The Diamond Smugglers - Ian Fleming

 A collector's item in two senses - first, non-Bond adult non-fiction by Fleming, and second, a Fleming book I actually enjoyed.

Taking the second first, it's been a while since I said it on this blog, so for clarity, I'll say it again.   I do not like James Bond.   I read most of the original novels when I was a lad but fell out with the films with Thunderball.   To the best of my knowledge I haven't watched a Bond movie all the way through since.   I tried the novels again in middle age and concluded they were crap.   Some of the posthumous follow-ons were better but still nothing I could get excited about.   There were soon limits to even those that I could not bring myself to cross.   Gardner yes, Amis OK, Faulks ... a bridge too far for me.

Back now to this, which I saw mentioned on Spybrary and found in this smart 2013 reissue by Vintage.  The book itself dates from 1957 when Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Glasgow Police and MI5 Chief, let it be known that Fleming, author of Diamonds Are Forever, was the chap to write up an account of Sillitoe's retirement job in charge of the International Diamond Security Organisation, set up to investigate and put a stop to the diamond smuggling business.

The smuggling enterprise was vast.   Far more was seeping out of Africa than was sent legitimately.   The licit and illicit markets were completely separate, with different price scales.   The fact was, in some parts of Africa someone strolling along a riverbank could pick up stones big enough to make them rich for life.

The task had been finished by 1957 and the smugglers at least curtailed.   Sillitoe had been in charge from London but the man on the ground, John Collard - called 'John Blaize' in the book because he was ex-MI5 - was the one with all the details, the one Fleming met and interviewed over ten days in Tangier.   The vast majority of the book is Collard's first person account.   This works well for me - I have never found Fleming's dialogue anything more than perfunctory.   On the other hand Fleming (and perhaps only Fleming) could conjure up so effortlessly the tawdry glamour of the neutral ground of Tangier.   The collaboration is a winning formula.  It's very short - the perfect length for its story - and I raced through it in two sessions.

A Bid for Fortune - Guy Boothby

 A Bid for Fortune (1895) is the debut of the Victorian super-villain Dr Nikola, a man with worldwide interests, limitless resources and a spooky cat called Apollyon.

"Ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porter in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Tibet, the Spanish priests in Manila or the Sultans of Borneo, the Ministers of Siam, or the French in Saigon.  They'll all know Dr Nikola and his cat, and take my word for it, they fear him."

The premise is silly - a holy relic of the Himalayan Masters promising access to the Mysteries of the Ancients.  it is of its time, the fin de siecle with its occult interests.  In physical appearance Nikola is the personification of the aesthetic decadent.  Boothby was an Australian living in London who produced more than 50 novels and yet was only 38 when he died.  Dr Nikola is perhaps his most enduring character, an obvious forerunner of Ian Fleming's Dr No.  Boothby was prolific but skillful.  His narrative never falters but the plot twists are all properly planned and his characters fully rounded.  He had travelled the world and it shows.  The locations here, of which there are many, smack of authenticity and personal knowledge.

There are four further Nikola novels and I hope to read them all. 

Ungentlemanly Warfare - Howard Linskey

 

When I reviewed my first Linskey, The Dead, in the middle of last year, I noted how careful he was in crafting his prose and how I really must read more of his work.  Not so much now, I'm afraid.  Ungentlemanly Warfare is a pretty standard SOE yarn, though to be fair Linskey does plough relatively fresh ground by incorporating the Milice, the Vichy brownshirts, as the direct opposition to the Maquis underground resistors Harry Walsh is sent to France to organise.  His principle mission is to kill the scientist developing the Me 163 jet fighter plane which, if made operational, will threaten the upcoming D-Day landings.  So far so good - and I should also add in the plus column the nice way Linskey plays the class war within SOE.  Guerrilla warfare is ungentlemanly, therefore those who fight guerrilla wars are not gentlemen; Harry Walsh is only middle middleclass and therefore perfect to aid and abet the guerrillas, but he can never rise above the rank of captain which he earned in the field - thus by default, really - at Dunkirk.

