spynovelfan, this is getting really tiring. Why should I have to dissect every little thing you say ? You think your articles are absolutes in meaning that Fleming's novels must have been serious literature and I don't agree. There is nothing more that needs to be said. 8-)
If you have nothing to say other than that Fleming isn't worth taking seriously as a writer and insulting my work, you didn't really have anything to say in the first place.
I didn't insult your work and I didn't say Fleming shouldn't be taken seriously as a writer. I said he didn't do serious writing. You really are being a snob.
Ricardo, anyone can spout a view on something. I'm not going to think it's worth anything just because you say you think it, and nor will anyone else. I'm only interested in discussions with people who are prepared to support what they say with reasoned points. You've made it crystal clear you're not interested in doing that, and have resorted to insulting me to boot. I've wasted too much time discovering that you're not worth trying to have a discussion with. But I won't make the mistake again.
If you have nothing to say other than that Fleming isn't worth taking seriously as a writer and insulting my work, you didn't really have anything to say in the first place.
I didn't insult your work and I didn't say Fleming shouldn't be taken seriously as a writer. I said he didn't do serious writing. You really are being a snob.
Ricardo, anyone can spout a view on something. I'm not going to think it's worth anything just because you say you think it, and nor will anyone else. I'm only interested in discussions with people who are prepared to support what they say with reasoned points. You've made it crystal clear you're not interested in doing that, and have resorted to insulting me to boot. I've wasted too much time discovering that you're not worth trying to have a discussion with. But I won't make the mistake again.
Alright, it's done then. I don't care what you think of me. 8-) And yes, I do believe are being a snob because you claim I have said absolutely nothing in defense (totally untrue) and I even agreed to disagree and yet you persist on having a debate.
I'm not a snob, Ricardo. I'm mystified as to what any of this has to do with snobbery, in fact, and rather disappointed at the turn the discussion has taken. Oh well. There was an interesting discussion for a few posts before this, anyway. Perhaps we should be thankful for small mercies on the interweb.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
edited October 2010
Hello spynovelfan,
I've been reading this thread with much enjoyment.
I'm in total agreement with what you say regarding Richard Usborne's influence on the Bond criticism and the citation of influences for Ian Fleming by Snelling, Amis et al.
I would like to hear what you think of Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) being considered as another of the "missing links" such as Dennis Wheatley, and a major influence on Ian Fleming. I'm currently reading Dark Bahama (1950) and I believe the whole Dark series could be linked to what Fleming later did with James Bond. Fleming was called a "Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade" after all.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I've only read a few of Cheyney's books, ages ago, and I must admit that they didn't grab me. But tentatively I would say the following:
Cheyney wasn't a great prose stylist, like Wheatley, but tonally he was much grittier and more realistic than a lot of the books that had come just a few years before. Also like Wheatley, he was massively popular, especially during the war; also like Wheatley he has been rather forgotten. Also like Wheatley, I think he was an influence on Fleming, and probably much more of a direct one than Sapper or Buchan. I can't remember any similarities as precise as the ones between Dr No and Fu Manchu or many of the plot points and ideas in Wheatley's novels, but the idea of espionage being a sticky, dirty business and the feel of rough and tough professionals is much more like Fleming than the 'clubland heroes'.
Fleming was apparently very pleased with Whitefriar's description of him as the 'Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade'. But he never, as far as I know, mentioned Cheyney as an influence. He never mentioned Wheatley, either, and I think Wheatley was an enormous influence. Perhaps it was safer to acknowledge writers he was less indebted to. I think with Wheatley he certainly sailed pretty close to the wind, by today's standards anyway.
I think the 'carriage trade' part of that review is interesting. Cheyney and Wheatley were regarded by many as below stairs authors - they were both very prolific, had huge print runs on poor paper, had lashings of sex and violence and few pretensions. They were story-tellers, and essentially Britain's answer to pulp. Fleming was writing the same sort of material, but using a more refined prose style, more akin to Leslie Charteris. I think a lot of the people who reviewed Fleming had read Sapper or Charteris or Buchan at school and had 'grown out' of thrillers and not kept up with them. Fleming read thrillers avidly all his life, and understood how Chandler and Simenon were writing great novels within the genre. So I think the idea sprung up, in several places, that he had revived the clubland heroes. But there was no gap like that - the thriller had carried on developing, and many writers were already updating the previous models and becoming tougher and more cynical, and with more sex and violence. Buchan bled into Sapper and Charteris, but then the likes of Sidney Horler, Frances Beeding and Manning Coles came along, followed by Wheatley and Cheyney, and so on. There were a lot of thrillers being written. A lot of them seem a lot like James Bond novels. Some of Wheatley's Sallust novels are, I think, much more sadistic and violent than Fleming. So I think this whole idea really stemmed from a couple of literary critics with establishment newspapers and, in some cases, connections to Fleming or his wife or her literary set, but who had not read thrillers for years.
For journalists and authors today, it is easier to ignore all this and say that Fleming reinvigorated the clubland heroes by adding sex, snobbery and sadism, and name-check Sapper and Buchan. I think the truth is a great deal more complicated than that. I think Fleming's virtues as a writer have very little to do with the usual stuff that he created product placement, megalomaniacal foreign villains and our usual conceptions of what a James Bond adventure is. Pretty much all the elements of a Bond novel or film were well established by 1953, and Fleming didn't really originate in any of the ways it's commonly said he did, in my view. I think his main innovation was in his abandoning of suspense, particularly the cliff-hanger, and in his focus on the internal life of his hero to a far greater degree than had been done previously. That and his prose style.
