And Then Began Again
In 1933 the British news agency Reuters sent Ian Fleming to Moscow to cover a Stalinist show trial, an assignment that gave the young reporter a peek inside the brutal machinations of the Politburo.
Joining British Naval Intelligence at the start of World War II, Fleming devised stratagems, trained covert operatives, and deployed them on missions to gather information and spread mischief in enemy-held territory.
After America entered the war he created an outline for the command structure of the Office of Strategic Services, a civilian intelligence agency that was the forerunner of the CIA.
In the early 1950’s Fleming began funneling his knowledge of spies and spycraft into a series of adventure stories about a young British intelligence officer with the dullest-sounding name he could think of.
The first of these “James Bond Thrillers,” Casino Royale, was inspired by an evening’s recreation Fleming had spent in Lisbon with his boss during the war. He had lost at baccarat, playing against opponents who, Fleming imagined (he may have been right), were financing evil schemes with their winnings. Over the years he mused about how differently that night might have ended, if only some interested benefactor had stepped in to provide a late infusion of cash - exactly the service Felix Leiter performs for James Bond in Casino Royale.
The book was successful enough to warrant a low-budget live TV adaptation and a string of sequels. James Bond’s next mission, Live and Let Die, put him on the trail of a heroin pipeline and smuggled pirate treasure. In Moonraker he tangled with a vengeful Nazi technocrat bent on finishing the mission begun by the Blitz. A fourth adventure took him across America on the trail of a diamond-smuggling ring.
Fleming had already written the first draft of a fifth novel when a letter arrived from his friend and mentor Raymond Chandler, the acknowledged dean of detective fiction, gently upbraiding the younger man for squandering his talent.
In Chandler’s estimation, after a promising start with Casino Royale, each subsequent novel in the series had been slightly worse than the last, culminating in the recent, meandering Diamonds Are Forever. Now that Chandler's protégé had reached his late forties, it was time for Ian Fleming to decide what kind of writer he wanted to be.
Taking the criticism to heart, Fleming spent months revising and polishing his latest manuscript, From Russia, With Love. Starting with a racy setup borrowed from a Hitchcock spy movie, he began to mold the story into the shape of the world’s most beloved fairy tales. Finally, he fleshed out several of his characters and sequences to resemble cast of a popular feature-length Disney cartoon.
Recruiting a beautiful civilian to climb into bed with an enemy agent, only to have her poisoned, is the premise of Notorious, a 1946 film starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, a source which Fleming subtly acknowledges early in his text. While “notorious” is a rare word in Ian Fleming’s literary vocabulary, popping up once each over a pair of Bond novels, it occurs three times in From Russia, With Love alone, all within the pages where the “konspiratsia” against Bond is developed and a patriotic girl is recruited to bait the honey trap. Apparently, the best brains of SMERSH are also Hitchcock devotees.
In addition to a Hitchcockian plot, From Russia, With Love contains one of the master's beloved MacGuffins, a term defined by the director as a mysterious object which everyone in the story is intensely interested in, even if the audience is not. The MacGuffin in Notorious is radioactive pitchblende hidden in wine bottles. In From Russia, With Love it’s a boobytrapped Spektor decoding device.
If any of his pilferage from Hitchcock had found its way into Fleming’s first draft of From Russia, With Love, he made sure to underline the debt. While the novel may have been intended from the start as a sly, modern-day retelling of of the Charles Perrault version of “Sleeping Beauty," Fleming’s wholesale ransacking of Disney’s 1950 Cinderella for an assortment of clever touches and character traits, may have been a fairly late addition.
It seems a good bet that Fleming’s tribute to influential authors also took shape late in the editorial process, when he had settled on the idea of finishing off Bond for good and meant to pour his heart into one final adventure, and quietly thanked everyone who had set him on his path.
Thus Bond, traveling under the name “Somerset” totes an Eric Ambler paperback, while Red Grant cautions him against trying any “Bulldog Drummond stuff,” describing his own escape plan as “a bit of Third Man stuff.” Grant, who earlier had been reading P. G. Wodehouse in private, publicly pretends to appreciate Tolstoy. In reality he’s packing an electrically-triggered gun inside a hollowed-out copy of War and Peace, a weapon which Bond parries with The Mask of Dimitrios reinforced by the gold cigarette case he has tucked inside its pages.
From Russia, With Love marked a significant upgrade to Fleming’s creative process, and there would be no going back. The next novel, an expansion of his earlier treatment for a proposed TV show, Commander Jamaica, would incorporate the plot of another Disney film, along with nods to writers H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer, while adding a heavy dose of Greek mythology for good measure.
Later volumes would cull subplots and assorted scenes from popular films, including another Hitchcock thriller. There were also more fairy tales and Greek myths waiting to be mined, as well as a pair of Middle English chivalric romances, a Brontë novel, even a few TV Westerns - making Fleming's later Bond novels a veritable flea market of Western culture.