An Open Letter to The Transport Minister
(Copy to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and all borough and county councils). (Daily Graphic, Sept. 18, 1952)
By Frank Gray [Ian Fleming]
Dear Mr. Lennox Boyd —
With road casualties mounting towards the quarter of a million a year mark, there is genteel heart-searching in the public prints and a new coat of paint for the zebras.
The cosy fiction that “BLANKTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS” no more stems the tide of and shattered limbs and lives than do the other polite admonitions and mild scolds which greet the hasting family saloon on its merry way to that last rendezvous.
4,000 a week
It seems that so long as “MAJOR ROAD AHEAD” remains our most strident warning alike of a dangerous crossroad with a notorious death-roll and of a fairly innocent intersection, the price of myosis and well-bred understatement will continue to be about 4,000 casualties every week. (Five hundred casualties a day on our railways or air services would cause a bit of a stir!)
Even the compelling Black Widow poster, a most notable attempt by the authorities to make us think about keeping death off the roads, was the subject of so much squeamish clamour from our sensitive citizens that it was replaced by those folksy extortions, seen but not perceived, to do something about sudden death, civil defence, the Lord Mayor's fund, or making fish-cakes out of barracuda—one never reads far enough to find out which.
Raise Voice
Are good manners more valuable than all these lives and all this misery? Is it not time to borrow a little emphasis from abroad and let our road-safety signs raise their voices a trifle?
In America, at black spots which have caused many deaths, there are skull and crossbones signs with the previous year’s casualty total inscribed above.
Different towns and districts and even private concerns have their own campaigns and slogans, the latter often on two or three hoardings some twenty yards apart, building up to a punch-line.
Here are some of them:
“DON'T LEARN SAFETY … BY ACCIDENT" “WANT TO DIE? ... DRIVE CAREFULLY.” “LOSE A MINUTE … SAVE A LIFE.” "DRIVE CAREFULLY ... THE LIFE YOU SAVE … MAY BE YOUR OWN,” and the poignant “DEATH IS SO PERMANENT.”
Wrecks or cars are left at dangerous corners with “HE DIDN'T MEAN TO” inscribed above them, and garages put out signs like this: “DANGEROUS CORNER...SLOW DOWN...WE'LL FIX YOUR WRECK...IF YOU DON'T.”
An undertaker has this: “STEEP HILL...BAD CURVE HALFWAY DOWN...WANT AN APPOINTMENT?...ZOKOWSKIS’ FUNERALS...WE’RE WATCHING YOU.”
At holidays
At holiday times you will see the following: “DON’T LET DEATH TAKE YOUR HOLIDAY,” “DON'T GIVE YOUR LIFE FOR CHRISTMAS,” “DON’T GO OUT WITH THE OLD YEAR.”
At pedestrian crossings: “DON’T KILL A PEDESTRIAN … BECAUSE HE IS WRONG,” and “LOOK FIRST ... LIVE LONGER,” “DON’T TAKE A SHORT CUT … TO DEATH,” “THE SMALLER THE CHILD ... THE BIGGER THE ACCIDENT,” “KIDS DON’T KNOW … HELP THEM ... DRIVE CAREFULLY,” and so forth.
I admit these signs are strident, vulgar and ugly. But I really believe they’ll make the road-hog in his juggernaut and the motorcyclist trying to break through the sound barrier remember that he is aiming a loaded gun from the moment he leaves the garage—and that goes for the havering, crown-of-the-road, pride-of-the-family saloon, too.
Try Again
Incidentally, “BLANKTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS” was the fragrant thought (and the waste of paint) or another government.
I hope you’ll agree, Mr. Lennox-Boyd, that something more Winstonian should now be tried.
P.S. An afterthought—please declare illegal all stickers, celluloid canaries, pendant doilies and notices saying “KEEP OFF MY TAIL” on the windows of motor-cars. They obscure the vision, they are cheaply ostentatious and they diminish one’s love of one’s neighbour.
Fleming fans will of course recognize "the poignant 'DEATH IS SO PERMANENT'" as the title of chapter 24 in Diamonds Are Forever.
Detail-oriented readers might also recognize that this article doesn't actually have anything to do with the title of this thread, but I couldn't resist sharing it with you.
If you're curious why Fleming appeared under a pseudonym, Andrew Lycett has the details:
When not working on his book and his publishing interests [in 1952], Ian occupied himself with literary trivia...Another article burning a hole in his drawer concerned road safety. During his late-summer visit to the Bryces in the United States in 1950 he had become fascinated with the apocalyptic vision portrayed in the road signs. Americans were not afraid to suggest that car accidents led to deaths...On his return to Gray’s Inn Road, he asked Rodney Campbell, the New York correspondent of the Sunday Times, to do some further research which Ian used to write an article, "Death is so Permanent." But the Sunday Times editor, Harry Hodson, was not impressed by Ian’s efforts. "I don’t think it quite makes the grade," he told Ian stiffly.
Nearly two years later Ian rediscovered the text and decided that the most certain way of having it published was to enlist the support of his chairman. On 17 September he submitted it to Lord Kemsley with a polite covering note. The very next day, it was printed as a full-page spread in the Kemsley group’s tabloid, the Daily Graphic. His article had become "An Open Letter to the Transport Minister." It listed some of the crassest of Campbell’s American road-safety signs – for example, "The Smaller the Child, the Bigger the Accident" – and suggested they should be copied in Britain...[though] he provided no evidence that the American way of doing things led to fewer road accidents...Although Ian had signed his original letter with his own name, in the Daily Graphic he became Frank Gray, an unaccustomed pseudonym.
The Secrets of Interpol (Sunday Times, Sept. 4, 1955)
From IAN FLEMING, Special Representative of The Sunday Times
ISTANBUL, Saturday.
The Twenty-fourth General Assembly of the International Criminal Police Commission, generally known as “Interpol,” opens here on Monday. Through the courtesy of the United Kingdom delegate, Sir Ronald Howe, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, I shall be able to report on some of its deliberations.
Interpol is the longest arm of the law: with the major exception of the Iron Curtain countries, it reaches all round the world. Its object is to counter the growing internationalism in crime and to abolish national frontiers in pursuit of the criminal. From its modest foundation in 1923 in Vienna, Interpol has continued to expand. Today it is firmly established in fifty-two countries, and the murderer, counterfeiter or smuggler can hardly find safe refuge on the face of the earth from the deadly hand of the central Interpol radio station near Paris.
Every year the police chiefs of the member States meet to coordinate new methods of detection so as to keep ahead of the constantly improving science and ingenuity of the criminal, and every stock “Commissaire: from the detective fiction of the world is today arriving in this romantic city by air and sea and, more appropriately, by Orient Express.
On Monday, under the presidency of the formidable Monsieur F. F. Louwage, O.B.E., Inspector-General of the Belgian Ministry of Justice and President of the I.C.P.C. since 1946, there will begin a week of conferences on the major aspects of modern crime. These are some of them:
Drug Smuggling
First, the General Secretariat will present a report on the Illicit Drug Traffic, notably in opium, cannabis, morphine and cocaine. The Secretariat will report that Lebanon remains one of the principal supply centres for opium; that the Chinese, followed by the French and Italians, are still the chief traffickers in opium and that the amount of opium seized in 1954 increased by nearly 250 per cent, over 1953.
As to cocaine, it will be no news to the delegates from the American Narcotics Bureau that the United States remains the chief target of traffickers and that Cuba has developed into an important entrepôt for the Bolivian suppliers, and it will only confirm their suspicions that Italy, with its channels into American gangland, remains the chief European centre for the cocaine traffic.
The report gives details of certain cases in which the I.C.P.C. played a decisive role. Typical is the capture of about 330 kgs. of opium, hashish and morphine-base, and the twelve arrests effected as a result of co-operation , through the I.C.P.C, of the American Narcotics Bureau with the police forces of Greece, Lebanon Turkey and Syria. This is one of the biggest hauls since the war.
Scotland Yard's Concern
The conference will leave this realm of high drama and depravity to listen to some suggestions by Sir Ronald Howe for tightening up the policing of air traffic.
Apart from the flight of criminals, the smuggling of gold bars, diamonds and drugs by air has, in different parts of the world, become a serious problem, as has the security at airports of legitimate air freight such as bullion, precious stones and banknotes.
These problems are complicated by the speed with which a criminal can cross the world—perhaps before his crime has been discovered; by the ease with which privately chartered planes can land in a pretended, emergency at unguarded airfields, and by the vast expanse of aerodromes themselves.
Counterfeit Cheques
Mr. J. W. Kallenborn, the great authority on forgeries and head of the I.C.P.C. office at The Hague, will next raise the whole subject of cheque forgeries which, particularly with the increased use of travelers’ cheques, is becoming vastly more important than the counterfeiting of currency. Mr. Kallenborn’s recommendation is that a standard form of cheque should be adopted for each country and that an attempt should be made to make cheque forms as inviolable to counterfeiters as most currencies now are. He will even mention cases of cheque forgers printing cheque forms of their own design and drawn on imaginary banks, knowing that these can be passed through bank employees already confused by the present multiplicity of shapes, sizes and designs. Even before the war, counterfeit cheques yielded far greater returns than counterfeit notes and Mr. Kallenborn will quote some fabulous achievements, including in 1931, the cashing of a forged cheque for the then majestic sum of 3,007,000 French francs, the full story of which I would very much like to know.
