Ian Fleming’s +1 Formula
If this site has a major theme, it is the abundance of literary playfulness going on in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers, or at least in the ones written after 1955.
Spurred on by his mentor to try for “a little higher grade,” Fleming began mixing ingredients from classic tales into his Bond stories beginning with From Russia, With Love. And yet readers often don’t recognize the archetypes at the bedrock of Fleming’s later Bond novels, having been thrown off the scent by deliberate misdirection.
For instance, we might not notice the essential elements of “Sleeping Beauty” percolating through From Russia, With Love, because, for starters, the players associated with the fairy tale are introduced in the wrong order.
The first character described in Fleming’s book turns out to be the dragon, who only appears near the end of familiar versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” when it tries to stop an intrepid hero from waking the princes. The evil fairy whose spell starts all the trouble, parades around in a military costume in Fleming’s novel until the final few pages when she turns up in her more familiar guise as an old crone with a set of poisoned needles.
Between the extended introduction of Red Grant as an apocalyptic dragon in Chapter 1, and the moment when a concealed princess downs a sleeping potion in Chapter 25, the author freely adapts an impressive number of scenes, characters and props from Disney’s 1950 Cinderella:
Spying on the embassy through a mouse-hole, Klebb’s flirtation with Tatiana, jealous girls battling over a beau, Tatiana’s black choker, the antique splendor of the Kristal Palas, Kerim Bey’s watery, bloodshot eyes, and the death of Krilencu (staged to resemble the exit of Lady Tremaine’s evil cat Lucifer) are among the book’s many audacious borrowings from an animated Disney classic.
So, although the book is loaded with a rich variety of references, it boils down to the simplest plus-one formula for any Fleming novel:
From Russia, With Love = Sleeping Beauty + Disney’s Cinderella.
Having raided the Disney vault to lift numerous details from their 1950 Cinderella, as well as the basic outline of an animated work-in-progress (Sleeping Beauty), Fleming returned to the scene of the crime for his sequel. He would resurrect Bond in a book based on Disney’s most expensive live-action film to date, a production that had nearly bankrupted the studio. Ever the gentleman-thief, he would do so openly, leaving behind numerous monogrammed calling-cards.
As “M” briefs 007 on MI6’s official response to a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances in Jamaica, he muses, “So I’m supposed to do what? Send a submarine to the island?”
He doesn’t of course, but even without undersea transportation, “M” manages to dispatch Bond on an adventure that is strikingly similar to Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
When first confronted with the task of adapting the book, Disney screenwriters had been dismayed to discover that it has no plot. Verne’s classic tale is simply an extended underwater travelog which concludes when a small team of reluctant sightseers make a sudden dash towards freedom in the final chapter. The screenwriters solved their problem by structuring the film as the story of a jailbreak from an undersea prison.
Despite the lack of a vessel, Bond and his companion are treated to a magnificent view of the undersea world while enjoying a splendid meal. Bond is then forced to navigate Dr. No’s “gauntlet,” a dark metallic shaft full of nasty surprises, after which he must battle a giant squid with a knife and a spear, the very same weapons Ned Land used to fend off an identical threat in the 1954 Disney film, after escaping from the brig of the Nautilus.
Dr. No’s first name, “Julius,” may signal the oversized ambition of a would-be Caesar, but it is also the Latin form of the French name “Jules,” as in Jules Verne. And while there may be no submarine for Dr. No’s captives to escape from, “Nautilus” just so happens to be the name of the magazine for shell collectors which Honey Rider frequently consults.
If, in spite of the clues, we’re slow to recognize Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the prototype for Fleming’s Doctor No, it’s because of additional characters from the Victorian Era (and slightly later) which the author also weaves into his tale.
Dr. No himself seems to be a fusion of Verne’s Nemo and Sax Rohmer’s fiendish Dr. Fu-Manchu, a “Yellow Peril” supervillain introduced to the public in a series of short stories in 1912. Because there are were no ladies among the guests on Nemo’s submarine, Fleming had to look elsewhere to find a literary antecedent for Bond’s comely companion on this adventure.