What do you make of Cheyney so far? I keep meaning to read more of him. I got an interesting email a few months ago from someone who now represents his literary estate, asking for my view on his position in the thriller canon. I think I need to do some more research.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
edited March 2021
spynovelfan,
Thank you for your very thoughtful analysis on Peter Cheyney’s possible influence on the later works by Ian Fleming – much appreciated.
You’re right in saying he never mentioned Peter Cheyney as an influence, I think. Cheyney does get a few mentions in John Pearson’s biography of Ian Fleming. Fleming is quoted in a letter to his editor at Jonathan Cape, William Plomer, as saying “another two months with my road drill could get the book Casino Royale into publishable shape…It remains to be seen whether I can get a bit closer to Eric Ambler and exorcise the blabbering ghost of [Peter] Cheyney.” Evidence, I think, that Cheyney was indeed seen as being ‘below stairs’. Ambler was the type of literary thriller Fleming clearly was aiming for. In Casino Royale, I think he achieved it, too. It’s also interesting to note that Raymond Chandler, when he wrote the “golden words” that “Ian Fleming is probably the most forceful and driving writer of …thrillers in England”, also mentioned Peter Cheyney’s Dark Duet, and “another fairly good one”.
When pushed in interviews, Fleming cited the likes of E. Phillips Oppenheim, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Sax Rohmer. In fact, these are all mentioned in the October 1963 Roy Newquist Counterpoint interview with Ian Fleming. By saying you think Fleming sailed pretty close to the wind with his influences from the novels of Wheatley, I take it that you are referring to near plagiarism, by modern standards? It’s quite shocking to think that Fleming may have plagiarised to some extent, as it was a given by critics through the years that Fleming invented many of spy fiction’s (or more generally thrillers’) conventions. But it is refreshing to hear a new, more accurate criticism coming to the fore. I think that Fleming was in some ways a literary magpie, as well as an innovator, and what he did was no different from many other writers who aped the style of another author or were influenced by what they had read.
You mention Whitefriar’s quote that Ian Fleming was a “Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade” – could you tell me where this review of one of the novels was published, and the full name of the critic, please – just curious. I have an inkling that it was for Casino Royale, but I could be wrong.
So far, I am enjoying Dark Bahama, though the focus is less on one agent than several. It couldn’t hold a candle to any of Fleming’s work, in my opinion, but it’s still an interesting read. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this one, but it was the last in Cheyney’s Dark espionage series. I agree Cheyney’s prose style is inferior to that of Fleming’s. Cheyney seems to write with great dash. He seems to over-use the semi-colon rather, in my opinion. For example:
“Isles sighed; closed the doors; went back into the hallway.”
“He walked down to the end of the passage; opened the door; switched on the light.”
It seems curious writing to me. You just wouldn’t find this type of writing in Fleming. Fleming gives much more detailed descriptions of places, characters, foodstuffs, technology etc. than Cheyney or a good many other thriller writers do, it seems. This is in many ways the Fleming hallmark, along with his often-human portrayal of James Bond. As you say, Fleming truly was a literary writer in the thriller world, and put a lot of care and thought into what he wrote. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Cheyney dictated all of novels to his secretary?
However, it would be interesting to explore the theory that Peter Cheyney was another of the “missing link” authors along with Dennis Wheatley that influenced Fleming’s writing. One wonders how many other “missing links” have been missed…
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Oh, I had forgotten that quote in the letter to Plomer! Yes, very interesting. Fleming was a fan of Ambler and Greene. I expect he found Cheyney and Wheatley great fun to read, but realized that their writing had serious limitations. In a way, he took the fun things he liked about the plots of those sorts of novel and grafted on more of an Ambler style. I agree that Casino Royale is probably the clearest example of that.
The Whitefriar review was of Casino Royale, and is mentioned by Pearson, in Part II of Chapter 17. Pearson mentions Pym's review in the Sunday Times (which said he might become the best English thriller writer since Ambler if he could make his work a shade more probable), and The Listener's 'supersonic John Buchan'. Then:
'Even the Observer conceded that this first thriller by their rival's Foreign Manager was a "sort of Peter Cheyney de luxe". The columnist Whitefriar, who writes for booksellers and publishers and journalists in W.H.Smith's Trade News, went one better and called him the "Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade". It was a compliment that gave Fleming particular glee, and thereafter Whitefriar — a strictly anonymous but very skilled newshawk of the book trade whose nutcracker chin is to be seen at all literary parties worth the name — received inscribed copies of all the Fleming books; and Fleming wasn't one of those authors who hand round complimentary copies freely.'
Interesting that two reviews compared him to Cheyney, and in a very similar way.
As for others who influenced him, I think the problem is precisely the one you pinpoint, better than I had done in my ramblings above. Critics have acted as though Fleming invented most of the conventions of the British thriller, when he didn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't a brilliant writer, though. Simenon didn't invent all the tropes of the crime novel. No, I don't think Fleming was a plagiarist, but I think he was sometimes very derivative, and he would be hauled over the coals for it these days, I expect. But there was an odd sort of invisible line between the critics and the best-sellers, so nobody noticed he was derivative. Once the films became huge international successes, I think a lot of people have presumed that all the stuff in Bond films or Bond novels originated with them. Now if someone reads a Sax Rohmer novel, they think 'Wow. This is so much like Fleming, but came before!' And it is. But the same applies to a lot of writers' work that came before Fleming.
Here are some conventions in the British thriller that predate Ian Fleming's work, and which you will find in lots and lots of them before 1953. I think you will find them familiar.