Bank Robbery
Mr. Kallenborn’s plea will be supported by Dr. Giuseppe Dosi, head of the National Central Bureau in Rome, who will discuss the general relationship between policing and banking. He will detail the most modern methods of bank robbers (those who have seen the French film “Rififi” will have little to learn from them), including the latest electric drills, oxy-hydrogen blowpipes and the like, and he will make the unqualified statement that there is no such thing as a perfectly secure underground vault, safe or metal container, which can be depended on to protect its contents unless supplemented by a permanent guard or regular inspection. The dictum of Dr. Dosi is: “The degree of safety of any safe is inversely proportional to the time available to the safe-breakers.”
Crime and Disease
The nature of delinquency invariably takes up a great deal of the time of each General Assembly. Next week Dr. J. F. de Echalecu Y Canino, Professor of Criminal Psychology and of Neuropsychiatry of the Direccion General de Seguridad, Madrid, will re-affirm the theory that the more serious types of crime have their ultimate origin in the region of the cortical and the sub-cortical layers, and that nearly all crime is a bio-sociological phenomenon.
On the same line of country, Professor Castroverde Y Cabrera of Cuba will urge that health statistics should invariably accompany crime statistics in the dossier of a criminal because of the close connection between disease and crime. The painful stimulus of disease, he will say, provokes the individual to extremes of action and, since all extremes of action are anti-social, to crimes.
The Australian delegation will come back to earth with some hard facts about the migration of criminals, with particular reference to certain groups of “new Australians” who have settled in Australia since the war. Among them are Europeans whose crimes indicate that the perpetrators were trained in their nefarious activities in their mother countries, and the Australian police will make a plea for timely warning of the arrival of these undesirable migrants.
Since certain of the member States may be very happy to ship such people off to the other side of the world, I am doubtful that they will achieve more than airy promises.
The Face of Crime
However, the Australian police may make progress with their plan for coding the visual identification of the human being, which is basically an extension of the finger-print system to cover the human face. There is nothing new in the use of a “Portrait Parlé” such as “John Brown. 50 years. 5 ft. 9 in. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Low forehead. Straight nose. Wide straight mouth. Round chin and double neck cords,” but the Australians would codify this particular description into “John Brown. A4, D2, E3, R3, G4, H4, H2, I2, L13, M10, U41” which will certainly have attractions for the Radio Communications Branch of the I.C.P.C. Their documentation contains the complete catalogue of Portrait Parlé descriptions, from which I am interested to note that there are fourteen official face shapes from “pyramid” to “flabby”; seventeen nose peculiarities from “lump on tip” to “dilated nostrils” and five splendid eyelids described as: “hooded bags under eyes, blear-eyed, crying eyelids” and “reversed lower lids.” I also observe that violet eyes do not exist, but that green eyes do, and that “soup-strainer moustache” is officialese.
Radio Security
On problems of communication, the General Secretariat will make a plea for better radio discipline, and Inspector Sanjuan of Madrid will demand a secure cypher for all Interpol transmissions. He will preface his request with a short history of the secrecy of communications beginning with a method which was new to me. Apparently the first means of secret communication was to shave the head of a slave and write the message in indelible ink on his bald pate. Once the hair had grown to a reasonable length, the slave would be sent out on his journey and at his destination the hair would be shaved off again and the message read. This strikes me as more ingenious than those bits of paper modern heroes are always swallowing.
Forged Finger-prints
Amongst other subjects to be dealt with will be some highly technical proposals by Professor Charles Sannie, head of the Criminal Identity Department of the Paris Prefecture de Police, for an extension of the Bertillion finger-print system. His object is to defeat forged finger-prints—an ingenious invention of the modern criminal by which he actually profits from the accuracy of the finger-print system.
As an example. Professor Sannie will mention the case of a prisoner in gaol who impressed his prints on a piece of glass and gave the glass to someone else. This second party left it on the scene of a burglary which was committed while the owner or the prints had the best possible alibi of being himself in prison. He will also mention the moulding of false finger-prints on to rubber finger-stalls and other ingenious gambits.
Child and Bogeyman
Perhaps the most important but least technical discourse will be given by the President of the I.C.P.C. himself. Monsieur Louwage will discuss aspects of juvenile delinquency, and it is pleasant to record that in urging police all over the world to avoid becoming “bogeymen,” he will quote as the desirable attitude the firmness but friendliness of the London “Bobby,” and the success with which he gains the confidence and affection of youth. There will be nothing particularly new in what Monsieur Louwage has to say, but his words will certainly not be amiss in a conference of the chief bogeymen from fifty-two very different countries. Note: As you may have guessed, this report was written a week before Fleming's report on "The Great Riot of Istanbul." Next week I'll bring you Fleming's report on the actual proceedings of the conference, written after the riot.
Delinquents and Smugglers (Sunday Times, Sept. 18, 1955)
From IAN FLEMING, Special Representative of The Sunday Times at the International Police Conference
ISTANBUL, Saturday.
Despite the respective resignation and dismissal of its joint hosts, the Turkish Minister of the Interior and the Istanbul Chief of Police, the Twenty-fourth General Assembly of the International Police Commission tactfully averted its gaze from the surrounding shame and chaos, completed its labours and on Wednesday, discreetly thankful, took to its heels. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the secretariat much was achieved and many criminal loopholes have been blocked. But the most solid achievement was not in the final minutes of the assembly but in the public and private airing of the problems and cases of the police chiefs from 52 different countries.
Here, without committing Governments, and without the befogging intrusions of national sentiment, embarrassing topics could be discussed on the technical level. Thus the head of the Australian delegation could talk over piracy from the Pacific pearling grounds with the Police Chief of Tokyo, the head of the Egyptian Sureté could raise with the Inspector-General of Police of Tel Aviv the increased drug traffic from the Arab countries, and Mr. Donald Fish, B.O.A.C. chief security officer, could offer private advice to the director of the new Delhi intelligence bureau on certain ingenious ruses used for concealing gold bars in aircraft.
Juvenilia
Unofficial pooling of experience and knowledge is far more important and practical than the adoption of joint resolutions by representatives of 52 different countries with widely varying customs and legal systems. For example, juvenile delinquency sounds an easy topic to discuss. Everyone agrees that there should be less of it. But no resolution will cover even the words “juvenile” and “delinquency” as applied to, say, India, Scotland and Norway, let alone the other 49 States.
What about the criminal status of juvenile homosexuality, for instance? When you come to statistics, how do you explain that as against an international norm of 17 per cent., the percentage of crime committed by juveniles is 0.5 per cent. in Denmark and 44.5 per cent. in Scotland? In fact, the age of puberty—much later in Denmark—comes in as well as the differences in criminal law and the relative stringency of Scottish courts, and perhaps the Irish element in Glasgow. That is an example of the difficulty of codifying crime and therefore of codifying methods of prevention.
Illicit Gold
On the other hand, on a matter like gold-smuggling Interpol can be of real value, and it is probable that India, which is the chief target for the traffic, as America is for narcotic smugglers, will get real co-operation as a result of the remarkable facts her delegation laid before the assembly. It seems that she is being deluged with illicit gold. During 1954 nearly 40,000 ounces, valued at about £6 million, were seized by customs and police in 229 cases, involving 236 foreign nationals, and the delegation admitted that this haul can represent only a fraction of the illegal imports. Apparently it is coming in from all the gold-producing countries of the world— from Australia by steamship via Macao, Hongkong and Singapore; from Africa by fast lugger via Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf; from America by air via London, France, Switzerland and the Middle East. All this represents one of the most fabulous criminal networks in history, and the many Interpol States involved will now co-operate to crush it.
Other smaller points of interest that came up in discussion include the following. The U.S. Customs are particularly troubled by diamond-smuggling from Belgium and by the smuggling of watches and watch-movements from Switzerland. Regarding the latter. Dr. Grassberger, from Vienna, where next year’s Interpol conference will take place, observed that it is better to get real smuggled Swiss watches than counterfeit ones. For the past two years an Austrian gang have been running a side-line to the smuggling of watch-movements: they put cheap watch-movements in formerly discarded watch-cases, forge famous names on the dials and smuggle these too.
The United Nations delegate reported an interesting technical process for discovering the geographical origin of smuggled narcotics. The U.N. Narcotics Division has discovered that by alkaloid and spectrographic analysis the nature of the soil in which captured opium was grown, and thus its country of origin, can be determined, greatly facilitating the pursuit back down the pipe-line.
Policing Air Routes
Sir Ronald Howe, deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, presented the common-sense view of the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office on many recommendations where a conservative voice was needed. For instance on the occasion when the delegate from Chile suggested that your finger-prints should be verified before you could cash a cheque! As chairman of the sub-committee on policing the air routes, he fought for the rights and comforts of the passenger, and as a result we may see a simplification of the dreadful embarkation and disembarkation cards and a check to the practice in some countries of depriving the transit passenger of his passport during overnight stops.
(Incidentally I found unanimity among the senior delegates that Sir Ronald should be invited to become President of Interpol when M. Louwage of Belgium in due course resigns. This will be a great tribute to the prestige abroad of Scotland Yard.)
The corridors of the ornate Chalet Palace where the meetings were held were a splendid listening post. Here the Chief of Police of Thailand told me of the two elephants which form his riot squad. “Very effective against small villages,” he explained. Mr. Charles Siragusa, head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, explained his methods for “leaning on” Lucky Luciano, the famous American gangster who was deported from America and now lives in Naples. “He won't explain how he happens to stay so rich,” said Mr. Siragusa; “so my Italian police friends have interpreted this as withholding information from them and have put him on parole. That means that he may not consort with criminals and has to be indoors by 11 o’clock every night. One day soon he will happen to talk to a waiter with a police record or get home a few minutes late and will find himself in gaol. That is what we call ‘leaning on’ someone.”
