James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan

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       ENTER: THE SECRET AGENT

      Goldeneye was the location of the writing of the first drafts of all of Fleming’s Bond stories, starting on 15 January 1952 with Casino Royale.

      While the poise of his prose might suggest long, even agonised, deliberation, an inspection of Fleming’s modus operandi reveals anything but. Casino Royale’s 62,000-word manuscript was completed in no more than eight weeks. This was actually a slow rate for Fleming: he would later so refine the process that he was able to produce 2,000 words a day, which equated to completion of a draft in six weeks. Of course, that was not the end of the process. Or indeed the start of it: Fleming’s mind percolated ideas over a long period, during which he conducted research and jotted down ideas in notebooks. However, writing a manuscript quickly made commensurately easier the revising and enriching subsequently executed in Jamaica or back in Britain.

      Fleming explained his technique in a May 1963 Books and Bookmen article called ‘How To Write a Thriller’: ‘By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished …’ He disclosed that he didn’t even pause to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. ‘When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings.’

      Despite what would be an increasing boredom with his creation, Fleming’s productivity for the next dozen years was utterly dependable. His disciplined routine at Goldeneye – the 2,000-word target reached via three hours’ work in the morning and another hour in the evening – ensured that a new James Bond book would be published in his native country in either March or April each year.

      James Bond, we learn during the course of the narrative of Casino Royale, lives in a flat in Chelsea (in later books revealed to be in an unnamed square off the King’s Road, where he is tended to by his ‘treasure’ of a housekeeper, May), smokes at least seventy cigarettes a day of a Balkan and Turkish mixture custom-made by Morlands of Grosvenor Street and decorated with a triple gold band (not mentioned by Fleming at any time is that the bands would seem to refer to Bond’s/Fleming’s naval rank of commander) and, as a consequence of his bachelorhood and his attention to detail, takes ‘a ridiculous’ pleasure in food and drink. His only hobby is his supercharged 4.5-litre circa 1933 vintage Bentley (although it occurs to the reader that his stated love of gambling would also surely fall into the hobby category). He has invented his own elaborate dry martini drink, which he intends one day to patent (three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel – all served in a deep champagne goblet). He is a deductive man, for example instantly clocking some elderly inn-keepers as a childless couple whose frustrated affection is lavished on their guests and pets. At some point in the hazy future, Bond intends to resign and travel the world.

      When Bond sleeps, his face is ironical, brutal and cold, although this is offset when he is awake by his eyes’ warmth and humour. That face – at least according to supporting character Vesper in conversation with French agent René Mathis – is both very good-looking and resembles that of famous songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Bond disagrees with this comparison when gazing into a mirror (although – in an example of the frequent continuity clumsiness in Fleming’s canon – we are not told how he came to know of Vesper’s remark). He finds himself looking at a face into which are set a pair of ironically inquiring grey-blue eyes, over the right of which hangs a comma of hair that will never stay in place. Together with the thin vertical scar down his right cheek, the effect is ‘faintly piratical’. (In future books we will learn his height is an even six feet.)

      Professionally we discover that Bond works for the ‘Secret Service’, an adjunct to the British Defence Ministries, and has done so since before the war, as World War II was usually referred to then. ‘The Service’ is located on the ninth floor of a tall, grey building overlooking Regent’s Park in Central London. There, he answers to a chief of staff known as M, whom Bond worships even despite his harrumphing crustiness. Psychologists will be interested to learn that as a boy Fleming called his mother ‘M’. (Later in the series we will learn that M is an admiral and a knight named Miles Messervy.)

      When Bond’s cigarette lighter is mentioned herein, where most authors of the time would have made no comment on it further than its function, Fleming takes great care to specify it to be a black, oxidised Ronson. Yet the one major exception Fleming made to his preference for using names and brands from real life was Bond’s employer. There was, and is, no organisation with the title the Secret Service, even if it is obvious what is its real-life counterpart: the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. Lightly disguising an existing organisation is, of course, a literary tradition employed for the same sorts of reasons as giving one’s hero a name different from the person or persons on whom he is based. Those reasons range from discretion to convenience to fear of libel writs to a disinclination to distract the reader. In addition to all or any of those things, Fleming was to some extent hamstrung by the Official Secrets Act and the interrelated fact that SIS/MI6 did not officially exist. As late as 1966, the British Government barred the usage in print of even the generalised phrase ‘British Secret Service’. Although this was a King Canute mandate, Fleming was an ex-intelligence man and therefore presumably bound by loyalty where he wasn’t the law. Moreover, as someone who picked up titbits of information at MI6 dinners, he would also have been conscious of the need to keep valuable sources on-side.

      The name that Fleming chose as a substitute is rather peculiar. The Secret Service Bureau was formed in 1909 and during World War I was split into two. The Security Service – or Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5) – covers domestic intelligence matters. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – Military Intelligence, Section 6 (MI6) – gathers foreign intelligence. The British government began acknowledging the existence of MI5 only in 1989 and MI6 in 1994. Fleming’s term ‘Secret Service’ could be said to nod to the original unbifurcated organisation’s name. It had also been used in many previous British espionage books as either a colloquial or umbrella term. However, by now it seemed American nomenclature: the Secret Service has the job of ensuring the physical safety of high-ranking members of the US government.

      Whatever Fleming’s reason, he ultimately lost interest in his disguise. Although he never employed the more common MI6, by the time of the ninth Bond book, Thunderball (1961), he was occasionally stating SIS to be Bond’s employer.

      Bond carries a .38 Colt Police Positive with a sawn barrel and a very flat .25 Beretta automatic with a skeleton grip. The fact that he carts around weapons is germane to his codename: 007. Fleming would later in the series change the meaning of the ‘double-O’ prefix to that of a licence to kill, but in Casino Royale it is stated as denoting an agent who has had to kill in cold blood in the course of a job. What never changed was that the double-O status is of no little prestige in the Service.

      In either of its meanings, the double-O status has no counterpart in real life. There have been some suggestions from ex-SIS employees that executions occasionally happened, albeit carried out by contractors, but never any claim that this was commonplace. In 1953, however, society was far less open and governmental agencies far less answerable to the public, or indeed the executive. It would therefore have seemed possible – and, in the case of an organisation that didn’t officially exist, un-disprovable – that secret agents went around surreptitiously dispensing death.

      As to the actual nomenclature, Fleming told Playboy, ‘I pinched the idea from the fact that, in the Admiralty, at the beginning of the War, all top-secret