Bond on Page and Screen after Fleming

Ian Fleming died suddenly from a heart attack in 1964. By then attention had already switched from his James Bond novels to the films, of which the first full-length one, Dr No, appeared in 1962. The standard approach is to counterpoint the novels and films, asking how far the latter departed from the former, why, and what this can show us. Ranging from parlour game to serious study, this is a fascinating approach but it leaves out an important element of the Bond story, namely the novels published since Fleming wrote that have Bond as the protagonist. These novels show the significance of the character as a totemic figure in modern culture, and also give us a way to approach the changing concerns and values of the intervening period.

The best of the continuation novels are the first and some of the recent ones. In between, the situation was far less promising. To Glidrose, who owned the Bond publishing rights, the best way to deal with the threat of imitations appeared to commission a sequel, and that may have been encouraged by the imitations of the films that appeared. The first choice was Kingsley Amis, a prominent writer and a fan of Fleming’s novels. He had advised on finishing off The Man with the Golden Gun when Fleming died and had published The James Bond Dossier. Dedicated to Fleming’s memory and appearing under the pseudonym Robert Markham, Colonel Sun (1968) took forward a theme of the films, but not Fleming’s novels, in having the Chinese as villains. In the novel, they are out to wreck a Soviet diplomatic initiative in the troubled Middle East (this is the aftermath of the Six-Day War) and to blame it on the British. In an echo of Fleming, the cruel Colonel Sun is assisted by a Nazi responsible for a wartime atrocity. The Soviets fumble towards a better understanding of Britain and come to see China as the real villain. This approach draws on old fears of the “Yellow Menace” and on contemporary understanding of Chinese expansionism and unpredictability. Amis’s stance and style captured the melancholia Fleming had increasingly offered.

Thereafter, Amis turned elsewhere. A novel commissioned by Glidrose from Geoffrey Jenkins, a thriller writer who persuaded the company that he had worked on a plot with Fleming, was finished in 1971, but Glidrose decided not to permit its publication. Christopher Wood produced two novelisations of film screenplays, James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and James Bond and Moonraker (1979), but there were no new Bond stories.

In 1981 appeared Licence Renewed, the first from John Gardner, who has hitherto proved the most prolific and successful continuator, at least in terms of longevity. Gardner claimed “to bring Mr Bond into the 1980s”. During the Second World War, Gardner had trained in the Fleet Air Arm before transferring to the Royal Marines. After the war, he stayed on for some time and became an RAF chaplain, but was then discharged with a drink problem. As part of his rehabilitation, Gardner was advised to write it all down; hence his first book, Spin the Bottle.

In Licence Renewed, Britain had lost direction, and was affected by political and economic lethargy and a short-term attitude to problems. Q branch was under severe financial restraint, and the 00 section had been abolished. A sense of passing values was conveyed by Bond’s visit to the races at Royal Ascot. He was inspired by the sight of tradition as the royal family came down the course in their open carriages, but it was “a ceremony from another age”. However, in Gardner’s novels, Fleming’s disenchantment with the ordinary world became overt and ugly as a result of Gardner’s heavy-handedness and dyspeptic attitudes. Views that were widely accepted when used by Fleming in the 1950s seemed misplaced in a different world. Fleming rarely had to state these attitudes and the related criticism of others. Gardner also lacked Fleming’s flair, style and sense of irony.

In Licence Renewed, the villain, a freelancer, is Anton Murik, who is out to blackmail states with his threat to cause a nuclear meltdown in six of the world’s nuclear power plants, into funding his own plans for nuclear power. This drew on the serious nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1978. Apparently a wealthy Scottish laird, Murik, a crazed fanatic for whom the end justified the means, in fact, had the rightful laird, his half-brother, killed, and was trying to arrange the same fate for the laird’s daughter.

The following year, SPECTRE returned in For Special Services. M presents an unstable world: “There’s enough danger … With the governments, unrest, political ineptitude, recession, and the draining of resources—on an official level. Some big freelance operation could be catastrophic.” The plot focuses on whether SPECTRE has been revived. It has, and is out to take over the American NORAD command complex.

In Icebreaker (1983), Bond thwarts an attempt to bring about a Fourth Reich. The villain, Blofeld’s daughter Nena, turns out to be distorted in mind and body. SPECTRE aims to thwart Reagan’s plans for Star Wars, to gain computer information about the Space Wolves, American laser-equipped killer satellites disguised as weather satellites, and sell it to the Soviets. This is to be done through doctoring the ice-cream eaten at NORAD with a drug that induces euphoric obedience to instructions. Bond is revealed to have played a role in the Falklands War. SPECTRE returned in Role of Honour (1984), a story with conventional Bond settings: England, Monte Carlo and Switzerland. In alliance with the Soviets, Tamil Rahani, an electronics mogul and the new head of the organisation, seeks to destroy American nuclear weapons. Rahani reappears in Nobody Lives Forever (1986), sponsoring a competition for Bond’s head. Unlike in the Bond films before GoldenEye (1995), MI6 is shown to have been affected by a KGB traitor. One of the villains combines two standard features of the Fleming demonology: Nazi background and physical oddity.