The Director of the Paris Sureté talked of the iron-clad conspiracy of silence among the Dominici family. The Australian delegate complained of the expense of the Petrov case, which has not only left Australia with the burden of keeping Petrov alive but has meant the abstention of Russia from Australian wool sales for over a year. The famous Professor Soedermann, from Sweden, told me of a hitherto unpublicised plot to kill Hitler in 1942, and so on.
Ignorance is Bliss
The one police chief who has been sadly missed this year is the delegate from Burma. Last year at Rome the assembly was discussing sex crimes, and one by one delegates from the major Western powers reeled off their formidable and grisly statistics. Finally the Burmese delegate diffidently climbed to the rostrum. “I must apologise to the assembly,” he said, “for I have no statistics on this subject. We are a backward nation and have no sex-crimes. But as our civilisation catches up with those of the distinguished delegates who have been speaking I hope we may do better. Next year I will try to bring some good statistics on this matter.” Perhaps this year he was ashamed to come back still empty-handed.
Gangs C0ck a Snook at Interpol (Sunday Times, June 10, 1956)
By IAN FLEMING, The Sunday Times Special Representative
VIENNA, Saturday.
Allegorical figures representing industry, thrift, invention and wisdom look down on the police chiefs of 55 countries gathered in the Academy of Sciences here for the 25th assembly of the International Police Commission. The dark goddesses of sex, greed and narcotics would have been more appropriate witnesses.
The international drug traffic, gold smuggling, counterfeiting and prostitution are on the agenda, but much (too much) of this meeting will be occupied with a revision of Interpol’s statutes and with the election of a new president. Sir Ronald Howe, deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard, would have taken the place of the veteran M. Louwage of Belgium, but Sir Ronald is retiring to join a firm of merchant bankers, and M. Erie Ros, Stockholm’s chief of police, is likely to be elected.
Austrian Teddy-boys
Just as last year the criminal elements of Istanbul cocked a snook at Interpol by smashing up the city around the delegates, so, this year, have Austrian Teddy-boys shown their disdain by raiding the police museum at Graz and taking the pick of the modern revolver exhibits. These teen-age gangsters are known here as “halb-starke”—the half-strength ones—and their uniform is shiny leather jackets, shoes with two-inch soles and long greasy hair. The public is terrified.
A more attractive criminal element is the band of desperadoes who act as guides through the Iron Curtain. Their expert knowledge of safe routes through the minefields has so exasperated the Russians that they are moving the Hungarian curtain fringe a mile back. A conducted tour through the Hungarian Iron Curtain is cheap. I have been offered, and reluctantly rejected, a one-way passage for £2.
Greatest Safe-breaker
Vienna has a peculiar affinity with the mythos of crime. Over 100 years ago, a Viennese; Hans Gross, the first scientific criminologist, wrote his “Criminal Investigation,” and it remains the bible of the modern detective. Interpol itself was founded here in 1933, and today Vienna is the home of the greatest safe-breaker in the world—Joseph Bieraaus, who plies his trade as a locksmith.
His is a name to conjure with in the strongbox world, and he earns rich fees from the great safe-making firms. When the invasion of Britain was being planned he was asked if he could open the safes of the Bank of England and the Mint. On promising that he could, he was promoted sergeant and remained peacefully “on call.”
Then, of course, we have Nicholas Borrisov, alias Benno Blum, the original model for the Third Man, Harry Lime, who has opened his own cafe. Vienna is just the place for Interpol to meet.
Interpol, with its 250,000 card archives, seems to be increasing its cunning. Since its last meeting it has helped to come down on diamond smuggling from Africa, it has developed a new electronic method for detecting cheque forgeries and it has had some amazing successes against the drug traffic.
Drug “Shuttle-service”
One of the drug cases is interesting, because the gang used doctored cars—two Jaguars, two Buicks and a Fiat. Their own car body builder welded dummy crossbars to the chassis, capable of hiding away on each car up to 441 lb. of opium—a fortune’s worth. For two years these cars ran a regular shuttle-service between the Middle East and Marseilles. Then the police seized them all except the leader, a Lebanese “K,” who escaped.
Perhaps this summer, as you take your tryptique into some frontier office, that travel-stained Jaguar with the swarthy man and pretty girl which edged in just in front will be the redoubtable “K” with his latest girl, and perhaps if you follow their car to the next petrol station your keen eyes will notice that their tank takes only half as much petrol as your Jaguar does. Interpol in Vienna puts ideas into your head.
Fleming later wrote that his first Interpol conference, in Istanbul, "was great fun" and "by scraping together fragments from official papers and speeches and tying them up with informed gossip, I was able to write two long dispatches on 'The Secrets of Interpol' whose success was assisted by the Istanbul riots which took place conveniently over that week-end and on which I was able to give a scoop to my paper.
"The next year I went again to the conference, this time at Vienna, but my 'revelations' of the year before had put the police chiefs on their guard and, on this occasion, I was only able to produce a pretty thin three-quarters of a column. The learned papers read by the police chiefs had been more rigorously censored than before and were more carefully guarded, and the gossip dried up in my presence.
"I skipped the next year’s meeting in Lisbon, and that was the end of my acquaintanceship with Interpol."
Mudscape with Figures (The Spectator, August 5, 1955)
By Ian Fleming
Some people are frightened by silence and some by noise. To some people the anonymous bulge at the hip is more frightening than the gun in the hand, and all one can say is that different people thrill to different stimuli, and that those who like The Turn of the Screw may not be worried by, for instance, The Cat and the Canary.
Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the atmosphere of suspense into horrible acts. Poe, Stevenson and M.R. James used to frighten me most, and now Maugham, Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Graham Greene can still raise the fur on my back when they want to. Their heroes are credible and their villains terrify with a real "blackness." Their situations are fraught with doom, and the threat of doom, and, above all, they have pace. When one chapter is done, we reach out for the next. Each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier behind a fast motor-boat.
Too many writers in this genre (and I think Erskine Childers, on whose The Riddle of the Sands these remarks are hinged, was one of them) forget that, although this may sound a contradiction in terms, speed is essential to a novel of suspense, and while detail is important to create an atmosphere of reality, it can be laid on so thick as to become a Sargasso Sea on which the motor-boat bogs down and the skier founders.
The reader is quite happy to share the pillow-fantasies of the author as long as he is provided with sufficient landmarks to help him relate the author’s world more or less to his own, and a straining after verisimilitude with maps and diagrams should be avoided except in detective stories aimed at the off-beta mind.
Even more wearying are "recaps," and those leaden passages where the hero reviews what he has achieved or ploddingly surveys what remains to be done. These exasperate the reader who, if there is to be any rumination, is quite happy to do it himself. When the author drags his feet with this space-filling device he is sacrificing momentum which it will take him much brisk writing to recapture.
These reflections, stale news through they may be to the mainliner in thrillers, come to me after rereading The Riddle of the Sands after an absence of very many years, and they force me to the conclusion that doom-laden silence and long-drawn-out suspense are not enough to confirm the tradition that Erskine Childers, romantic and remarkable man that he must have been, is also one of the father-figures of the thriller.
The opening of the story--the factual documentation in the preface and the splendid Lady Windermere’s Fan atmosphere of the first chapters--is superb.
At once you are ensconced in bachelor chambers off St. James’s at the beginning of the century. All the trappings of the Age of Certainty gather around you as you read. Although the author does not say so, a coal fire seems to roar in the brass grate; there is a glass of whisky beside your chair and, remembering Mr. Cecil Beaton’s Edwardian décors, you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass. The smoke from your cheroot curls up towards the ceiling and your button-boots are carefully crossed at the ankles on the red-leather-topped fender so as not to disturb the crease of those spongebag trousers. On a mahogany bookrest above your lap The Riddle of the Sands is held open by at well-manicured finger.
Shall you go with Carruthers to Cowes or accompany him to the grouse-moor? It is the fag-end of the London season of 1903. You are bored, and it is all Mayfair to a hock-and-seltzer that the fates have got you in their sights and that you are going to start to pay for your fat sins just over the page.
Thus, in the dressing-room, so to speak, you and Carruthers are all ready to start the hurdle race. You are still ready when you get into the small boat in a God-forsaken corner of the East German coast, and you are even more hungry for the starter’s gun when you set sail to meet the villains. Then, to my, mind, for the next 95,000 words there is anticlimax.
This is a book of great renown; and it is not from a desire to destroy idols or a tendency to denigration that this review--now that, after the statutory fifty years, The Riddle of the Sands has entered the public domain--is becoming almost too much of an autopsy. But those villains! With the best will in the world I could not feel that the lives of the heroes (and therefore of my own) were in the least way endangered by them.
Dollmann, villain No. 1, is a "traitor" from the Royal Navy, whose presence among the clucking channels and glistening mudbanks of the Frisian Islands is never satisfactorily explained. His job was "spying at Chatham, the blackguard," and the German High Command, even in 1903 when the book was first published, was crazy to employ him on what amounts to operational research. He never does anything villainous. Before the story opens, he foxes hero No. 1 into running himself on a mudbank, but at the end, when any good villain with his back to the wall would show his teeth, he collapses like a pricked balloon and finally disappears lamely overboard just after "we came to the bar of the Schild and had to turn south off that twisty bit of beating between Rottum and Bosch Fat." His harshest words are "You pigheaded young marplots!" and his "blackness" is further betrayed by the beauty and purity of his daughter, with whom hero No. 1 falls in love (it is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have.)
Von Bruning, villain No. 2, is frankly a hero to the author, and is presented as such; and No.3, Boehme, though at first he exudes a delicious scent of Peter Lorre, forfeits respect by running away across the mud and leaving one of his gumboots in the hands of hero No. 2.
