SF but unfortunately moved here after Caen retired. I keep planning to order some of the books compiled from his columns. Having served as a columnist for my college newspaper I admire the real professionals.
You shatter PussyNoMore’s illusions.
The Pussy has long held you both in good stead as the definitive Flemingistas.
How can it be that you don’t like the definitive Bond art ?
Have you had your visual taste buds removed at birth ?
Please recant.
PussyNoMore.
Raymond Hawkey's Pans are the definitive covers for me.
Thank you for the compliment, though!
Fay Dalton is extraordinary and without doubt it is her work that has made the Folio editions.
PussyNoMore’s also a huge fan of Gerald Wadsworth’s Bond paintings and have several of his prints adorning my study.
That said it was Chopping’s work that gave Fleming’s novels luxury brand status and which remain, alongside Ray Hawkey’s Deighton covers, the definitive book art.
Ray Hawkey’s covers were spot on for the paperback market but I think his best work was for Deighton. The Pussy thinks ‘The Ipcress File’ was the greatest cover art ever - any genre !
It is very sad that they are even knocking the Secret Service these days. Sad, I mean, for those who have thrilled since their childhood to the glorious myth and sad for all the world of writers and actors whose livelihood depends on the Great Stone Face, perhaps with a black patch over one eye, that can be written about and acted but for security’s sake never properly described.
Already most of the Secret Service cliches have died. In the old days it was apparently possible to get hold of a beautiful girl with a basic training in architecture and ballistics and get her into bed with the enemy general who, between transports, would give her full details of the fortress that was the strong point in his country’s defence. And there was that great prize of the code book purloined by the embassy valet, and the people in mackintoshes followed by other people in mackintoshes, the conversations among the potted palms and champagne buckets overheard by mustachioed waiters, and the assassinations—right down to William Le Queux’s explosive cigar between the lips of the English Foreign Secretary—all these splendid situations are so rusty that no amount of oil can cure the squeaks and rattles of steam-age spy-manship.
Nowadays, and for so long as war is a threat, the spy is a ticking seismograph on top of the Jungfrau measuring distant atomic explosions on the other side of the world, or instruments carried in aircraft that measure the uranium or plutonium content of the atmosphere, and these things have about as much romance as a dentist’s drill.
Except in very small contexts, the number of tanks, the number of soldiers, the design even of a hydrogen bomb, are hardly worth the powder of a Secret Service. The big people have all the big weapons and the small people have them not. Details of the weapons are unimportant. They are known. They’ll destroy the world. There is only one thing to know, a sure thing, and that knowledge itself is only vital for perhaps a quarter of an hour during which preventive or retaliatory measures can be mounted—where, exactly when, to a millionth of a second, is whose finger going to press a button?
These things being so, and they are so, any book or play or film about the Secret Service must be either incredible or farcical. Personally, I am sufficiently in love with the myth to write basically incredible stories and to keep, without any difficulty for I am in love with the myth, a straight face. Graham Greene in his book had a more ruthless approach and a modern one. He took the splendid Secret Service myth of centuries and kicked it hilariously downstairs.
Briefly, Our Man in Havana is a vacuum cleaner salesman called Wormold (a typical “reluctant hero” name) eking out a living in Havana in company with his daughter, in the book an adorable nymphet, on whom, since his wife left him, Wormold lavishes his love and his spare money. Alec Guinness is totally Wormold, as he is totally all his acting parts, but Miss Jo Morrow as his daughter, endowed with only half the appropriate co-efficient of nymphetry, seems more like a mistress.
Wormold, because of the cash that will help to push his daughter on in Havana Society, is half-willingly impressed into the Secret Service by Noel Coward, who plays the pin-stripe “Steady on, old man” Secret Service agent to hilarious perfection.
Alec Guiness soon finds that he can get by in the Secret Service with a lot of half-baked mumbo-jumbo. He uses names drawn at random from the membership list of the local country club and reinforces them with drawings on secret weapons copied from his vacuum cleaner catalogue.
This splendid situation, that is almost too close to the truth for those who served in wartime intelligence to find funny, should proceed horribly from farce to real terror but somehow it doesn’t quite come through. The photography is magnificent—the sleazy and acutely observed Cuban scene [is] dotted with harsh-looking Cuban police and dominated by the vast personality of Burl Ives. (The trouble with Ives is that he always has the ability to act anyone else off the screen. Here he plays the agent of an unspecified power as Emil Jannings would have played him.)
Miss Maureen O’Hara, the Secret Service agent sent out from London headquarters to help Wormold—does Wormold marry her in the end? I couldn’t make [it] out—is as desriable as I would wish her to be, and Mr. Ernie Kovacs as the Chief of Police has all the villainy of understatement and, because he has been solidly cast, holds the narrative sequence more or less together. There is of course not enough of Sir Ralph Richardson, the Chief of the Secret Service and head of the tragical farce that Graham Greene has made of our favourite myth.
For the rest, it need only be said that if the Secret Service had to be kicked downstairs, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Sir Ralph Richardson should have been able to do it. In fact this film, which is somehow made extraordinarily incomprehensible, is largely carried, despite the great names, by Mr. Ernie Kovacs, Mr. Burl Ives, and Miss Maureen O’Hara, in that order.
I’m afraid I don’t understand Sir Carol Reed. He directs individual scenes brilliantly but so often it seems to me he loses narrative sequences. In short this to me was a brilliant book that has somehow lost its point, and it was a very good one, as a film.
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Note: A year earlier Fleming had reviewed the novel Our Man in Havana.