The supreme Bondian master-villain, ie Dr No, Drax, etc. Clearly, this sort of figure can be seen in Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, but there are many other examples that predate Fleming. Here's an excerpt from The Man With The Clubfoot by Valentine Williams, published in 1918:
'"You smoke?" queried Clubfoot. "No!"—he held up his hand to stop me as I was reaching for my cigarette case, "you shall have a cigar—not one of our poor German Hamburgers, but a fine Havana cigar given me by a member of the English Privy Council. You stare! Aha! I repeat, by a member of the English Privy Council, to me, the Boche, the barbarian, the Hun! No hole and corner work for the old doctor. Der Stelze may be lame, Clubfoot may be past his work, but when he travels en mission, he travels en prince, the man of wealth and substance. There is none too high to do him honour, to listen to his views on poor, misguided Germany, the land of thinkers sold into bondage to the militarists! Bah! the fools!"
He snarled venomously. This man was beginning to interest me. His rapid change of moods was fascinating, now the kindly philosopher, now the Teuton braggart, now the Hun incorporate. As he limped across the room to fetch his cigar case from the mantelpiece, I studied him.
He was a vast man, not so much by reason of his height, which was below the medium, but his bulk, which was enormous. The span of his shoulders was immense, and, though a heavy paunch and a white flabbiness of face spoke of a gross, sedentary life, he was obviously a man of quite unusual strength. His arms particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath the shaggy brows, that hinted at accesses of ape-like fury, uncontrollable and ferocious.
He gave me his cigar which, as he had said, was a good one, and, after a preliminary sip of his wine, began to speak.
"I am a plain man, Herr Doktor," he said, "and I like plain speaking. That is why I am going to speak quite plainly to you..."'
Ah yes, Dr Julius Gorner was not so original after all.
'Smersh', ie the secret foreign government agency that nobody knows about. Here's another excerpt from The Man With The Clubfoot, as I'm there already:
'You cannot penetrate far behind the scenes in Germany without coming across the traces of Section Seven of the Berlin Police Presidency, the section that is known euphemistically as that of the Political Police. Ostensibly it attends to the safety of the monarch, and of distinguished personages generally, and the numerous suite that used to accompany the Kaiser on his visits to England invariably included two or three top-hatted representatives of the section.
The ramifications of Abteilung Sieben are, in reality, much wider. It does such work in connection with the newspapers as is even too dirty for the German Foreign Office to touch, comprising everything from the launching of personal attacks in obscure blackmailing sheets against inconvenient politicians to the escorting of unpleasantly truthful foreign correspondents to the frontier. It is the obedient handmaiden of the Intelligence Department of both War Office and Admiralty in Germany, and renders faithful service to the espionage which is constantly maintained on officials, politicians, the clergy and the general public in that land of careful organisation.
Section Seven is a vast subterranean department. Always working in the dark, its political complexion is a handy cloak for blacker and more sinister activities. It is frequently entrusted with commissions of which it would be inexpedient for official Germany to have cognizance and of which, accordingly, official Germany can always safely repudiate when occasion demands...'
There are lots of thrillers predating 1953 that contain passages like this. Smersh was an updating of this old idea for the times, I think mainly using information from Mondich's book on the organization.
'SPECTRE', ie the freelance villainous organization. Again, this was very common, but see for example 'The Big Seven' in Dennis Wheatley's 1939 novel The Quest of Julian Day. This was a group of seven men behind a massive criminal organization involved in espionage, blackmail, dope-running, diamond-smuggling and white-slave trafficking. The members are
Occultist Sean O’Kieff, who calls the hero, British agent Julian Day, 'my dear boy'
English aristocrat and grotesque near-dwarf, Lord Gavin Fortescue
Egyptian Ismail Zakri Bay
Inosuki Hayashi, known as 'the Jap'
Azreal Mozinsky, a Polish Jew
Count Emilio Mondragora
Baron Feldmar von Hentzen
(I reckon if this example doesn't show that what are commonly thought of as Bondish components were very well established before Fleming's first novel, nothing can!)
Product placement. Fleming didn't invent it. Charteris, Sapper, Hornung, Sayers, Williams, and many others were stuffed with the high life, and Wheatley really kitted his heroes out in Bondian gear from the 30s on, with Lobb shoes, Savile Row suits, Sullivan's cigarettes, a Mauser, Bacardi, the lot.
I couid go on, but hopefully you get the idea. Pretty much all of those things we think are Bondish were already extremely well established in the British thriller by the time Casino Royale was published in 1953. The torturing of the hero by the villain and the villain speechifying and giving the plot away. The animals in the bed. The beautiful girl he rescues. The ransom notes and demands, the exotic poison, the weapons skills. Pretty much any element you care to mention. Fleming was working very firmly in a tradition that had been going on for half a century. He put his own stamp on it in lots of ways, but he didn't invent the rules of the game, by any means.
The reason I mentioned Gorner is simply to show how most variations of these conventions have been done. They have sunk into the blood of the thriller, and we know roughly what the options are that are available in any given situation. There are an infinite number of moves to make, but an awful lot have been made, as well. An example off the top of my head is Bond's drink being spiked in the film version of Casino Royale, and then his stumbling out into the street. It doesn't happen in the novel, of course. It seems rather Bondish, and the way it is acted and shot and so on all worked very well in our age and did not seem anachronistic in any way to viewers, as far as I know. But apart from a couple of things (like the defibrillator!) that entire scene could have been an adaptation of a British thriller from about 1916. Seriously. Scenes like that are in dozens of Le Queux and Oppenheim novels, in really just that way. But I don't think the scriptwriters meant it to be a tribute to old British thrillers. It's just become part of the formula, and such ideas are used unthinkingly almost, knowing it is part of the formula but bringing out the subtle character elements that have built up around Bond.
Similarly, I don't think Gorner - sorry, Hitch2! - would have been meant by Sebastian Faulks as a homage to Clubfoot. Possible, but I'd be surprised. It's more likely, I think, that Faulks was trying to create a classic 'Fleming-style' villain. And some of those traits, which everyone in the world associates with the James Bond series, are physical deformity, hatred of England, megalomania, menace while wining and dining the hero, and all that stuff. Gorner is clearly influenced to a degree by Dr No, to a degree by Hugo Drax. But Faulks needed his own twist to make the character something that was 'Fleming-esque' but had not been done. So he thought of the monkey paw deformity. I don't think it's a reference to Clubfoot. I think, rather, that it would be pretty difficult to think up a character who fits the popularly recognized conception of a Fleming-esque villain without either aping (sorry) Fleming too much, or accidentally coming up with something that resembled a character that had come before Fleming or after. So many writers have written this type of villain, both before and after Fleming, that a lot of them have lit on the same ideas. Make him a deformed dwarf! Well, Dennis Wheatley did that with Lord Gavin Fortescue. Give him a pet... hyena! Sorry, Geoffrey Jenkins did that. Make him an occultist Japanese baron with a penchant for fondue who once rode a tricycle through Venice for a bet... Done a thousand times before, I'm sure.
Well, you see what I mean, I hope. Our idea of the 'Bondian villain' has really been around since the beginning of the 19th century. Dr No, Drax, Blofeld et al were Fleming's versions of this sort of character, which was an essential element of the thriller. He didn't invent the idea of such a character, as some think. Unfortunately, this means that if a journalist happens to read an old thriller and finds such a character, they end up writing an article concluding that whoever-it-is was a huge influence on Fleming, because look! A character who is a megalomaniacal deformed villain who invites the hero to a lavish dinner before torturing him. You could easily write just such an article on Valentine Williams, using only the two excerpts from one novel I quoted above. There are dozens and dozens of writers who preceded Fleming who were doing this sort of thing, and so if you want to find out how the Bond novels really developed and who Fleming's precise influences were, unfortunately you need to read rather widely in the early British thriller. I say unfortunately - it's terrific fun. What could be more enjoyable than discovering tons of thrillers with dashing secret agents going up against beastly foreign villains? If you're a Fleming fan, the likes of Wheatley's Gregory Sallust novels are akin to reading a whole run of alternate universe Bond adventures set in World War Two. Get stuck in!
I am almost done with Sax Rohmer's The Golden Skorpion. One of the main characters has an elderly scotish housekeeper, but other than that, Gaston Max is not really 007. It is obvious that Sax Rohmer had a hankering for Middle Eastern women (Egyptian or Syrian) as opposed to Fleming's Blond ambition.
There is a discusion of Islamic cultural politics but Rohmer doesn't really judge the Islamic world. I have order about 25 Sax Rohmer books, mostly used.
I look forward to reading them all in the coming 12 months including the "Sumuru" series. I am not really sure why Rohmer is no longer popular, I would not characterize his stories a racial and his style of writing and spelling is wonderful.
It makes me sad to think that had Fleming live and left the Bond series, we would have had at least 20 years of good storytelling of a different nature. Unfortunately we don't.
"And if I told you that I'm from the Ministry of Defence?" James Bond - The Property of a Lady
I've been doing a bit of digging into Fleming's influences and rereading some of vintage thrillers, and I've rather changed my mind about Rohmer. I still don't think he was one of the very front rank of direct influences on his work, but I think he has been severely underestimated, and that his influence can be seen quite strongly in several of the Bond novels, not just Dr No. And I think he was more of an influence on Fleming than the two writers who are most cited, Buchan and Sapper, by some distance. I'll be publishing an in-depth post about it on my blog, where I'm currently writing a series of posts about Fleming and his influences.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
This is a great little thread on the Fleming influences - just thought that I would re-post it to get the topic moving again!
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
This is a great little thread on the Fleming influences - just thought that I would re-post it to get the topic moving again!
I Just got finished reading The Bride of Fu Manchu, it was very similar to certain concepts in Dr No. I actually believe the Shadow of Fu Manchu which is coming up, might have been the main story behind Dr No.
"And if I told you that I'm from the Ministry of Defence?" James Bond - The Property of a Lady
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
edited March 2021
This thread is surely one of the best on the Literary 007 sub-forum here on AJB forums. I'm currently working on an article dealing with the Yellow Peril, or all of the Chinese characters that appeared in the James Bond films and novels. It will appear in due course on The Bondologist Blog - there are some great references in this thread and I would like to see more discussion of the points raised above. The level of debate here on AJB is excellent to say the least. -{
The Yellow Peril and the Terrible Hun and the Red Menace are all stereotypes and Fu Manchu and Dr. No (maybe even Colonel Sun) are all a part of this. I think this aspect of the Bond novels and the thrillers that came before and influenced Fleming is also very worthy of further serious study.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I am reading the Island of Fu Manchu - which takes place in NY City, Kingston, and Haiti. The main plots involves Fu Manchu using a submarine to recover a lost treasure in the Caribbean sea.
"And if I told you that I'm from the Ministry of Defence?" James Bond - The Property of a Lady
I am reading the Island of Fu Manchu - which takes place in NY City, Kingston, and Haiti. The main plots involves Fu Manchu using a submarine to recover a lost treasure in the Caribbean sea.
Hi perdogg, how many Fu Manchu novels are there? - which would you say most inspired Dr. No and Colonel Sun and which are the best novels to start reading?
I too find this thread on Fleming's influences quite fascinating.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I am reading the Island of Fu Manchu - which takes place in NY City, Kingston, and Haiti. The main plots involves Fu Manchu using a submarine to recover a lost treasure in the Caribbean sea.
Hi perdogg, how many Fu Manchu novels are there? - which would you say most inspired Dr. No and Colonel Sun and which are the best novels to start reading?
I too find this thread on Fleming's influences quite fascinating.
There are 13 Fu Manchu novels written by Sax Rohmer, but you also have to remember that Rohmer wrote a few Gaston Max novels. Gaston Max is a French Agent/policeman (Sécurité de l'État).
In the series, later novel, the "Seven Sins" there is an explaination regarding the mystical properties of the number 7.
"And if I told you that I'm from the Ministry of Defence?" James Bond - The Property of a Lady
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
I am reading the Island of Fu Manchu - which takes place in NY City, Kingston, and Haiti. The main plots involves Fu Manchu using a submarine to recover a lost treasure in the Caribbean sea.
Hi perdogg, how many Fu Manchu novels are there? - which would you say most inspired Dr. No and Colonel Sun and which are the best novels to start reading?
I too find this thread on Fleming's influences quite fascinating.
There are 13 Fu Manchu novels written by Sax Rohmer, but you also have to remember that Rohmer wrote a few Gaston Max novels. Gaston Max is a French Agent/policeman (Sécurité de l'État).
In the series, later novel, the "Seven Sins" there is an explaination regarding the mystical properties of the number 7.
As I'm currently writing an article on Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun (1968), I'd like to read your thoughts on where Amis was simply following the lead of Ian Fleming's Dr. Julius No with his creation Colonel Sun Laing-tan. I'm very interested in the use of the 'Yellow Peril' theme/racism in spy and crime thrillers at the moment. I got a book entitled Fu Manchu and the 'Yellow Peril': The Making of a Racist Myth (1994) by Jenny Clegg at the weekend there and it's given me some ideas I'd really like to incorporate into my article entitled 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun'. It should be up on The Bondologist Blog before the end of the month.
Also, I'd like to know what are your favourites from the Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novels, and have you seen any of the numerous film versions, some of which starred Ian Fleming's cousin and the actor who portrayed Francisco Scaramanga, Sir Christopher Lee.
This is really a frascinating thread; one of the very best here on AJB! -{
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I would get a copy of "The Bride of Fu Manchu". This one Rohmer really hits the mark. The earlier novels read more like detective novels, but I think in the "TBOFM" you can really see the influences of Rohmer upon Fleming. You have a villian, and a "Bond Girl" so to speak. I have never sceen a Fu Manchu movie. I think this whole racism bit is a bit overblown.
You can tell that Rohmer was partial to middle eastern culture. I would also recommend the "Seven Sins". I think Dr No is more Fu Manchu than Col Sun just because of the elaborate ways Dr No tries to kill Bond in his obstacle course.
You can get a lot of the earlier Fu manchu novels for free on Amazon kindle.
"And if I told you that I'm from the Ministry of Defence?" James Bond - The Property of a Lady
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
I would get a copy of "The Bride of Fu Manchu". This one Rohmer really hits the mark. The earlier novels read more like detective novels, but I think in the "TBOFM" you can really see the influences of Rohmer upon Fleming. You have a villian, and a "Bond Girl" so to speak. I have never sceen a Fu Manchu movie. I think this whole racism bit is a bit overblown.
You can tell that Rohmer was partial to middle eastern culture. I would also recommend the "Seven Sins". I think Dr No is more Fu Manchu than Col Sun just because of the elaborate ways Dr No tries to kill Bond in his obstacle course.
You can get a lot of the earlier Fu manchu novels for free on Amazon kindle.
Thanks so much for your recommendations, perdogg. This is a fascinating subject area. I will include a lot of this type of detail in my special interest focus article 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun' due to appear on The Bondologist Blog soon.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
Ricardo, anyone can spout a view on something. I'm not going to think it's worth anything just because you say you think it, and nor will anyone else. I'm only interested in discussions with people who are prepared to support what they say with reasoned points. You've made it crystal clear you're not interested in doing that, and have resorted to insulting me to boot. I've wasted too much time discovering that you're not worth trying to have a discussion with. But I won't make the mistake again.
Alright, it's done then. I don't care what you think of me. 8-) And yes, I do believe are being a snob because you claim I have said absolutely nothing in defense (totally untrue) and I even agreed to disagree and yet you persist on having a debate.
I've been reading this thread with much enjoyment.
I'm in total agreement with what you say regarding Richard Usborne's influence on the Bond criticism and the citation of influences for Ian Fleming by Snelling, Amis et al.
I would like to hear what you think of Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) being considered as another of the "missing links" such as Dennis Wheatley, and a major influence on Ian Fleming. I'm currently reading Dark Bahama (1950) and I believe the whole Dark series could be linked to what Fleming later did with James Bond. Fleming was called a "Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade" after all.
I've only read a few of Cheyney's books, ages ago, and I must admit that they didn't grab me. But tentatively I would say the following:
Cheyney wasn't a great prose stylist, like Wheatley, but tonally he was much grittier and more realistic than a lot of the books that had come just a few years before. Also like Wheatley, he was massively popular, especially during the war; also like Wheatley he has been rather forgotten. Also like Wheatley, I think he was an influence on Fleming, and probably much more of a direct one than Sapper or Buchan. I can't remember any similarities as precise as the ones between Dr No and Fu Manchu or many of the plot points and ideas in Wheatley's novels, but the idea of espionage being a sticky, dirty business and the feel of rough and tough professionals is much more like Fleming than the 'clubland heroes'.
Fleming was apparently very pleased with Whitefriar's description of him as the 'Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade'. But he never, as far as I know, mentioned Cheyney as an influence. He never mentioned Wheatley, either, and I think Wheatley was an enormous influence. Perhaps it was safer to acknowledge writers he was less indebted to. I think with Wheatley he certainly sailed pretty close to the wind, by today's standards anyway.
I think the 'carriage trade' part of that review is interesting. Cheyney and Wheatley were regarded by many as below stairs authors - they were both very prolific, had huge print runs on poor paper, had lashings of sex and violence and few pretensions. They were story-tellers, and essentially Britain's answer to pulp. Fleming was writing the same sort of material, but using a more refined prose style, more akin to Leslie Charteris. I think a lot of the people who reviewed Fleming had read Sapper or Charteris or Buchan at school and had 'grown out' of thrillers and not kept up with them. Fleming read thrillers avidly all his life, and understood how Chandler and Simenon were writing great novels within the genre. So I think the idea sprung up, in several places, that he had revived the clubland heroes. But there was no gap like that - the thriller had carried on developing, and many writers were already updating the previous models and becoming tougher and more cynical, and with more sex and violence. Buchan bled into Sapper and Charteris, but then the likes of Sidney Horler, Frances Beeding and Manning Coles came along, followed by Wheatley and Cheyney, and so on. There were a lot of thrillers being written. A lot of them seem a lot like James Bond novels. Some of Wheatley's Sallust novels are, I think, much more sadistic and violent than Fleming. So I think this whole idea really stemmed from a couple of literary critics with establishment newspapers and, in some cases, connections to Fleming or his wife or her literary set, but who had not read thrillers for years.
For journalists and authors today, it is easier to ignore all this and say that Fleming reinvigorated the clubland heroes by adding sex, snobbery and sadism, and name-check Sapper and Buchan. I think the truth is a great deal more complicated than that. I think Fleming's virtues as a writer have very little to do with the usual stuff that he created product placement, megalomaniacal foreign villains and our usual conceptions of what a James Bond adventure is. Pretty much all the elements of a Bond novel or film were well established by 1953, and Fleming didn't really originate in any of the ways it's commonly said he did, in my view. I think his main innovation was in his abandoning of suspense, particularly the cliff-hanger, and in his focus on the internal life of his hero to a far greater degree than had been done previously. That and his prose style.
What do you make of Cheyney so far? I keep meaning to read more of him. I got an interesting email a few months ago from someone who now represents his literary estate, asking for my view on his position in the thriller canon. I think I need to do some more research.
Thank you for your very thoughtful analysis on Peter Cheyney’s possible influence on the later works by Ian Fleming – much appreciated.
You’re right in saying he never mentioned Peter Cheyney as an influence, I think. Cheyney does get a few mentions in John Pearson’s biography of Ian Fleming. Fleming is quoted in a letter to his editor at Jonathan Cape, William Plomer, as saying “another two months with my road drill could get the book Casino Royale into publishable shape…It remains to be seen whether I can get a bit closer to Eric Ambler and exorcise the blabbering ghost of [Peter] Cheyney.” Evidence, I think, that Cheyney was indeed seen as being ‘below stairs’. Ambler was the type of literary thriller Fleming clearly was aiming for. In Casino Royale, I think he achieved it, too. It’s also interesting to note that Raymond Chandler, when he wrote the “golden words” that “Ian Fleming is probably the most forceful and driving writer of …thrillers in England”, also mentioned Peter Cheyney’s Dark Duet, and “another fairly good one”.
When pushed in interviews, Fleming cited the likes of E. Phillips Oppenheim, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Sax Rohmer. In fact, these are all mentioned in the October 1963 Roy Newquist Counterpoint interview with Ian Fleming. By saying you think Fleming sailed pretty close to the wind with his influences from the novels of Wheatley, I take it that you are referring to near plagiarism, by modern standards? It’s quite shocking to think that Fleming may have plagiarised to some extent, as it was a given by critics through the years that Fleming invented many of spy fiction’s (or more generally thrillers’) conventions. But it is refreshing to hear a new, more accurate criticism coming to the fore. I think that Fleming was in some ways a literary magpie, as well as an innovator, and what he did was no different from many other writers who aped the style of another author or were influenced by what they had read.
You mention Whitefriar’s quote that Ian Fleming was a “Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade” – could you tell me where this review of one of the novels was published, and the full name of the critic, please – just curious. I have an inkling that it was for Casino Royale, but I could be wrong.
So far, I am enjoying Dark Bahama, though the focus is less on one agent than several. It couldn’t hold a candle to any of Fleming’s work, in my opinion, but it’s still an interesting read. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this one, but it was the last in Cheyney’s Dark espionage series. I agree Cheyney’s prose style is inferior to that of Fleming’s. Cheyney seems to write with great dash. He seems to over-use the semi-colon rather, in my opinion. For example:
“Isles sighed; closed the doors; went back into the hallway.”
“He walked down to the end of the passage; opened the door; switched on the light.”
It seems curious writing to me. You just wouldn’t find this type of writing in Fleming. Fleming gives much more detailed descriptions of places, characters, foodstuffs, technology etc. than Cheyney or a good many other thriller writers do, it seems. This is in many ways the Fleming hallmark, along with his often-human portrayal of James Bond. As you say, Fleming truly was a literary writer in the thriller world, and put a lot of care and thought into what he wrote. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Cheyney dictated all of novels to his secretary?
However, it would be interesting to explore the theory that Peter Cheyney was another of the “missing link” authors along with Dennis Wheatley that influenced Fleming’s writing. One wonders how many other “missing links” have been missed…
The Whitefriar review was of Casino Royale, and is mentioned by Pearson, in Part II of Chapter 17. Pearson mentions Pym's review in the Sunday Times (which said he might become the best English thriller writer since Ambler if he could make his work a shade more probable), and The Listener's 'supersonic John Buchan'. Then:
'Even the Observer conceded that this first thriller by their rival's Foreign Manager was a "sort of Peter Cheyney de luxe". The columnist Whitefriar, who writes for booksellers and publishers and journalists in W.H.Smith's Trade News, went one better and called him the "Peter Cheyney of the carriage trade". It was a compliment that gave Fleming particular glee, and thereafter Whitefriar — a strictly anonymous but very skilled newshawk of the book trade whose nutcracker chin is to be seen at all literary parties worth the name — received inscribed copies of all the Fleming books; and Fleming wasn't one of those authors who hand round complimentary copies freely.'
Interesting that two reviews compared him to Cheyney, and in a very similar way.
As for others who influenced him, I think the problem is precisely the one you pinpoint, better than I had done in my ramblings above. Critics have acted as though Fleming invented most of the conventions of the British thriller, when he didn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't a brilliant writer, though. Simenon didn't invent all the tropes of the crime novel. No, I don't think Fleming was a plagiarist, but I think he was sometimes very derivative, and he would be hauled over the coals for it these days, I expect. But there was an odd sort of invisible line between the critics and the best-sellers, so nobody noticed he was derivative. Once the films became huge international successes, I think a lot of people have presumed that all the stuff in Bond films or Bond novels originated with them. Now if someone reads a Sax Rohmer novel, they think 'Wow. This is so much like Fleming, but came before!' And it is. But the same applies to a lot of writers' work that came before Fleming.
Here are some conventions in the British thriller that predate Ian Fleming's work, and which you will find in lots and lots of them before 1953. I think you will find them familiar.
The supreme Bondian master-villain, ie Dr No, Drax, etc. Clearly, this sort of figure can be seen in Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, but there are many other examples that predate Fleming. Here's an excerpt from The Man With The Clubfoot by Valentine Williams, published in 1918:
'"You smoke?" queried Clubfoot. "No!"—he held up his hand to stop me as I was reaching for my cigarette case, "you shall have a cigar—not one of our poor German Hamburgers, but a fine Havana cigar given me by a member of the English Privy Council. You stare! Aha! I repeat, by a member of the English Privy Council, to me, the Boche, the barbarian, the Hun! No hole and corner work for the old doctor. Der Stelze may be lame, Clubfoot may be past his work, but when he travels en mission, he travels en prince, the man of wealth and substance. There is none too high to do him honour, to listen to his views on poor, misguided Germany, the land of thinkers sold into bondage to the militarists! Bah! the fools!"
He snarled venomously. This man was beginning to interest me. His rapid change of moods was fascinating, now the kindly philosopher, now the Teuton braggart, now the Hun incorporate. As he limped across the room to fetch his cigar case from the mantelpiece, I studied him.
He was a vast man, not so much by reason of his height, which was below the medium, but his bulk, which was enormous. The span of his shoulders was immense, and, though a heavy paunch and a white flabbiness of face spoke of a gross, sedentary life, he was obviously a man of quite unusual strength. His arms particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath the shaggy brows, that hinted at accesses of ape-like fury, uncontrollable and ferocious.
He gave me his cigar which, as he had said, was a good one, and, after a preliminary sip of his wine, began to speak.
"I am a plain man, Herr Doktor," he said, "and I like plain speaking. That is why I am going to speak quite plainly to you..."'
Ah yes, Dr Julius Gorner was not so original after all.
'Smersh', ie the secret foreign government agency that nobody knows about. Here's another excerpt from The Man With The Clubfoot, as I'm there already:
'You cannot penetrate far behind the scenes in Germany without coming across the traces of Section Seven of the Berlin Police Presidency, the section that is known euphemistically as that of the Political Police. Ostensibly it attends to the safety of the monarch, and of distinguished personages generally, and the numerous suite that used to accompany the Kaiser on his visits to England invariably included two or three top-hatted representatives of the section.
The ramifications of Abteilung Sieben are, in reality, much wider. It does such work in connection with the newspapers as is even too dirty for the German Foreign Office to touch, comprising everything from the launching of personal attacks in obscure blackmailing sheets against inconvenient politicians to the escorting of unpleasantly truthful foreign correspondents to the frontier. It is the obedient handmaiden of the Intelligence Department of both War Office and Admiralty in Germany, and renders faithful service to the espionage which is constantly maintained on officials, politicians, the clergy and the general public in that land of careful organisation.
Section Seven is a vast subterranean department. Always working in the dark, its political complexion is a handy cloak for blacker and more sinister activities. It is frequently entrusted with commissions of which it would be inexpedient for official Germany to have cognizance and of which, accordingly, official Germany can always safely repudiate when occasion demands...'
There are lots of thrillers predating 1953 that contain passages like this. Smersh was an updating of this old idea for the times, I think mainly using information from Mondich's book on the organization.
'SPECTRE', ie the freelance villainous organization. Again, this was very common, but see for example 'The Big Seven' in Dennis Wheatley's 1939 novel The Quest of Julian Day. This was a group of seven men behind a massive criminal organization involved in espionage, blackmail, dope-running, diamond-smuggling and white-slave trafficking. The members are
Occultist Sean O’Kieff, who calls the hero, British agent Julian Day, 'my dear boy'
English aristocrat and grotesque near-dwarf, Lord Gavin Fortescue
Egyptian Ismail Zakri Bay
Inosuki Hayashi, known as 'the Jap'
Azreal Mozinsky, a Polish Jew
Count Emilio Mondragora
Baron Feldmar von Hentzen
(I reckon if this example doesn't show that what are commonly thought of as Bondish components were very well established before Fleming's first novel, nothing can!)
Product placement. Fleming didn't invent it. Charteris, Sapper, Hornung, Sayers, Williams, and many others were stuffed with the high life, and Wheatley really kitted his heroes out in Bondian gear from the 30s on, with Lobb shoes, Savile Row suits, Sullivan's cigarettes, a Mauser, Bacardi, the lot.
I couid go on, but hopefully you get the idea.
Pray continue.
The reason I mentioned Gorner is simply to show how most variations of these conventions have been done. They have sunk into the blood of the thriller, and we know roughly what the options are that are available in any given situation. There are an infinite number of moves to make, but an awful lot have been made, as well. An example off the top of my head is Bond's drink being spiked in the film version of Casino Royale, and then his stumbling out into the street. It doesn't happen in the novel, of course. It seems rather Bondish, and the way it is acted and shot and so on all worked very well in our age and did not seem anachronistic in any way to viewers, as far as I know. But apart from a couple of things (like the defibrillator!) that entire scene could have been an adaptation of a British thriller from about 1916. Seriously. Scenes like that are in dozens of Le Queux and Oppenheim novels, in really just that way. But I don't think the scriptwriters meant it to be a tribute to old British thrillers. It's just become part of the formula, and such ideas are used unthinkingly almost, knowing it is part of the formula but bringing out the subtle character elements that have built up around Bond.
Similarly, I don't think Gorner - sorry, Hitch2!
Well, you see what I mean, I hope. Our idea of the 'Bondian villain' has really been around since the beginning of the 19th century. Dr No, Drax, Blofeld et al were Fleming's versions of this sort of character, which was an essential element of the thriller. He didn't invent the idea of such a character, as some think. Unfortunately, this means that if a journalist happens to read an old thriller and finds such a character, they end up writing an article concluding that whoever-it-is was a huge influence on Fleming, because look! A character who is a megalomaniacal deformed villain who invites the hero to a lavish dinner before torturing him. You could easily write just such an article on Valentine Williams, using only the two excerpts from one novel I quoted above. There are dozens and dozens of writers who preceded Fleming who were doing this sort of thing, and so if you want to find out how the Bond novels really developed and who Fleming's precise influences were, unfortunately you need to read rather widely in the early British thriller. I say unfortunately - it's terrific fun. What could be more enjoyable than discovering tons of thrillers with dashing secret agents going up against beastly foreign villains? If you're a Fleming fan, the likes of Wheatley's Gregory Sallust novels are akin to reading a whole run of alternate universe Bond adventures set in World War Two. Get stuck in!
There is a discusion of Islamic cultural politics but Rohmer doesn't really judge the Islamic world. I have order about 25 Sax Rohmer books, mostly used.
I look forward to reading them all in the coming 12 months including the "Sumuru" series. I am not really sure why Rohmer is no longer popular, I would not characterize his stories a racial and his style of writing and spelling is wonderful.
It makes me sad to think that had Fleming live and left the Bond series, we would have had at least 20 years of good storytelling of a different nature. Unfortunately we don't.
I Just got finished reading The Bride of Fu Manchu, it was very similar to certain concepts in Dr No. I actually believe the Shadow of Fu Manchu which is coming up, might have been the main story behind Dr No.
The Yellow Peril and the Terrible Hun and the Red Menace are all stereotypes and Fu Manchu and Dr. No (maybe even Colonel Sun) are all a part of this. I think this aspect of the Bond novels and the thrillers that came before and influenced Fleming is also very worthy of further serious study.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Yes, we need more threads of this quality in the Literary Bond forum here on AJB. -{
Keep us posted if you would!
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Hi perdogg, how many Fu Manchu novels are there? - which would you say most inspired Dr. No and Colonel Sun and which are the best novels to start reading?
I too find this thread on Fleming's influences quite fascinating.
There are 13 Fu Manchu novels written by Sax Rohmer, but you also have to remember that Rohmer wrote a few Gaston Max novels. Gaston Max is a French Agent/policeman (Sécurité de l'État).
In the series, later novel, the "Seven Sins" there is an explaination regarding the mystical properties of the number 7.
As I'm currently writing an article on Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun (1968), I'd like to read your thoughts on where Amis was simply following the lead of Ian Fleming's Dr. Julius No with his creation Colonel Sun Laing-tan. I'm very interested in the use of the 'Yellow Peril' theme/racism in spy and crime thrillers at the moment. I got a book entitled Fu Manchu and the 'Yellow Peril': The Making of a Racist Myth (1994) by Jenny Clegg at the weekend there and it's given me some ideas I'd really like to incorporate into my article entitled 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun'. It should be up on The Bondologist Blog before the end of the month.
Also, I'd like to know what are your favourites from the Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novels, and have you seen any of the numerous film versions, some of which starred Ian Fleming's cousin and the actor who portrayed Francisco Scaramanga, Sir Christopher Lee.
This is really a frascinating thread; one of the very best here on AJB! -{
You can tell that Rohmer was partial to middle eastern culture. I would also recommend the "Seven Sins". I think Dr No is more Fu Manchu than Col Sun just because of the elaborate ways Dr No tries to kill Bond in his obstacle course.
You can get a lot of the earlier Fu manchu novels for free on Amazon kindle.
Thanks so much for your recommendations, perdogg. This is a fascinating subject area. I will include a lot of this type of detail in my special interest focus article 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun' due to appear on The Bondologist Blog soon.