The plot is that the heroes want to discover what the villains are up to, and, in a small, flat-bottomed boat, they wander amongst the Frisian Islands (and two maps, two charts and a set of tide-tables won't convince me that they don’t wander aimlessly) trying to find out.
This kind of plot makes an excellent framework for that classic "hurdle race" thriller formula, in which the hero (despite his Fleet-Foot Shoes with Tru-Temper Spikes and Kumfi-Krutch Athletic Supporter) comes a series of ghastly croppers before he breasts the tape.
Unfortunately, in The Riddle of the Sands there are no hurdles and only two homely mishaps (both of the heroes’ own devising)--a second grounding on a mudbank, from which the heroes refloat on the rising tide, and the loss of the anchor chain, which they salvage without difficulty.
The end of the 100,000 word quest through the low-lying October mists is a hasty, rather muddled scramble which leaves two villains, two heroes and the heroine more or less in the air, and the small boat sailing off to England with the answer to the riddle. Before 1914 this prize must have provided a satisfactory fall of the curtain, but since then two German wars have clanged about our heads and today our applause is rather patronising.
The reason why The Riddle of the Sands will always be read is due alone to its beautifully sustained atmosphere. This adds poetry, and the real mystery of wide, fog-girt silence and the lost-child crying of seagulls, to a finely written log-book of a small-boat holiday upon which the author has grafted a handful of "extras" and two "messages"--the threat of Germany and the need for England to "be prepared."
To my mind it is now republished exactly where it belongs--in the Mariner's Library. Here, a thriller by atmosphere alone, it stands alongside twenty-eight thrillers of the other school--thrillers where the action on the stage thrills, and the threatening sea-noises are left to the orchestra pit. Notes:
Readers with long memories might remember that I posted this article a few years ago, but no collection of Fleming's literary journalism is complete without it, since "Mudscape" is one of his best and most sustained critical essays.
We already knew Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Greene, were influences on Fleming, but it's good to hear we was also influenced by Poe, Stevenson and M R. James. What Fleming praises in these authors are his own qualities as a thriller-writer. "Above all" he values pace and in a thrilling metaphor says "each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier." Pace is of great value in the Bond books, since it's used to hustle the reader past implausibilities and plot defects.
Fleming's counsel against getting bogged down in detail might sound hypocritical, but Fleming had to convince his readers of far wilder events and characters than the comparatively realistic Childers. And Fleming certainly took his own advice in avoiding "leaden" recaps. He kept his books short.
Predictably, Fleming is most entranced (and seeks to entrance the reader) by details of clothing and furnishings ("you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass"), down to the hero's spongebag trousers of the hero. As many have stated, he was sometimes more interested in things than people, but his interest was deep and sensual.
Fleming's biggest complaint against Childers involves his villains. Fleming's own, full of "blackness," are among his greatest strengths, and it is no coincidence that the weakest Bond books are those with the least substantial villains. We also have an amusing namecheck of the "delicious" Peter Lorre, who had already played LeChiffre by the time Fleming penned this article.
"It is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have." Is this why Draco was made so loveable ally? And why Tracy was killed so soon after the wedding? I jest.
Mountaineering Downwards (Time and Tide, January 2, 1954)
By Ian Fleming
British Caving: An Introduction to Speleology
Members of the Cave Research Group, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 35s.
"Down in a deep dark hole sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk." Irreverently the dummy hexameter jingled through my head as I digested this weighty tome on a subject which should surely not be taken quite so seriously. ‘The Science of Speleology!’ The sport of exploring caves really cannot be rated a science any more than mountaineering (Montophily?) or treasure-hunting (Thesauromania?). It is true that the science of geology is involved, also physics and geophysics, biology (‘biospeleology’ to the potholers if you please!), palaeontology and so forth. But these can also be part of mountaineering and even of treasure-hunting. Somehow these underground mountaineers have been persuaded to take themselves very seriously indeed and this tome is one of the results.
I am sorry that the Reverend Cecil Cullingford, the editor, did not fight shy of the project. He is the author of that cheerful and expert little handbook Exploring Caves which deals with the sport at exactly the right level, as an entertaining pastime with undertones of romance and adventure. Now he treats us to a volume so comprehensive that the only subject connected with caves that is omitted (or avoided) is the psychology of speleologists—why people like exploring caves—which would have been far more interesting than the sections on meteorology, mammalogy and gravimetric surveying.
Personally I should guess the whole business has something to do with a return to the womb. Certainly there is a touch of infantilism involved, as one may learn from the commonsense chapter on "Caving Code and Ethics" in which the writer criticises the speleologist’s love of secrecy and the jealousy with which he keeps his caves to himself, barring and locking them from others with the result that ‘the relationship between the potholer and the ordinary country folk is now in danger’. Then:
"The manners of some of them are deplorable. At the village Saturday night dance they argue with the doorkeeper about the price of admission, or steal in when no one is looking. One party even stole in to a dance by an unattended door and were dancing in spiked boots, wearing their safety helmets!"
Stalactites are stolen from caves and gypsum flowers and cave pearls "have been filched in their hundreds from near Settle".
But enough of deflating these excellent people. The best amongst them are incredibly brave expert mountaineers responsible for bringing to light a great deal of archaeological and cultural interest and who, in this scholarly though pompous work, remind us that our forebears lived in these caves, fighting for possession with sabre-toothed tigers, cave-lions, hippopotami, wolves, bears, rhinoceri, leopards and even mammoths. It is a thrilling and romantic sport that makes the skin crawl and the spine tingle and for those who enjoy it or who wish to become expert, and even for those who don’t know a spelunca from a hole in the ground, this book contains all the hard facts and some very beautiful photographs. I just wish that cavers wouldn’t call themselves speleologists.
I have become very leery of “underwater” books. The best one was Cousteau’s The Silent World and little but trash has followed. There are three aspects of submarine literature which particularly offend—the general archness of the writing (some of those translations from the French are excruciating), the dreadful jokiness, in which Haas painfully excels, and the bare-faced cheating of the reader about the perils of the deep, heightened by trick photography.
There are sea myths still to be explored—the mile-deep battles between sounding whales and giant squids, with eyes a foot in diameter, is one that particularly attracts me—but anyone who writes with bated pen about octopuses, shark, barracuda or the manta ray is a bluffer.
Two books before me offer reassuring evidence that the literature is settling down. Above all, they are factual. James Dugan received his underwater education from Cousteau. He helped with both the book and the film of The Silent World, and his The Great Iron Ship qualifies him as one of the finest research workers in romantic fact. His Man Explores The Sea (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.) is a history of undersea exploration from Alexander the Great's diving-bell to the bathyscaphe. It is a long book, splendidly illustrated, and it contains more excitement and adventure than any book I have read this year.
There are accounts of the great underwater treasure troves; the most dramatic incidents in the evolution of the submarine; the development of underwater photography (A catalogue sent to a South American amateur diver was returned with the notation “Undeliverable. Addressee eaten by a crocodile”); scientific underwater research on fish, minerals and oil; the great discoveries in undersea archaeology and gripping tales of underwater sabotage. Here is a sample:
There appeared before me out of nowhere a large white form. It had arms and legs, heavy and puffed like pillows. It had a dome-shaped head and a white eye. It was a Japanese diver wearing white burlap overalls over his diving dress to offer a less-attractive surface to octopi. He stayed there for two minutes watching my line strain, then he disappeared. He was going off to let me die, fouled in the kelp. I was hopelessly lost; with a tremendous effort I got to my feet. There, right behind me, with a knife in his hand, was the Jap diver. He was cutting my lines…
It is a thrilling and, with the exception of an occasional unnecessary note of farce, admirably written book which will be given for many Christmases to come to anyone who has put on goggles and gazed into this other world.
***
The Collins Pocket Guide to the Undersea World (Collins 21s.) is exactly what it says, and Ley Kenyon is to be congratulated on producing a really comprehensive and attractively written handbook on the sport of skin diving. There is everything here, with splendid photographs and drawings, and I am unable to fault it for common sense and basic general knowledge.
Captain Cousteau’s Underwater Treasury. By Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan. (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.)
By Ian Fleming
Swimming is really an extremely dull activity unless you are showing off to the spectators or competing at it. Swimming in the sea is just as dull as going for a walk in the middle of a snowfield or a desert. There is nothing to look at or occupy your mind, and you go on, automatically moving your limbs, until you are tired and it is time to go back.
Around 1942 Jacques Cousteau and his happy band of comrades altered all this. It was he who taught the common man to look under the sea as he swam, and, suddenly, swimming became interesting. Interest and curiosity, the act of focusing one’s eyes, and mind, have results you do not expect. I suppose I can swim for pleasure about half a mile before I get bored and therefore tired, but, with a mask on, and if the underwater territory is a new one, it is almost impossible for me to stop swimming. A mile or two is nothing, and I have a feeling that if I were to visit the Great Barrier Reef, I wouldn’t stop until a mud fish or a giant clam got me.
Cousteau, unhonoured and scantily sung, has put man back under the sea where he came from, and, from what the scientists say, he has done this by chance just at the moment in history when anyway we are being driven back into the oceans in search of more food and raw materials.
I am sure he never meant to cause this world-wide revolution, though, being the extraordinary man he is, he would certainly have been a pioneer in something. What first inspired him might, be expressed in the words of Thomas Fuller: “He goes a great voyage that goes to the bottom of the sea.”
***
Unfortunately, Cousteau writes far too little about his experiences. I doubt if The Silent World would ever have got written but for James Dugan, who somehow squeezed the book out of him. Cousteau just has not got patience for writing, and he is totally uninterested in the paraphernalia of fame. Fortunately, James Dugan keeps on at him, and one day we shall get his second volume of biography, the fantastic tale of his last ten years in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles, prospecting for oil for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (most successfully, I understand), plumbing the great ocean deeps, and other thrilling exploits of which we read only scraps in the newspapers.