The KGB replaces SPECTRE in No Deals, Mr Bond (1987). As with Fleming, communism is equated with Nazism, but, unlike in the films, there is a sense of a divided Britain. The Foreign Office has been responsible for the end of the 00 section and there was pressure from it for M’s resignation. He feels under siege and Bond has to save him from his domestic critics. The commander of the British nuclear submarine taking Bond to the East German coast dislikes covert operations and his relationship with Bond is tense. As elsewhere in Gardner’s novels, there is a sense of Britain on the slide. Murders are becoming more common and the elegant club Blades now needs money from foreign gamblers.

In Scorpius (1988), Gardner drew on concern about religious cults, presenting a freelance villain, Vladimir Scorpius. Posing as Father Valentine, he uses drugs and hypnotised religious followers in his Society of Meek Ones in order to try to assassinate the Prime Minister and the President.

Win, Lose or Die (1989) was one of Gardner’s better-plotted novels. It has an explicit political theme—the habitual one of the clash between order and anarchy, more specifically an anarchist attempt to disrupt a great power summit. The anarchists, BAST—the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism—are led by Robert Besavitsky, a New York friend of Yasser Arafat and an arms supplier to the PLO. BAST seeks to benefit from the disaffected of the world. Besavitsky seeks to accomplish his aim of raising a large sum of money via terrorism, to which he has a highly opportunistic view. He aims to seize Bush, Gorbachev and Thatcher at a summit and hold them for ransom.

Brokenclaw (1990) has Bond battle another villain with a diverse racial background (he is Brokenclaw Lee Fu-Chu) who plans to acquire the American submarine tracking device and to break into Wall Street’s computer system. In The Man from Barbarossa (1991), the authoritarian General Yevgeny Yuskovich aims to reinstate communist rule, to use atomic weapons to help the Iraqis, and to launch a nuclear attack on the USA. In Death is Forever (1992) it is the return of Stalinism to Europe that is at issue. In Never Send Flowers (1993), a psychopathic actor sets out to assassinate celebrities. In Sea-Fire (1994), a plutocratic businessman sees himself as the new fuehrer of a revived Nazi regime. COLD (1996), which involved the thwarting of an attempt to stage a fascist coup in America, was Gardner’s last Bond novel.

Gardner, who died in 2007, was replaced in 1996 by Raymond Benson, an American board member of the Ian Fleming Foundation who sought to present Fleming’s Bond free from political correctness and with all his vices intact. Benson’s tone was less harsh than Gardner’s: it is more pleasant to read his novels. They were also more optimistic than those of Fleming, at least in the sense that Bond did not collapse as a character. As with Gardner, there was from Benson a mixture of books based on screenplays and also freestanding adventures. The former are not always identical to the screenplays. For example, in his Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Benson claimed that Elliot Carver, the villain, directed his anger against Britain because of his origins as the illegitimate son of a perverted British media lord.

In contrast, Benson’s freestanding adventures sought to find meaning in the world after the Cold War. Thus, in Zero Minus Ten (1997), the villain seeks the nuclear devastation of Hong Kong in order to provoke war between Britain and China. Benson went on to 2003, producing, in total, six Bond novels, three novelisations, and three short stories. The Man with the Red Tattoo (2002) was the sixth and final original Bond novel by Benson. It introduced the danger of a mutated version of West Nile virus.

After Benson, a successful series of novels about a teenage Bond in the 1930s was written by Charlie Higson, while The Moneypenny Diaries were written by Samantha Weinberg.

In 2008, Ian Fleming Publications (the renamed Glidrose from 1999) produced a book to mark the centenary of Bond’s birth. This was a one-off book, the contract for which was given to a major writer, Sebastian Faulks. He set out to write in a “retro” style, rather than engaging with the present, as Amis, Gardner and Benson had done. The novel did not work terribly well, partly because the villain, Gorner, was weak. In a characteristic Fleming feature, Gorner moved from the Nazis to the Soviets. The second half of the novel is anticlimactic and almost Bond-by-numbers. Devil May Care started off as something close to a Fleming Bond, but, by the end, had turned into a Gardner Bond.

It was followed by Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche (2011), which was set in the present, as if Bond had been born in 1979. The villain is Severan Hydt, the Dutch-born owner of Green Way International, a waste disposal consortium, who is linked to a sinister American pharmaceutical corporation and to Serbia. The corrupt National Organisation Against Hunger is shown to be linked to Sudan.

In contrast, William Boyd’s Solo (2013) was again “retro”. Drawing on his African expertise, Boyd, a highly skilled novelist, had the clever idea of putting Bond into the (disguised) Biafran War of the late 1960s at the right time during 007’s career. This approach reflected the considerable traction Bond still enjoyed.

Anthony Horowitz followed with Trigger Mortis (2015), which again had a “retro” setting. It was set in 1957, just after Goldfinger and against the background of the space race. Pussy Galore returns, and there are dramatic scenes in Germany and the US. The Soviets aim to exploit the explosion of a replica rocket beneath New York in order to undermine American popular support for the space race: “it will set them back a decade or more, by which time the Soviets will be in total command and unstoppable”.