The spirited girl whom Bond first ogles on the beach at Crab Key is named Honeychile Rider, surely a wink and a nod at H. Rider Haggard, the prolific author of adventure stories who specialized in tales of lost worlds. The suggestion is reinforced when we learn that the girl whom Bond meets has an “imperious attitude” with a voice that is “sharp and accustomed to being obeyed,” reminding us that one of Haggard’s most durable creations was Ayesha, known to her subjects as “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” a central figure across several novels.
Although Honey at first appears to be a modernized version of Ayesha, her role as the nature-loving protector-goddess of Dr. No’s island probably owes a larger debt to another denizen of the “lost worlds” tradition, Rima the Bird Girl from W. H. Hudson’s 1904 Green Mansions.
Fans who are familiar with only the movie version of Doctor No might be unaware that in the book, the entire MI6 investigation is set in motion by the deaths of Audubon Society wardens, or that Dr. No’s darkest sin is ecological - the wanton destruction of bird habitats on the fictional Crab Key. The justice which Bond metes out to the book’s villain is thus amusingly appropriate.
With avian wildlife taking a prominent role in Fleming’s sixth Bond novel we’re also reminded that the author’s own master spy was named for an ornithologist who specialized in birds of the Caribbean, and that Bond’s Chelsea flat was only a brisk walk from the W. H. Hudson Memorial Bird Sanctuary in Hyde Park.
Fleming’s second novel after getting his second wind seems to boil down to a simple formula:
Dr. No = Disney’s 20,000 Leagues + Mysterious Jungle Goddess
However, any book which also playfully blends the myths of Theseus and the Labyrinth and the sacrifice of Andromeda to a sea-god with imagery suggesting the adventures of Ned Land, Captain Nemo, Fu-Manchu, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and Rima the Bird Girl, is surely in a league of its own.
Fleming had used From Russia, With Love as an opportunity to pay tribute to writers who penned the thrillers that inspired him or which he simply enjoyed reading in his youth. Authors such as “Sapper” McNeile, P. G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler are given walk-ons in Fleming’s thriller. Red Grant is reading Wodehouse in the opening chapter of FRWL and later makes verbal references to McNeile’s “Bulldog” Drummond and Greene’s The Third Man. Bond travels under the name “Somerset” and slips an Eric Ambler paperback inside his cigarette case to stop a bullet.
In Dr. No Fleming reached back further in time to acknowledge the Victorian writers who had spawned the traditions of crazed inventors and the breed of sure-shot adventurers who uncover hidden worlds operating within our own. With the benefit of hindsight we’re privy to a further line of connections which almost beg to be acknowledged.
Fleming’s From Russia, With Love is at heart a Disney cartoon for adults, while his Dr. No is a grittier Disney adventure film. The actor cast as James Bond in 1962 came to the attention of producer Albert R. Broccoli’s wife when she saw him in Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. It was Sean Connery’s first leading role in an American film. Connery’s final appearance in a film with a tenuous connection to James Bond, The Rock, was a Disney production.
Besides She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, H. Rider Haggard is remembered today chiefly for his big-game hunter Allan Quatermain, hero of the 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, and whose meeting with Ayesha is the subject of She and Allan, a book written more than three decades later. Sean Connery would play Quatermain in his final live-action film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which also featured Captain Nemo, among several other notable characters from Victorian literature.
Ursula Andress, the Swiss actress who played Honey Ryder in Dr. No, starred as Ayesha in the 1965 Hammer adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s She. The movie also features John Richardson, an actor who had been on the shortlist to replace the departing Connery in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Andress was urged to take the role in Doctor No by her houseguest Kirk Douglas, who had played Ned Land in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. After reading the script Douglas must have sensed the box office potential of adding a statuesque bikini-clad beauty to an already-proven formula.