But now James Dugan, who I am sure again did most of the work, has made him put together in this thick and beautifully illustrated volume more than sixty of his favourite underwater adventure stories from all literature. Everything is here—sharks, octopuses, treasure, submarine battles, exploration, archaeology, the glorious beauty of the coral reefs. Everyone who has ever put on an underwater mask will enjoy this fat, rich anthology, and if any teacher is looking for a wonderful source for reading aloud to boys—and girls, for that matter—of from ten to over twenty, then this, and especially now, on the threshold of the Ocean Age, is the book for him.
Thank you very much, Barbel. I'll be sure to check those out. I'm no Elvis expert (more of an MJ fan) but I enjoy his music and have a few CDs and books on him. I think my favourite song of his is his last, 'Way Down'. -{
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Partner! You Have Triumphed My Ace… (Daily Graphic, Sept. 28, 1949)
By I.L.F. [Ian Lancaster Fleming]
Did you know that “trump” was originally “triumph”? Did you know that spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs were originally swords, cups, coins and staves, representing the nobility, the clergy, tradesmen, and peasants—the main social classes of the Middle Ages?
Have you reflected that not even the French Revolution or the Communists succeeded in replacing the kings and queens in the pack with other symbols, and were you aware that Wild Bill Hickock shot all the pips out of a ten of spades at twelve paces?
Not me, and I still don’t know the rules of “Canasta,” the new card game which is sweeping America on the heels of gin rummy, after reading The Complete Card Player, by Albert Ostrow (The Bodley Head, 15s.). Nor do I know the latest contract bridge rules and I don’t know the odds for drawing a card at “chemin de fer.” These are serious lapses in an American card encyclopaedia “which should challenge Hoyle as the general reference book.”
But if you want to play Bimbo high-low at poker, Blind Hookey, Cedarhurst Gin, Clobberyash, Double-dummy with a widow, Idiot’s Delight, Oh Pshaw, Seven-toed Pete or Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle—this is the book for you.
Gamesmanship. By Stephen Potter. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 6s.)
By Ian Fleming
On the analogy of white lies, this little book is an aid to the white cheat, hereafter referred to as a “gamesman.” We have all met gamesmen and perhaps been defeated by their gamesmanship. It has fallen to Mr. Potter to be their first champion, the first chronicler of their “ploys” and, who knows, perhaps the subversive guide towards a new golden age in British sport when Ryder Cups, Ashes and the goblets of Wimbledon, Henley and the Olympics will all come home again.
After some introductory remarks on the history and origin of gamesmanship, the author proceeds to the “flurry” ploy, of which the basic axiom is “the first muscle stiffened (in the opponent) is the first point gained.”
His description of preparations for leaving home in the opponent’s car en route for the tennis courts is a workmanlike summary of the “primary hampers” which all of us have experienced at the hands of gamesmen. (There is a helpful “Sketch Plan to show specimen wrong route from Maida Vale to Dulwich Covered Courts.”) While touching on “clothesmanship” and “stakesmanship” the author sounds a note of warning against the counter-gamesman, and readers will be wise to draw wider conclusions than are suggested by the single example, the “Frith-Morteroy Counter.”
Reading on, it will seem to many gamesmen that the “Jack Rivers opening” is weak. I prefer the more deadly “Huntercombe” variant (not mentioned by Potter) which goes like this. On the first tee: Gamesman: “I say, did you see that article of Cotton’s in the ‘Lancet’?” Opponent: “No, what did he say?” Gamesman: “Well it seems you breathe in on your upswing and out on the downswing, and the point is I’m sure he’s wrong. I do just the opposite. Let’s see what we really do during this round and we can write in a letter shooting him down.”
Potter is on firmer ground in his remarks on “Basic Fluke Play” and I concur when he states categorically that there are only eighteen ways of saying “Bad luck”; but many will think that his chapters on Brinkmanship, Clubmanship, etc., are amateurish and even naive, and readers will have little faith in his rudimentary advice to card players. (He does not even touch on “Voice Control” in husband and wife partnerships at the bridge table!)
I have said enough to show that, though not definitive, Potter on Gamesmanship is a Christmas “must” for partners and opponents and for anonymous despatch to “that woman” at the Bridge club. Colonel Frank Wilson’s diagrams and illustrations, particularly his anatomical chart of the golfer’s stance on the putting green (show to opponent in the third week) are in the best tradition of English Sporting Prints.
The decline in the Faculty of Attention is neither new nor peculiar to America (Wordsworth remarked upon it in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads nearly 150 years ago), but America has developed to a finer art than we the technique of attracting without actually engaging attention. Hollywood, the Tabloids, the Comics, the Shiny magazines, the Digests, Radio and “Video” provide a daily dish of premasticated pulp which is rapidly conditioning the American palate away from any mental fare whose absorption requires an effort. (Hollywood is filming The Forsyte Saga under the title of That Forsyte Gal because “Saga” is considered a “difficult” word.)
In order to sell their 15s. novels (the standard price), American book-factories (as opposed to reputable publishers ) tempt the reluctant reader’s appetite by pressure-salesmanship of brightly wrappered sop-stuff—the title of this report is from a well-known blurb—with the result that writers and readers “with teeth in them are a rapidly dying race in America.”
James Marquand, for instance, has at last produced that bedtime story in swansdown prose towards which some of his recent work has, alas, been hinting. Point of No Return, which has led the fiction bestsellers for months past, is an agreeable meander through the life and pale loves of a character who closely resembles that American comic ineffectual, Mr. Milquetoast. These are harsh words, but from a sincere admirer of H. M. Pulham, Esq. and So Little Time.
Leading the general list is Cheaper by the Dozen (coming from Heinemann on October 10), a most engaging piece of real-life whimsy which describes the methods used to educate the 12 children of Mr. Gilbreth, an American consulting engineer and efficiency expert. Written by two of his children, it comes in much the same package as The Egg and I, which sold a million in America last year and has since done very well over here. Some religious books are being widely read, and there are many popular pink pills for pale psyches, such as Peace of Soul, Peace of Mind, The Mature Mind and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
It is sad to have to predict that admirers of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 will find themselves disappointed with The Rage to Live, the wearisome chronicle of a Pennsylvania family with a viper named Grace Caldwell in its bosom. This windy saga is not redeemed by extreme coarseness in parts, and it has the worst contrived ending of any novel I can remember.
Another casualty is Marc Brandel, whose adult and macabre Ides of Summer found him a discriminating English public last year. The Barriers Between is full of the turgid ruminations of a sensitive ex-G.I., whose heavy drinking in Mexico is too much for his sensitive stomach.
It is pleasant to be able to record that English authors continue in handsome demand. Mr. Churchill’s Their Finest Hour still outstrips all domestic war memoirs published this year and qualifies him for his newest laurels as chief literary dollar-earner for England (and top scrivener, for Sir Stafford!). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is also having a phenomenal success. Featured by Life and then by The Reader’s Digest, this brilliant book is more than repeating its reception in England. Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate is a best-seller, as was her The Pursuit of Love, despite the unfamiliar idiom and cliquishness of this comedy of lost manners. Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral is proving an excellent corrective to the American popular theory that we never fought the Japanese.
Finally, a book which will do much for our battered self-esteem, Our English Heritage, by Gerald Johnson. Mr. Commager, in The New York Times, concludes a review which would make all England blush with the words: “Every nation inherits a good part of its culture and its institutions. The United States has been fortunate because its inheritance comes from a nation whose peculiar contribution to civilisation has been integrity of character.” Note: The Hollywood film of The Forsyte Saga was eventually titled That Forsyte Woman. Released in 1949, it starred Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young.
I haven't read H. M. Pulham, Esq. (or anything else by the now-forgotten John P. Marquand), but I can recommend the film version, directed by the great King Vidor and starring the brainy and beautiful Hedy Lamarr.
Eldollarado: A Transient’s Scrapbook from New York (Sunday Times, June 28, 1953)
From Ian Fleming.
Tipping is a pestiferous business and it would be a wonderful thing if U.N.E.S.C.O. or the U.N. Commission on Human Rights would establish a World Tipping Code. On my last night in the Ocean Belle my advice on the subject was sought by a group of three American couples bearing names which you would know.
My eyes started from my head as each couple showed its hand. “I always give my cabin steward £20.” “We’ve done a lot of entertaining in the Veranda Grill and we're dividing £40 between the head waiter and the two others” “Would £5 be enough for the Turkish Bath man?” “And what about you?”
I was torn between various emotions. My feelings for the working-man triumphed. “I think you're being very generous,” I said. “You’ll certainly all get an extra couple of teeth in the farewell smile.”
Under cover of their rather thin laughter I escaped with my pair of jacks unseen. For the four nights, I tipped my cabin steward £2. He seemed perfectly happy.
***
These Names Make Bad News
For a time the Coronation (“It’s going to mean a great religious revival round the world” is a comment I have heard several times) ousted McCarthy as topic “A” in New York and I believe throughout America, but now he is top-billing again, and you simply can’t stop talking about him or reading about him.
There are various reasons for this: he has a really expert publicity machine, he is always springing or cooking-up a new surprise, people are terrified and fascinated by him, and “he may be a sonofabitch but, darn it, he's always right.” Homosexuals in the State Department, British ships trading with China, un-American books in American embassies abroad.
Each scandalous broadside has missed with ninety-nine calumnies and hit with one. And that one is enough in a country where every man is born with a chance to be President and where, in consequence, every man aches to prove the Administration wrong. McCarthy is just pressing the trigger of a gun which is loaded and aimed by a huge cross-section of the public.
Walter Winchell has been doing much the same thing for thirty years, and he goes on doing it on radio and TV to a guaranteed public of around ten million every week. Is there a connection between them? And what role does Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. play in all this, the Washington Fouché who has controlled the American secret police for the amazing span of twenty-seven years? These three men are the recipients of all the private grudges of America. They are the overt and covert crusaders against un-Americanism. The sun would indeed be darkened if history were to bring them together, or any closer together, before this giant country has found itself.
***
Tales from Kinseyland
But August 20 is K-Day and on that morning one topic will sweep away all others. For on that day will be published Dr. Kinsey’s “Sexual Report on the Human Female,” and on that day every newspaper, every dinner-table, will go hog-wild.
The Report is completed and scarifying tales and rumours are leaking out of the peaceful, beautiful campus of Indiana University where what might be described as semesters are being held to allow newspaper and magazine men (and women) to digest the huge tome and squeeze out the meatiest three-thousand word thesis for release in each paper on K-Day. Not a word more than 3,000 or someone will reach for a lawyer.
So far two semesters have been held. One in May and one in June. And there is another to come.
***
Jottings on a Nylon Cuff
Canasta has become the favourite card game of America, leading Contract Bridge by ten per cent.—a wide margin. Bolivia is the name of a new variation I do not intend to learn. Bolivia is really a standardisation of Samba, which I have also eschewed. Three packs. Going-out requires a sequence canasta and a regular canasta. Wild card canastas score 2,500 points. Black threes left in your hand cost a hundred points each against you. Game is 15,000 points. Who do you think is touring America promoting it? Who but that Queen of the Green Baize, our old friend Ottilie H. Reilly.
***
The latest and most deadly way of making a dry martini is to pour a little dry vermouth into a jug, swirl it round and throw it down the sink. Fill Jug with gin and place in ice-box until tomorrow. Then serve (or drink from Jug). Note that there is no wasteful dilution with ice-cubes.
***
The germ-consciousness of America is rapidly becoming a phobia, battened on by doctors, druggists and advertisers. People actually prefer foods that are frozen or tinned or preserved. They are more hygienic. And what about this? Brown eggs are virtually unobtainable in New York. “Customers won’t touch ‘em,” my Super-Market told me. “They’re dirty.”
***
Fifty-cent Angels
Broadway Angels Inc. has made a Common Stock issue of 570,000 shares at fifty cents a share to allow “the small investor an opportunity to employ funds in diversified enterprises connected with the Broadway Theatre.” The stock will be traded on the “Over-the-Counter-Market.” The issue was made on March 1 and the President of the Company, a Mr. Wallace Garland, tells me it is already three-quarters subscribed by some 2,000 investors.
“Of course, you can lose 100 per cent. of the capital invested in one show,” said Mr. Garland. “But look at ‘Voice of the Turtle,’ 3,000 per cent, profit. ‘Mister Roberts,’ 500 per cent profit. ‘Harvey,’ 4,000 per cent, profit. Do you think the British would be interested?”
“I’m sure they would be,” I said. “I'll tell them about it.”
(P.S. “Show Business” tells me that normally the angel has a thirty-seventy chance of making his money back. And of course, there’s Treasury permission to get. But it would be fine to own a piece of Ethel Merman.)
Questions of Colour (Times Literary Supplement, January 01, 1954)
By Ian Fleming
Fernando Henriques: Family and Colour in Jamaica. With a Preface by Meyer Fortes. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 18s.
There are about 250 million Negroes in the world and one of the great problems of this and future generations lies in promoting their happiness and well-being. Over the centuries, this will only be achieved by an extension of the colour bar so that part of the earth’s surface—perhaps the African continent—becomes a Negro dominion or reserve, or else by progressive removal of the colour bar until, through miscegenation, the entire population of the world is coffee-coloured. In England, until very recently, we barely perceived the problem. The solitary blackamoor was a nursery figure, a pet. In the plural he was a horde of fuzzy-wuzzies to be handled with glass beads or machine-guns.
But suddenly, almost since the war, the picture has changed; or rather our eyes, educated in humanity by the twentieth-century blaze of social enlightenment, see it differently. Suddenly we perceive the Negro as a tragically unhappy man ridden by a sense of inferiority which accompanies him, like a deformity, from the schoolroom to the grave. In our sympathy we lavish education and culture and medicine upon him only to be pained when, with advancement, he reaches for the weapons we once used against him and turns them upon us—weapons of legal and political argument, weapons of “giant powder” and steel. Floundering, we bomb him in one colony and in another invite him to fork-lunches at the Residency. Here he is a tool of Moscow, there he gets the O.B.E. Now he is pacified with a new constitution, then he is threatened with a battleship. Whichever way we attempt to disintegrate the black cloud on the horizon, it still remains larger than a man’s hand and, to those who think about it, just as menacing as if it were shaped like a mushroom.
Mr. Henriques is a social anthropologist and, while he might be indulgent towards these generalizations, in Family and Colour in Jamaica it has been his concern to focus a microscope over a small portion of this black cloud and to provide a detailed field-study of the mesh of colour relationships that exist even in a community as politically advanced and socially enlightened as Jamaica. The result is not only a valuable contribution to social science but a work of general interest, written with intelligence and sympathy.
The author, himself a member of a famous Jamaican family still prominent in the island, is lecturer in social anthology in the University of Leeds. It was thus not difficult for him to return to Jamaica and move among the people with intimacy and yet with eyes wide open. He concentrated on the County of Portland and its capital, Port Antonio, and his minute focus on the habits of and customs of this parish provides some of his most interesting passages of descriptive reporting. But it is his examination of the minutiae of colour relationships within Negro society that brings out the bitter colour warfares that accompany the usual economic class struggles.
“Colour,” he emphasizes, “is evaluated in terms of actual colour, hair formation, features and skin textures,” allowing for infinite combinations all of which have social significance. Thus, a dark person with “good” hair and features ranks above a fairer person with “bad” hair and features, and so on. Families become divided on colour lines, but in other spheres there are even greater frustrations. Choice of a career, promotion, public and private acceptance by others, marriage, in fact all social position is largely determined by colour. Even poverty plays a secondary part. Always there is that dreadful moment, generally at school, when some incident on the playground, some remark overheard in the street, will suddenly bring home to the little black boy that the fair boy will have the advantage of him for the rest of his life. It is no wonder that the conclusions reached by this stimulating and humane author are not encouraging, and the only disappointing feature of the book lies in the absence of some brave and thought-provoking suggestions for the future which would stir our minds as well as our hearts.
One of Our Submarines. By Edward Young. (Hart-Davis. 18s.)
By Ian Fleming
We make terrible mistakes at the beginning of all our wars, but the worst of them is the failure to give the maximum number of people a chance to fight the enemy from the very day war is declared. The National Defence Club is hard to join. Anyone not on a waiting list gets passed, from one “Sorry, old man” to the next until his ardour and patriotism are as scuffed as his shoe leather.
To be a round peg in a round hole in wartime is rare and priceless. Edward Young was one of the fortunate. Of the three Services, the Navy is the shop most tightly closed. It has to be. Irresponsibility or inefficiency by any one man in a ship is far more dangerous and expensive than the failure of his opposite number in the normal run of service in the Army or Air Force. And the citadel of this closed shop is the Submarine Service. A week-end yachtsman, Young was graciously admitted into the R.N.V.R., and then by a fluke had a chance of volunteering for submarines. He was accepted, completed his training, moved from ship to ship just, it seemed, as the one he left was doomed, was given the first R.N.V.R. command in the history of submarines, and dodged depth-charges and disaster in the same ship until he ended the war in her with the rank of Commander and with the D.S.O., D.S.C. and Bar. A wonderful war for one young civilian. How many other fine men were lost on the clumsy machine?
One Of Our Submarines is in the very highest rank of books about the last war. Submarines are thrilling beasts and Edward Young tells of four years’ adventures in them in a good stout book with excitement on every page. He writes beautifully, economically and with humour, and in the actions he commands he manages to put the reader at the voice-pipe and the periscope so that sometimes the tension is so great that one has to put the book down.
The author tells us little about himself, which is a pity, for the hints which penetrate through his modest cloak of self-effacement make us wish for more of his personal reactions as he climbed towards the final solitary pinnacle of command. It is interesting that when he reaches that pinnacle the writing seems to become slightly constrained and the earlier attractive freedom of comment and expression gives place to the voice of authority as he takes his deadly tube against the Japanese.
To anyone who has served in submarines it will not be surprising that the little communities he describes are so happy and so closely knit. A sociologist would probably say that the ship’s company of a submarine represents the highest form of democratic unity—from fifty to a hundred men, the duties of each one vital to the safety of all of them, social barriers impossible, discipline automatic and perfectly comprehended, successes and failures completely shared and always the subconscious framework of permanent danger to override and control the selfish instincts of the individual.
All this comes out in One of Our Submarines and the book is a fine tribute to a happy and gallant Service. But what a wonderful setting for a novel—a Caine Mutiny of the Submarine Service! Mr. Young is exceptionally qualified to write it.
Man The Ropes. By Augustine Courtauld. (Hodder & Stoughton. 12s. 6d.)
This is the autobiography of a man upon whom it seemed that the sun would always shine.
It is true that innumerable governesses and school-masters beat Augustine Courtauld for various types of rebellion, and that much of his later life consisted of getting in and out of scrapes with authority and equally uneven battles with resistentialist sun, ice, rock and sea: but the tough, gay quixotry of Augustine Courtauld always won.
At one time, in 1931, when the world’s press was full of the youth missing for five months in an ice hut in the Arctic, it seemed that here was another Edgar Christian destined to a young, lonely death in the midst of one of those tom-boy expeditions into the Frozen North. But his hero, Gino Watkins, soon himself to die in the Arctic, found Courtauld as Courtauld knew he would.
There were more adventures in the Arctic; then marriage to Mollie Montgomery, and to Duet, his dream-ship, which is still part of the family. Then came the war. To me these are the best chapters: when Courtauld, Polar Medal, Watchkeeper’s Certificate and all tried to enroll in the exclusive club that was the Navy and could get no further than a Civil Servant’s job in the Naval Intelligence Division. He was put in the Scandinavian Section, which was in charge of an expert on Egypt. One day the latest intelligence on the Swedish Fleet was asked for. Courtauld hunted through the files and produced a solitary, dog-eared “secret report” dated many years previously, which announced that “owing to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease the manoeuvres of the Swedish main fleet would be cancelled.” Many such incidents went into Courtauld’s early attempts to win the war and they make splendid, ironical reading. At last he got into M.T.B.s and then into the abortive Arctic Commando under “Red” Ryder, the V.C. of St. Nazaire, which ended with the murder in Belsen of the small party which finally got to Norway. Courtauld was transferred to a destroyer and then to ferrying landing-craft across the Atlantic.
VE Day came and Courtauld went back to his family, to Spencers, his beautiful house in Essex, and to Duet. It looked as if the sun would go on shining for him until suddenly the Almighty decided that Courtauld’s life had been too happy. He turned off the sunshine. Christopher, the eldest boy of six children, caught polio, from which it took the Courtaulds three years to rescue him. Neuritis struck Augustine and put him in a wheelchair, for the rest of his life. Mollie had a long nervous breakdown. The storms of Fate blew and went on blowing.
Now at last the skies have cleared again and the battered ship is back on an even keel. This splendid, gay little book of very English adventures is one of the results. All Augustine Courtauld’s life is in the Masefield quotation from which the title comes:
The power of man is as his hopes
In darkest night, the cocks are crowing.
With the sea roaring and the wind blowing;
Adventure. Man the ropes.
Mr. Coward Explains (Sunday Times, March 28, 1954)
Future Indefinite. By Noel Coward. (Heinemann, 21s.)
By Ian Fleming
Noel Coward is one of the most remarkable men of the century whose age (he is in his fifty-fifth year) he shares. Genius is not a word to be thrown about carelessly, but any man who can succeed in giving pleasure, in most of the creative media, to half the inhabitants of the world for thirty years must possess a measure of it.
Much of his secret lies in his passionate professionalism. A master of technique, he works extremely hard and with minute accuracy, discipline and integrity. The second volume of his autobiography shows all these qualities, and it may thus seem very unfair to complain that in this admirably written book it is just these professional virtues that sometimes obtrude upon the narrative. If only he had thrown away those diaries. If only he had not bothered so much about dates and places and ships and planes. If only he had not found it necessary to put the record straight about his war service, his court case on a currency offence, the incident of the “Brooklyn Boys.”
Mr. Coward’s public life has demonstrated that he is a man of courage, devotion to duty and patriotism. If he had done nothing more during the war years than produce In Which We Serve, he would have done as much for the Allied cause as any man in his profession; yet in this vastly readable and entertaining book there occasionally creeps in a rather querulous note of self-justification which seems out of place in a man of his attainments. But when he forgets the critic inside himself who has always been his sternest mentor and when he thinks only of the reader he provides a scintillating picture of his life before and during the war.
On every page there are passages of brilliant observation, wit and humanity, which allow one to hope that when his third volume, Past Imperfect, comes to be written, he will forget his own private pains and write only according to his particular genius, which is to give pleasure to intelligent people.
Books and Authors Abroad: English Laurels in America (Sunday Times, July 4, 1948)
By Ian Fleming
In the United States the literary event of the year has been the publication of the first of five volumes of Mr. Churchill’s war memoirs entitled The Gathering Storm. The New York Times and Life have published long extracts from the book, as has The Daily Telegraph in England, and now a further huge section of the American public will read this great English adventure story by Britain’s first citizen.
The efforts of our official propaganda organisations are small beer beside the vast American audience created by Mr. Churchill, and it is debatable whether the handiwork of any other single Englishman will bring in more hard currency this year. The Gathering Storm, which has been acclaimed by the critics with “rave” but reverent notices, deals with the prelude to war—in the author’s words, “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm”—and with the Twilight War, ending in May, 1940. The volume (nearly 800 pages with the appendices) closes with Mr. Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.
Due largely to the shortage .of paper and cloth, the majority of the British public will not read this great segment of their own history until Messrs. Cassell publish the volume here in September.
Few other major works of general interest have appeared. "Vinegar” Joe Stilwell’s posthumous and peppery memoirs of the Burma campaign have not been praised, and Mr. Sumner Welles’s We Need Not Fail has made no stir. Dr. Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male still leads the best-sellers for the worst reasons. In fact, it is a stodgy agglomeration of statistics and graphs whose findings will be treated with respect by the medical authorities to whom it is addressed. The Hatfields and the McCoys, by Virgil Jones, is an exciting piece of folklore retelling the story of the famous family feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border. The Harvard University Press are publishing the definitive Letters of Edgar Allan Poe in October.
English authors are well represented by Edward Crankshaw’s Russia and the Russians and by Simon Nowell Smith’s scholarly piece of Henry James research, The Legend of the Master, and English novelists easily lead a barren fiction field. Evelyn Waugh’s piece of side-splitting necrophilia, The Loved One, which has so far only appeared here in Horizon (Chapman & Hall are to publish in book form), has been greeted with masochistic ecstasy, and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter has been chosen as the Book of the Month.
Forthcoming volumes include a new James M. Cain The Moth; The Sky and the Forest, a tale of Africa by C. S. Forester; No High Way, by Nevil Shute; and Ape and Essence, a new Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World vein. Ernest Hemingway’s long new novel is said to be maturing slowly.
American books are only qualitatively absent from this short survey. The output of literary chewing-gum continues apace, but the public is surfeited, probably owing to “an unfortunate combination of higher prices and lower quality,” as the Saturday Review of Literature puts it. The publishers moan and groan, but the drumming of the book clubs, the tireless superlatives of reviewers, and ever shinier book jackets are of no avail and, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a slump is a slump is a slump.
Pleasure Island: the book of Jamaica. Edited by Esther Chapman. (Chantry Publications. 21s.)
There should be a series of Baedeker-Michelin guides to the British Empire. I offer the suggestion with respectful urgency to the Ministries concerned and to the Colonial Development Corporation.
Esther Chapman’s guide book to Jamaica provides an excellent model, edited as it is with intelligence and common sense. There should be a better map of the island, and the section devoted to the local fauna could be improved, but in a beautifully illustrated book of twenty-one chapters covering everything of interest to a tourist or a resident such minor criticisms are captious. Esther Chapman has done a great service to Jamaica.
***
Island in the Sun (Sunday Times, January 12, 1958)
By Ian Fleming
Jamaica. By Peter Abrahams. (Corona Library: H.M. Stationery Office. 25s.)
There ought to be a Baedeker series on the British Commonwealth. Living small lives in this dull little Island at its centre, we have no idea of the fabulous lands and islands in the sun that are linked to us by history, speech and currency. Not even distance separates us now that you can be in the Caribbean in twenty or Singapore in forty hours’ flying time—only poverty and, more important, our cliff-girt mentality.
While waiting for the philanthropist who will finance the series, the next best thing is the Corona Library, sponsored by the Colonial Office, an imaginative and luxuriously conceived project which has brilliantly examined Hongkong, Sierra Leone, Nyasaland, British Guiana, and now Jamaica.
Jamaica is rather more serious-minded than some of the others, and Mr. Peter Abrahams’s treatment is thorough rather than seductive. The flora and fauna, for instance, which, with the landscape, are Jamaica's glory, are given short shrift compared with politics, administration and various aspects of development and welfare; but the latter are admirably handled, generally with entertaining and illuminating scraps of conversation with the Jamaican man-in-the-street.
The production is up to the very high Corona standards, and the line drawings by Rosemary Grimble, daughter of “Grimble of the Islands,” are particularly attractive and apposite.
Three Men at the Motor Show (Sunday Times, October 21, 1956)
The Sunday Times asked three men to go to the Motor Show and to give their uninhibited views on what they found there. Two are family motorists, the third a famous racing driver. Their views have been kept deliberately non-technical. This was the “panel” of critics:
STIRLING MOSS has owned several small family saloons, the most recent a Standard 8 fitted with a 10 h.p. engine.
IAN FLEMING drives a Ford Thunderbird which is the envy of his friends.
GODFREY SMITH fits a wife and a baby daughter into a 1955 Morris Minor.
The place, Earls Court, on the day of the preview. The critics begin:
FLEMING: Nothing really startling this year. The usual difficulty in choosing between too many models with much the same good English qualities. Most of the cars are, as usual, too good for the drivers.
SMITH: There’s no doubt that this will go down in history as the two-pedal car Show. I think our manufacturers deserve a pat on the back for the way they’ve got them into production.
MOSS: I wish there had been a few more gimmicks to attract people to British cars. Rovers have done it with their turbine. And look at the crowds round that Buick Centurion mock-up. Heaven knows when it will be in production, but it’s full of blueprint ideas. I’m surprised that at least the B.M.C. doesn’t have a “Car of the Future” to get us all excited. Well, we’ve got to start somewhere. Let’s start in the millionaire’s class. The Rolls is still supreme, of course. It’s a name that commands affection all over the world.