Bond’s women were clearly a problem for Faulks, Boyd and Horowitz, since the concept of the “Bond Girl”, nubile, willing and dispensable, is frowned on by contemporary feminism and has been largely replaced in popular culture by the “kick-ass” action heroine. That’s more of a problem for the movies than the books, but it means that even for books set in the 1950s and 1960s—as these three Bond novels are—the female characters need to be something more than sex objects or improbably glamorous spies.

Anthony Horowitz’s Trigger Mortis makes the boldest stab at this since he starts his story six weeks after Goldfinger has been despatched, with Bond sharing an apartment and unmarried bliss with the reformed lesbian Pussy Galore. This domesticity palls on both of them, however, and in addition Pussy has not been fully reformed. She kicks ass with both feet. So, with no regrets on either side, she departs to her old life and Bond embarks on a new mission where he meets a beautiful and skilled racing driver, Logan Fairfax, who helps him defeat Smersh on the motor racing track, after which she falls into the arms of … Pussy Galore. Bond’s next experience is hardly more encouraging. He is helped by a beautiful CIA agent, Jeopardy Lane, to defeat a more colourful Bond villain, Korean billionaire Jason Sin, who plans to blow up New York and blame it on the US space program. But Jeopardy more or less runs their joint operation, having announced that he can forget any idea of sleeping with her just because she’s naked from the shower and a few feet away. Obviously she’d been reading some of the original Fleming novels, and though they eventually succumb to each other, it’s clear that for Jeopardy as much as for Bond this is just one for the road. They both move on.

In Sebastian Faulks’s Devil May Care the Bond girl seems initially to be just another improbably glamorous spy, Scarlett Papava, but she has hidden depths. In addition to pretending to be her own twin, she also reveals herself to be an MI6 agent whom M has put on the mission in order to make sure an ageing 007 doesn’t screw up. She’s Bond’s nanny more than his lover, and she too moves up and on to another mission.

William Boyd’s Solo offers Bond two very different women as solutions for his fading sexual charisma following a lonely forty-fifth birthday. The first is Efua Blessing Ogilvy-Grant, who initially presents herself as the MI6 Head of Station in the fictitious breakaway West African state of Zanzarim, but who is later revealed to be, first, a sidekick of the villainous Jakobus Breed in a complex arms-and-drug-smuggling operation, and second, yet another CIA agent. To establish her loyalty to Breed, Blessing shoots Bond, but looking ahead avoids hitting any vital organs. She and Bond end up on the same side, but Blessing is killed before she has the chance to decide if James offers her any kind of future. He returns to London and to Bryce Fitzjohn, a successful horror-movie actress, who is a match for Bond in age, intelligence, charm and mutual attraction. It’s his opportunity to seize the blend of contentment and responsibility that he has until now avoided. But spying is not a life a woman could be decently asked to share, he decides, perhaps disingenuously, and he slips out into the early morning. Solo again.

All three novels are attempts to subvert the image of Bond as a sexual action hero by making him conform to the theories of the feminist, gay and gender revolutions now current. An early pioneer of the 1960s sexual revolution has become its last sad squire. But it’s questionable if an Alpha Male spy, or any adventurous hero, can really be believable within a plot shaped by ideas of gender equality and fluidity. A self-questioning Bond, wounded by sexual and other defeats, outmanoeuvred routinely by women, is as implausible as the most gymnastic kick-ass heroine. We must either abolish James Bond or amend the theories. That will likely become a battle between the mass audience for Bond and the cultural gate-keepers who increasingly want fiction to give their theories the confirmation that facts (and more important, popular opinion) deny. For the moment these three novels have gone as far as fiction can go in updating Bond without outdating him entirely.

Failing to replicate the commercial success of the Fleming books, the successor volumes nevertheless, like the films, show how Bond can be used to chart present interests and anxieties, whether or not the setting is “retro”.

Bond at present, yet again, is on the cusp between an all-time adventure history and a figure grounded in a particular context, that of a Britain with purpose and value. This is a tension that has been seen ever since the beginning of the adaptations for the films with Dr No in 1962 and in the novels ever since Colonel Sun in 1968. The films and novels of recent years have struggled with this tension, adopting and adapting very different approaches accordingly. At times the “retro” fit makes for an air of nostalgia, a 1950s-1960s comes to the 2000s-2010s, which may only work for some of the audience or readership. At times, there is a more placeless Bond of the present, one designed for a global market.

There is a clear difference between the recent books, for which a good reading knowledge of English is required, and the recent films, which are increasingly action-hero craft in which a knowledge of the language is of limited importance. As a consequence, the novels offer more of a throwback to, or at least reference to, Fleming’s originals. Although Gardner did not write terribly well, he best captured aspects of Fleming’s despair about the decline of Britain. That is a bridge-too-far for the modern film-makers.

Author of The Politics of James Bond (2001) and The World of James Bond (2017), Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Templeton Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia