James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan
job at headquarters. Thirty-seven is a fairly realistic age for an espionage agent and, interestingly, is the age Fleming was when his own intelligence career ended with the conclusion of World War II. One should also note that before youth culture (the dawn of which was then just around the corner), thirty-seven was not the quintessential ‘middle-age’ that it is to modern sensibilities. The mental definition herein of Bond as a ‘young man’ by female character Gala Brand would have been a common categorisation in 1955.
Bond’s yearly salary of £1,500 (about £32k in today’s money) is that of a principal officer in the Civil Service. He lives very well because he also has a yearly, tax-free private income of £1,000 and when on assignment can spend as much money as he likes. Despite his financial comfort, Bond hasn’t much use for filthy lucre. In his depressed moments he is sure he will be killed before that forty-five cut-off and wants to have as little as possible in his bank account when that happens.
His private life – when not involving playing cards with a few close friends or high-stakes golf at weekends – revolves around three married women, to whom he makes love ‘with rather cold passion’.
Plotwise, Bond is – courtesy of his fluency in German, expertise in sabotage and knowledge of geopolitical issues – assigned to be a government security man at the site of the Moonraker rocket. The Moonraker is funded, designed and staffed by wealthy industrialist Hugo Drax in lieu of Britain’s ability to provide its own nuclear deterrent. (In real life, it would have one by the late fifties.) The Prime Minister has to give the authority for a Secret Service agent to become involved in what is technically a domestic affair. (This is in fact the only Fleming novel in which Bond doesn’t go abroad.)
Drax is, like Le Chiffre, somebody who claims to have no idea who he is. He has distorted teeth and a face deformed by the same wartime accident that robbed him of his memory, something he tries to cover up with a big red moustache and the tufts of hair on his cheeks. Drax also has filthy manners. Worse than those shortcomings is the fact that he cheats at cards, something exposed by Bond at M’s behest in a first section whose relationship to what follows is curiously superficial.
It transpires that Moonraker’s test-flight coordinates have deliberately been changed so that it will land not in the Channel but the middle of London, which must naturally mean that its dummy weaponry has been replaced by a real warhead. Although Bond discovers some suspicious facts, the full nefarious plan is uncovered by Gala, a beautiful Special Branch policewoman.
‘You don’t know how I have longed to tell my story,’ Drax informs Bond and Gala, who have been captured and bound. This is of course a precursor to a self-justifying backstory and gloating revelation of malevolent plan, interspersed with Bond’s ejaculations of scorn. It’s now known as the epitome of Bondian, but Jeremy Duns points out, ‘The thing with the villain explaining to Bond what his plot is before he kills him – the supposedly amazingly clever villain actually stupidly tells Bond everything – this was already being parodied by Leslie Charteris twenty years earlier, it was so common.’
Drax is in fact a Nazi, as are all his German scientists. The Soviet Union has assisted him in his plans for its own ideological reasons. Drax intends that Bond and Gala be incinerated with the explosion of the warhead, but the two free themselves and alter the flight plan. That Bond and Gala then listen to the radio to find out whether their plan has succeeded is a damp squib of a climax to be sure, but is in the book’s general spirit of realism. The interaction with what is nominally the ‘Bond girl’ also turns out to be a damp squib: Bond’s presumptions about her are upended by the revelation that Gala is about to get married. In a melancholy ending, they decorously shake hands.
A glut of error, inconsistency and nonsense is by now to be expected in a Bond book, but it’s difficult to overlook the fact that it is inconceivable, even at the height of the Cold War, that Moscow would have sanctioned a missile strike that would almost certainly have precipitated global nuclear combat. Yet such is the verisimilitude of Fleming’s story – especially his research on rocket science and the way he conveys the Moonraker’s awe-inspiring, gleaming giganticness – that this occurs to one only when mulling it over, and that this mulling process does not occur when the pages are being turned.
Moonraker aroused the interest of Hollywood. However, just as famed director Alexander Korda had failed to follow-up his interest after seeing an advance copy of Live and Let Die, John Payne and subsequently the Rank Organisation did not capitalise on the property on which they had taken out options. Moonraker rights transferred back to Fleming in 1959.
The book, though, did get adapted to another medium, even if Fleming may not have known about it. A South African radio broadcast of a Moonraker production by the Durban Repertory Theatre has variously been reported as occurring in 1955, 1956, 1957 and 1958 and to have been both an hour and ninety minutes long. There is a suspicion that it may not have been authorised by Fleming or his agents.
The second actor to portray James Bond was, like Barry Nelson, not British. Bob Holness spent most of his formative years in the UK but was born in South Africa and returned there as a young adult. Holness told one Bond fan that his performance as 007 was broadcast live and that no recording was made.
Some might suggest this to be for the best. The idea of Holness playing a blunt instrument is rather comical for Britain, where Holness eventually returned in his grey-haired, bespectacled late middle age and became known as quizmaster of iconic British teenage game show Countdown, remembered for its sniggering catchphrase, ‘I’ll ’ave a “P”, please, Bob.’ However, Holness in real life was clearly somewhat less clean-cut than his television persona. He once reported that his reaction to the news that Sean Connery had been cast as 007 was, ‘That cunt’s got my job!’
Over the subsequent decades, there have been few further Bond radio dramas, perhaps because broadcasters perceive the idea of them as pointless in light of the lush visual spectacle of Bond films.
Diamonds are Forever, the fourth Bond novel, was published on 4 April 1956.
It was serialised that month in the Daily Express newspaper. The Express was then, as now, middle-market, pitched halfway between the intellectualism of The Times and the populism of the Daily Mirror. Unlike now, it was then a top seller and the serialisation served to proffer Bond to a large captive audience who may not have previously been aware of the character. The Express would from that point on routinely run Bond novel serialisations, albeit condensed and sanitised for a family audience.
In the first recounted Bond mission with no involvement on the part of Russia, Bond is dispatched to the United States to disrupt a diamond-smuggling route to there from Africa. The American end of the smuggling operation is here referred to as ‘American gangsters’ or ‘The Mob’ but for some reason never ‘The Mafia’. Bond has a contempt for such types, whom he considers ‘Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meat-balls and squirting scent over themselves’.
Bond is able to get into the diamond-smuggling pipeline because he can pass as intended courier Peter Franks to someone who has only a description on which to go – a situation so lacking in what would now be basic security requirements as to remind us that the world of Fleming’s Bond is as close to the nineteenth century as it is to our own. Bond quickly starts unravelling a trail of diverse but intertwined criminality involving fixed horse races in Saratoga Springs and rigged blackjack games in Las Vegas. Bond is unexpectedly assisted/shadowed by Felix Leiter, now working for the famous private detective agency Pinkerton’s. Leiter has a steel hook in place of his right hand, and a false left leg. Not for the first or last time, Bond has a romantic coupling with a woman whose name is simultaneously ridiculous and sublime: Tiffany Case.
On his seaborne passage home with Tiffany, Bond discovers that also aboard are Mr Wint and Mr Kidd, a pair of Mob-employed homosexual killers. After dispatching them, Bond is compelled to cover his tracks to make the deaths look like an argument that has ended in murder and suicide. This is realistic, but somewhat less intoxicating than the cavalier attitude of the cinema Bond, who has never given a stuff about the carnage and official headaches caused by his actions.
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