Now for the less good.  The writing at the start of the book is really poor - overdone, unsubtle, unconsidered, unrefined.  There are some appalling proof reading failures: Scott's Guards will live with me forever.  Things certainly improved as the story progressed, either because Linskey gets more involved with the action sequences or perhaps because the first couple of chapters came from an old draft which Linskey managed to restart with an improved skill set.  Certainly I stopped thinking 'This needs editing' and ceased to notice any bloopers, and that's good enough for me.  But then--- Oh god, clever little cameos for Ian Fleming and Kim Philby.  Showing off your research.  Only your research wasn't quite deep enough, Howard.  A level deeper and you'd have found that the first hero of ungentlemanly warfare was Peter Fleming, Ian's brother, who was in charge of proposed guerrilla warfare in Kent when, as seemed certain in 1939 and 1940, Hitler invaded Britain.  See Giles Minton, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The story itself is predictable - Harry has to risk his girlfriend to get to the target.  I don't want to give the game away but the point of a successful adventure story is that the hero has to personally bring down the anti-hero, and that doesn't happen here, so the story doesn't quite succeed.  And I will no longer be quite so keen to read more Linskey.

Killing Eve - Codename Villanelle - Luke Jennings

 Everyone knows Killing Eve. Everyone watched the first series, considerably fewer went the distance with the second. Luke Jennings is the creator and wrote the original ebooks. Codename Villanelle is the collection of the first four (the titular first, 'Hollowpoint,' 'Shanghai,' and 'Odessa'. The good news is there are two more collections to get my greedy mitts on. The even better news is that the originals are just as good as the first TV series. Phoebe Waller-Bridge dispensed with some of the story and added other elements, but overall the punchy structure, the offbeat dark humour, the wit and the downright beauty were all kept. The lack of wit is where the second series probably went wrong.

The problem Waller-Bridge had was that Sandra Oh cost big money but she doesn't feature in the first installment, 'Codename Villanelle.' So she had to be inserted from the start. 'Killing Eve' may well become Villanelle's obsession in the successor volumes, but it isn't the plot driver here, which makes the title slightly odd. These are minor quibbles, though. I loved every minute of reading this. Luke Jennings is a master of the shorter form. Every word counts. He lingers on evocative detail, like the shoes Villanelle is wearing when she kills. He also creates wonderful images - there is a magnificent phrase about a snow-filled umber sky over grey trees - but he knows his main job is to get on with the action.

This is where comments about Villanelle being a 'female James Bond' suddenly become apposite. Fleming was a rotten writer who made up for his lack of talent with knowledge of cars and guns and exotic locations. Jennings, who I stress again is a brilliant writer, does cars and guns and exotic - but he also adds opera and Paris fashion shows and perfumes. To put it bluntly, the man's a genius. For me, 'Shanghai' is a mini masterpiece.

Trigger Mortis - Anthony Horowitz

I have got out of sequence with my post-Fleming Bond reboots. I have leapt from the first Gardner to one of the most recent. So what? Trigger Mortis is what I'd been hoping for, a Bond that is as great as the first three Connery movies. Horowitz, one of the most successful contemporary writers of general fiction, is a way better writer than Fleming, as indeed all Fleming's successors are. More importantly, he is a more gifted writer than any of the others, except perhaps Faulkes, who I haven't read. Most importantly, he has chosen to write in period, filling in the gaps, as it were. Trigger Mortis (the title sounds horrible but is in fact brilliant) comes immediately after Goldfinger. Thus we start off with Bond in bed with Pussy Galore. We then plunge headlong into Grand Prix racing at its most dashing and daring (the Nurburgring in 1957). This would have been good enough for many thriller writers but here is only Act One: it introduces the villain, a Korean meglamaniac, and the main plot, which is about the Space Race.

I am very cynical when it comes to Bond. I have already indicated the only movies I care about and it should be noted that I was only nine or ten when I fell asleep in the cinema during Thunderball. I have avoided anything that came after Roger Moore. I read all the Fleming books before I went to see Thunderball. I enjoyed them at the time, but was not a critical reader when only ten and under/ I revisited them perhaps fifteen years ago and was appalled at how bad they are. Fleming himself is interesting but nowhere near as interesting as his brother Peter, a real life adventurer, married to a movie star, and field commander of the British Resistance we never needed in the second World War. Peter was also a better writer, albeit he overwrites in the devil-may-care style popular in the Thirties when he wrote his bestsellers.

I therefore turned to those commissioned by the Estate to keep the cash rolling in. Colonel Sun and Licence to Kill are both reviewed on this blog. It's interesting that Gardner, who kept the franchise going longest, wrote a Moriarty version of Sherlock Holmes, as of course did Horowitz more recently. I preferred the Gardner Moriarity, which, coincidentally, I also read when I was both young and old. But I tell you, Gardner's Bond is not in the same league as Horowitz's. I genuinely cannot remember a thriller so well done, so thrilling that I could not stop reading.

An absolute triumph - a classic of its rather esoteric sub-genre.

Oh ... one last note. Trigger Mortis actually contains original material by Ian Fleming. Don't worry, it's not noticeable. Horowitz must have smartened up any actual writing, and it's only the writing that let Fleming down. The ideas were highly original, even brilliant in their day.

Journey into Fear - Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was the master of spy fiction. Before him there was John Buchan and whoever it was created Bulldog Drummond; after came James Bond. Without Ambler there would have been no Bond. Fleming absolutely stuck with Ambler's formula for success, though in my view his writing was never as good. Where Fleming outshone Ambler, however, was in having the continuing hero. Each of Ambler's major thrillers has a different hero and they tend to be middling men of no particular significance who by chance become embroiled in the machinations of nations. They are more like real spies in that sense and, given that we know they will not recur in the next book, we cannot be sure they will survive, which adds suspense utterly lacking in Bond.


Here, for example, Mr Graham, who lacks even a forename, works in a senior capacity for an international arms manufacturer. This being 1940, the firm's products are in great demand and Mr Graham - having survived an assassination attempt in Istanbul - is trying to get home to England on a cut-price ocean steamer. His fellow passengers are few in number. Any or none of them might be in league with the assassin, who also manages to slip aboard. That, in essence, is the story.


It is down to Ambler's skill as a storyteller that we remain enthralled. His characterisation is excellent, his writing strong. He uses narrative devices well beyond his successor Fleming. For example the first couple of chapters unfold in flashback. We are aware of Mr Graham's amended plan to sail aboard the scruffy steamer, then find out why he has agreed to give up his original plan to travel first class by rail. This gets excitement in good and early (the attempt on his life), introduces the femme fatale (the glamorous nightclub dancer Josette) and reveals the involvement of professional spies in Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret service.


Journey into Fear made an excellent film with Orson Welles as Haki. After the war Ambler moved to Hollywood to write and produce movies. He was extremely successful - I had no idea until I looked him up. He wrote the screenplays for The Cruel Sea and the best of all Titanic movies, A Night to Remember. That is how good he was. Better than Buchan, better than Fleming. The best.

Colonel Sun- Robert Markham/Kingsley Amis

As noted below, I acted on the spur of the moment and bought a copy of Colonel Sun, the first of the continuing adventures of James Bond which began after the death of Ian Fleming. They left a decent pause - Fleming died in 1964 and Colonel Sun did not come out until 1968 - but only because Fleming left a load of scraps that could be exploited in the interim.

Amis had already cashed in with The Bond Dossier (1965) so was an obvious choice for Fleming's heirs. Whether Fleming himself would have approved is another matter. Amis was a truly gifted writer who dabbled in genre fiction from time to time. Fleming was a rubbish writer who created a genre phenomenon. What made the difference was that Fleming knew about the spying business and had met most of the real life spies he brought together in the character of Bond. You wouldn't turn to Fleming if you wanted an inspiring description of a landscape - certainly not if you wanted characters of more than (at best) one-a-half dimensions. But you can and always could rely on his explanation of a particular firearm or car. You can rely him for the tone in which spies and especially their superiors speak and their world view. Fleming was one during the war - a spy and a bureaucrat.


True Bond fans have always shunned the post-Fleming stuff. I have said before on this blog: I read all the early Bonds before I was twelve and loved them; I saw the films as they came out and drew a very firm line after Thunderball, which is crud; I tried the books again sometime this century and have read several, which I find to be a deal less good than they are supposed to be. The plots are rubbish, the characterisation inadequate, and the tone - which, in fairness, was undoubtedly the tone of posh folk in Fleming's formative years - offensive and unacceptable.


And so to Colonel Sun... First off, I have always found Amis's arrogance unacceptable, which oddly makes it perfectly acceptable here. In fact the sex bomb, Ariadne, is a fully developed, conflicted and unpredictable character, which surprised me. I really liked the eponymous villain. The torture scene was stripped down to gruesome basics and was genuinely horrifying. The plot was certainly complicated - much more complicated than anything Fleming came up with - and I'm not sure it worked. Colonel Sun is the super-villain but instead of seeking to rule the world like your regular super-villain, all he wants to do is disrupt a gathering of Soviet spooks on a nearby island and blame it on the gallant Brits, for which purpose he has arranged to kidnap M. (I thought the use of a decrepit and semi-senile M was pure genius.)


The writing is very good, infinitely better than Fleming. Amis handles the action sequences well enough and his descriptions of the Greek islands are often spellbinding. The problem - the failure, really - is his inability to convince us that he knows how to sail a common-or-garden boat. There have to be boats because these are the Greek islands. They have to be sailed cleverly and surreptitiously because this is a spy adventure. But - for goodness sake, Amis - Bond is a bloody naval officer!!! Presumably that's in your Bond Dossier somewhere. Even I knew that. And I also know that Fleming knew how to sail boats - because he, like Bond, was a Naval Commander.

Ian Fleming and James Bond - Ben Macintyre

I am a big fan of Ben Macintyre, his books, his TV programmes and his contributions to The Times. This is one of his early, minor works, commissioned in 2008 to mark the 100th anniversary of Fleming's birth.

I am in no sense a fan of James Bond. I read perhaps half the novels as a child and gave up to the films after I fell asleep in Thunderball when I was eight or nine. I suppose I have seen most of the Connery and Moore movies on TV since then. I have seen none of the Dalton, Brosnan or Craig iterations and am very unlikely to now. I have re-read a couple of the books more recently. I remember Diamonds Are Forever and Casino Royale. The former is very flimsy, the latter rubbish. Ian Fleming is not an author I take to in any way.


So I am probably not the target audience for a book about Bond and his creator. Yet I enjoyed it. Macintyre makes no attempt to exaggerate Fleming's literary prowess, he relies on the undeniable fact that with Bond he created a worldwide icon and spawned two industries (film and follow-on books) that continue fifty years after his death. Instead he looks at what made the Bond books successful - chiefly the excitement of international jet-setting and hi-tech gadgetry in the age of postwar austerity. Macintyre uses his encyclopaedic knowledge of historical espionage to identify the originals behind the characters. He covers the basics of Fleming's life, the key moments that saw Fleming in Jamaica with time on his hands the urge to write the spy story to end all spy stories. I could personally have done with a little more about his older brother Peter, also a successful novelist and peripheral spy, and his influence on Ian. At the end of the day Ian Fleming was not an especially pleasant man and Macintyre tells us enough about his better side to leave us satisfied.


One unexpected result of reading Ian Fleming and James Bond is an inexplicable desire to look into some of the post-Fleming Bond novels. In particular I am keen to get hold of Colonel Sun, the first of the follow-ons, by a hard-up Kingsley Amis hiding behind the name Robert Markham. I read it when it first came out and hated it. I do not like any of Amis that I have read over the years, so why on earth I've just clicked to buy Colonel Sun on Amazon... What have you done to me, Macintyre? It'll be John Gardner's Bond next but it will never ever be Sebastian Faulks. You hear me? Unless---

The Man Who Was M - Anthony Masters

The subtitle of this minor classic from 1986 is "The Life real-life spymaster who inspired Ian Fleming". Well, we all need a hook, but the connection is wafer thin.  For one thing Maxwell Knight was never a field agent and never travelled the world in the hunt for foreign agents.  Max was strictly London-based and spent his MI5 career bringing down the enemy within, be it Percy Glading, communist co-ordinator of the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring of 1938 or the highly-connected Fascists of the Right Club two years later. In both instances Knight infiltrated glamorous young women agents (Olga Gray and Joan Miller respectively) whilst he stayed secluded in his flat in Dolphin Square.with his menagerie of snakes and aye-ayes and bugs.

It's not just the wildlife that distinguishes Knight from James Bond, it's also the sex life. Not only did Knight never have sex with Gray or Miller, albeit both were in love with him and the latter even lived with him, he was married three times and never consummated any of the unions. Knight was frankly weird. Masters ponders his subject's sexuality but of course cannot come up with a conclusion.

After the war Knight became, of all things, a freelance broadcaster on natural history with the BBC. Indeed it was as the much-loved Uncle Max, author of books for children such as The Young Naturalist's Field Guide (1952) that he was memorialised when he died in 1968.

Masters' account of the Right Club is a good as any.  His rendering of the Woolwich Arsenal case is better than most and I had never before across the case of Ben Greene, cousin of Graham and (Sir) Hugh, which ultimately ruined Knight's standing in spy-circles, although I suppose there are worse things than being ostracised by an MI5 run by the likes of Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Hollis. Masters spoke to people who knew Knight, including his two surviving wives, who can of course never be asked again.  The only trouble is, he says that Knight was 68 when he died.  No he wasn't; he was born in September 1900 and died in January 1968. He was therefore 67. A minor slip, perhaps, but it undermines confidence.  That's why I called it a minor classic. A bit more care and The Man Who Was M might just be a classic.

A Foreign Country - Charles Cumming

I've been keeping an eye out for Cumming's work since he won the CWA Steel Dagger, and the Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Book of the Year for this very novel in 2012.

As I have stated several times on this blog, spy fiction is not my first choice and I can only tolerate the very best.  Fortunately, Cumming is up there with the very best.  Much more literate than Fleming and not as tendentious as le Carre can sometimes be.

The storyline here is unrolled through a number of clever twists, none of which strain the credulity.  Essentially, it is this: the incoming female head of MI6 vanishes; Thomas Kell, the spy who was effectively thrown into the cold, is given the off-the-books task of tracking her down with the vague promise of reinstatement if successful.  This means we don't have to endure too much office in-fighting and can get down to the chase through Tunisia and France.

The plot deepens, the target changes more than once, and the pace never once relents.  Cumming has stripped down the backstory of his characters to the bare minimum needed to engage our empathy.  Thus he can devote all his authorial energy to making his thriller thrilling.  He succeeds.

I am definitely up for more.  The Trinity Six sounds intriguing...

Slow Burner - William Haggard

More classic British espionage from the so-called "adult Ian Fleming", this from 1958 when naked women with guns were considered exceptionally racy (and, in fairness, the introduction of this one is done with considerable relish).  Haggard's secret service (the Security Executive) consists of Colonel Russell, his deputy Major Mortimer, and a secretary, all in a suite of rooms somewhere in Whitehall.  Haggard's world is the world of the civil service - the world he himself inhabited - a world of not-quite-good-enough former public schoolboys.  Indeed it might be more accurate to describe Haggard as the father of le Carre's Smiley.  This is a world where you can deduce a chap's regiment by the length of his stride.  Where policemen salute and spy masters doff their bowler in return.

The story here is a good one - the potential loss of Britain's post war super fuel, the Slow Burner of the title.  There is some high spirited scientific mumbo jumbo and two women, one more proper than she needs to be and the other nowhere near.  There are even intimations of sex.  Great fun.

Rogue Royale - Jeremy Duns

Jeremy Duns is a British author of Cold War spy fiction (featuring Nick Dark) who now lives in Finland.  He is the man who found out R J Ellroy was writing his own ecstatic reviews on Amazon, which recommends him strongly to me.

This is an ebook which expands on journalism he wrote following his discovery of an never-filmed script for Casino Royale, penned by the legendary Ben Hecht (The Front Page etc.).  At something over 10,000 words it is the perfect length and subject for a non-fiction ebook.  Now I can't stand Bond in either film or print, especially print, but Duns is a fan and is able to place Hecht's work in the developing Bond canon during the early Sixties.  He is not too dazzled by Hecht's reputation to spare him due criticism for dumb ideas like the mindreader who helps Le Chiffre cheat at cards.

It's an impressive piece of research and eminently readable.  I recommend it.

Moriarty - John Gardner

Three decades after the first two volumes (The Return of Moriarty and The Revenge of Moriarty), Gardner's third and final volume of the 'memoirs' of the Victorian super-criminal were published posthumously.  The immensely prolific Gardner died in 2007 and Moriarty appeared a year later.

Back in the day, Gardner was very famous - I remember the amount of publicity given the first two volumes, a stark contrast with the zero publicity afforded the third.  He was the first English writer to spoof the Bond genre (with his Sixties series of Boysie Oakes novels) only to be hired to by Fleming's executors to write to continuation Bonds in the Eighties.  He ended up writing fourteen original Bonds and the novelisations of two films, License to Kill and Goldeneye.  I remember reading the first, Licence Renewed but don't remember any more.  Certainly, they can't be any worse than Fleming's because Gardner is a much better writer, so it might be worth having a look.

The good news is that loads of Gardner's works are coming out in ebooks.  The Bonds are available now in America but not here yet.  The five Kruger novels are available here published by Bello, Pan's digital arm.  (I did not know that.)  The other great news is that Gardner has such a spiffy website, so his executors are clearly making an effort to keep his work alive.  Good on them.

Anyway, back to this book...  I loved Return and Revenge back in the Seventies and, only the other week, was musing on how good they were.  Then I went to the library and found this.  Did it excite me as much?  No, but I'm older and more miserable.  Did I enjoy it?  Yes, absolutely - great fun.  Did I admire it?  Again, yes - the thing about Gardner is the way he shows he has done his research without clouting you round the head with it in the manner of Len Deighton. 

I think digital Gardners will be joining my digital bookshelf ere long.

The Midnight Swimmer - Edward Wilson

I'm not the biggest fan of spy fiction, particularly spy fiction of or set circa 1960.  OK, it's Bond, I absolutely hate Bond - I lost interest in the movies with Thunderball and the novels as soon as my voice broke.  I tried reading the novels again recently - Casino Royale and Diamonds Are Forever - and I still find them poorly written and pompous.

Imagine my reaction then, to this, the third in US expat Edward Wilson's series featuring William Catesby, a Bond clone with a difference in that he wears the bowler and pinstripe but began life as a working class lad from Lowestoft.  I absolutely loved it.  One major attraction is that it's wrapped around real events (the Cuban missile crisis) with real people mixed in with the fictional.  There is something of Deighton is the amount of detail Wilson delights in, and inevitably a flavour of le Carre in the double-dealing.  Like his protagonist, Wilson's attitudes and conclusions are often unexpected.

The writing is not without fault.  There are a lot of unwarranted question marks in the later sections of the ebook, a sign of faltering proofreading, and - more seriously - there are far, far too many epilogues.  It's a series; who cares what happened next?  We'll find out in the next instalment.

Wilson himself is an unusual character.  Baltimore-born, he fought in Vietnam but ended up teaching further education in England.  He has been a British citizen for 30 years now.  I'm keen to read the earlier Catesby novels but especially keen to read his Vietnam novel, A River in May (2007)

Billion Dollar Brain - Len Deighton

I've never really considered Deighton's spy novels because they are eternally linked with Michael Caine and I've not been much of a Caine fan (Get Carter excepted) since the movie of Funeral in Berlin bored me rigid as a film-fanatical ten year-old.  But I discovered Deighton's WW2 novels two years ago and couldn't resist this vintage edition when I found it outside my favourite book shop.

Deighton's work has certainly worn better than that of Ian Fleming.  Fleming was never much of a writer (I have revisited his work in the last couple of years); nor was Deighton in the early years - but Deighton has a much better sense of story, pace and tension, and a slightly better grasp of characterisation.  If nothing else, his fictions are more democratic.  Not everybody is public school or rich.  Not all the women are sex-crazed.

The 'brain' itself - a computer so big, it has to be stored inside a mountain - is so absurdly outdated that it simply doesn't matter.  Deighton gets away with it because he has taken the trouble to research his concept.  The Cold War has also gone; again, it doesn't matter because we trust Deighton when he tells us how important it seemed at the time.

I love the settings - from seedy Soho to Finland - all described in detail with the stamp of personal knowledge.  Even if it turns out Deighton just made the whole thing up, his writing style convinces us it's true.  It's not a mystery story but the twist at the end about the femme fatale was a cracker.

Period piece, yes - but none the worse for that.  Actually, I suspect Billion Dollar Brain is more enjoyable as a period piece than it was as a slightly futuristic thriller.