FLEMING: I’m sorry the old basketwork Rolls has gone for ever. Incidentally, I gather it’s quite untrue they ever thought of turning out a £2,000 Rolls-Royce. Just a rumour. Their S Series Bentley is the most successful car Rolls have ever built. Waiting list of over a year. I’ve tried one, it’s like driving a Swiss watch.
SMITH: I must say I hanker after the Continental, but there really ought to be more luggage space in a car of that price. You can hardly get one normal suitcase into the boot. I’d like to see what the Italian coachbuilders could do with it.
MOSS: But for real Lord Mayor comfort give me that big Daimler. There’s room for six in the back. It’s practically a drawing-room on wheels.
FLEMING: I’m glad to hear Daimler’s have fitted a new heater. I’ve never known an engine run so coolly, but, as a result, the heater just didn’t heat.
SMITH: I think the companies should give one a total guarantee for accessories and the accessory firms should issue a guarantee to the motor manufacturers. If I buy a new suit and the buttons break my tailor replaces them. He doesn’t send me hunting round London after the button manufacturer.
MOSS: I agree. What I want is a really truthful petrol gauge that doesn't say “empty” when I’ve got another 50 miles’ driving in hand (or vice versa), windscreen wipers that don’t make a noise, and long window handles that move the window up and down with one stroke. But let’s get back to cars. Here’s the Aston Martin. Lovely car, and that body design is truly original. Stacks of room for luggage, all-round visibility and good driving positions. I’m not impressed by that open Superleggera model. Looks nice enough but visibility is poor, and there’s hardly room for anything but a small blonde with a sponge bag. May be all right for Italy. It’s the same old problem: how to marry the beautiful and the practical.
SMITH: Don’t you think the Fords come closest to doing that?
MOSS: I do. I think their styling is probably the most up to date in this country.
FLEMING: The Riley owners used to be some of the staunchest fans in motoring, but I think, since the B.M.C. took over Rileys, the fans have been slipping away. Rileys seem to be rather the ugly duckling of the B.M.C. group. All the brains seem to be going into the Austins and Morrises. Look at the Austin Healeys. They ought to bring out a Riley-Healey, and get a bit of zest back into the car.
SMITH: They’ve let Jaguar get the edge on them.
MOSS: Marvellous cars. Jaguar performance in racing since the war is one of the things we can really be proud of. Wonderful workmanship and finish. I can’t see how they do it for the price.
FLEMING: Pretty imposing front view on the new one but I don’t see why they need all those lamps and horns and traffic signals. There are ten of them altogether.
SMITH: They could have put the horns behind the radiator grille and put the traffic lights into the sidelights.
MOSS: Here’s the new Rover 105. Rover owners are still as faithful as Riley owners used to be. I’m not surprised. They’ve always built a good, car and they’ve always been forward-looking. Don’t know when this turbine model of theirs will be on the road. It’ll be quite a race with Detroit, but it’s going to be a new kind of motoring when it comes. But take the 105. It’s a genuine two-pedal car, and what’s so extraordinary about it is that it’s the only British company with its own automatic transmission and torque converter. Usual good Rover driving lay-out, and plenty of room for parcels.
SMITH: One of the reasons why It has always been a favourite with women.
MOSS: Women don’t have to worry about their comforts so much nowadays. All the big manufacturers look after them. Take the styling of that Austin Estate car. I really like that red and white combination. Their colours are some of the most dashing in the Show. It’s a big selling point, now people are less conservative about colour schemes.
FLEMING: The Armstrong Siddeley is another luxurious affair at a reasonable price. Wonderfully silent engine and as fast as you like, though I think the springing’s a bit soft for really fast driving. You can’t get that comfortable ride and still go round corners at sixty.
MOSS: They’ve tightened it up on the 238, but I think its looks could be improved. There’s a sort of downward slant about the bonnet which I don’t like. Here are Bristols next door. Good fast cars and a clean, handsome body without any nonsense. They make that 2-litre work pretty hard, but it seems to like it. Rather a dull stand with just two drab-coloured cars. One of their competition models would have livened it up.
SMITH: They’ve certainly put some work into my Morris Minor. I’d like to see a long road test between this 1,000 model and the Volkswagen. I hear that the gearbox is a beauty. And I’m delighted to find they’ve put more steam in the engine.
FLEMING: I haven’t tried either of them, but I’d rather have the Morris or the little Austin every time. At least you have an engine in front of you in case you hit something. In the Volkswagen there’s nothing under that bonnet except perhaps a suitcase.
MOSS: But here’s the M.G. I must say I like the appearance of the new hard-top. I only hope that it won’t be too noisy inside. If your father has promised you a sports car for your twenty-first birthday, there are plenty to choose from these days. There's the M.G., the Austin Healey (I like those bright colours they've laid on for the American market) and the new six-cylinder should be a smooth job. Then there’s the Triumph with disc brakes on the front wheels—they’ll all be having them in time I expect—and now there's the little Berkeley, which is pretty good value at £575. It’s stripped to essentials, but somebody had plenty of initiative to put a really cheap sports car on the road. The man on the stand says they’ve got orders of upwards of 5,000 already. Anyway, I'd like to be 21 again with all those to choose from.
FLEMING: What about the Citroen? Have you tried it? I gather they’re having plenty of trouble with it in France. It’s so revolutionary there aren’t many garages who can repair it if anything goes wrong. It came out a bit too quickly, I dare say. But Frenchmen rave about it.
MOSS: It’s probably the most comfortable jar in the show, and packed full of brilliant ideas. Huge boot, wonderful visibility and every kind of gadget. It deserves to succeed and I think it certainly will once it has settled down. Let's have a look at the Skoda and see what they’re doing on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Of course this is very much a Show model. But it’s got plenty of bright ideas too—propeller-shaft running through the main chassis member, independent front and rear springing, and notice those aluminium fittings. I don’t know why we don’t take to them instead of chrome. You’ll find them on that Swiss-bodied Alvis, too. Another fine-looking car. But this Skoda looks a workmanlike Job. Rather austere, but I suppose it’s made for rather austere people.
SMITH: Is there anything else you notice looking round the Show?
MOSS: I like the new Station Wagon models. There’ll be more of them. They’re ideal for a family and particularly for holidays abroad, and the coach builders like Grosvenor and Abbott have got a fine line into them. Wheel trims are much smarter. Take a look at the Austins. There’s still too much chrome about. Vauxhalls make such a good car that I don’t know why they have to smother it in the stuff. The same applies to those tiny chrome strips on the face of the Singer. Finish seems to be getting better and better, and I hope basic workmanship is keeping up with It. Prices on balance seem more or less constant, but we're getting more for our money—extra instruments for example. That’s about all. There’s quite a lot to be proud of here. If we’ve criticised a bit, so will the other people who come to the Show.
FLEMING: If you could have your pick of the cars, what would it be?
MOSS: I’ll have an Aston Martin DB 2.4 saloon, if you’ll quieten the engine a trifle. Off-white and silver-green.
SMITH: I’ll have a Continental Bentley.
FLEMING: An Austin 105 Station Wagon for me. Elephant’s-breath grey.
MOSS: One thing we do agree on, then. We’re all going to go on driving British. Notes: As we'll see next week, Fleming did not buy that station wagon and did not go on buying British!
The Times obituary for Godfrey Smith, future editor of the Sunday Times notes that "His first job after Oxford was as personal assistant to Lord Kemsley, owner of The Sunday Times. In 1956, he was appointed news editor, where he got to know Ian Fleming, who was the foreign manager. When Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale, was published he gave Smith a signed copy. Among his reporters was John Pearson...They were to become lifelong friends, with Pearson always referring to Smith as 'the Guvnor'."
Those of you familiar with Ian Fleming's TV treatment "Murder on Wheels" will know that the plot involves James Bond saving Stirling Moss from agents of SMERSH, who hope to sabotage an auto race. Fleming wrote "The whole brunt of this episode is, of course, borne by the motor racing. Stirling Moss has, in fact, provided me with the two crash manoeuves as described and there is little doubt that he and Mr. Vanderwell, who designed and owns the Vanwalls, would co-operate in the filming." Alas, it was never to be.
Connoisseurs’ Choice (Sunday Times, October 21, 1962)
As a further guide to would-be buyers at the Motor Show, The Sunday Times invited some of its contributors and staff, as well as some recognised experts, to say what car they would choose and why.
Ian Fleming:
I would choose a Studebaker Avanti, full four-seater V8 Gran Sport, supercharged by Paxton, styled by Raymond Loewy. Price around £3,000.
Having driven two Thunderbirds for six years, during which not a light bulb has fused and paint and chromium have not wilted, despite a garageless life, I have become wedded to American cars when they have something approximating to European styling.
I am now switching to the Studebaker, which has always produced first class cars, and
has now, with the Avanti, created something really startling—top speed with four up of over 160 m.p.h. and acceleration of 0-60 in 7.4 seconds. My model, packed with intelligent gimmicks such as switches in the roof, aircraft-type levers for the heating, disc brakes and a powerful built-in roll bar in case I turn over, is being delivered in a few weeks.
Note: In his 1964 interview with Playboy, Ian Fleming said the following about his cars:
"I like a car I can leave out in the street all night and which will start at once in the morning and still go a hundred miles an hour when you want it to and yet give a fairly comfortable ride. I can’t be bothered with a car that needs tuning, or one that will give me a lot of trouble and expenditure. So I’ve had a Thunderbird for six years, and it’s done me very well. In fact, I have two of them, the good two-seater and the less-good four-seater. I leave them both in the street, and when I get in and press the starter, off they go, which doesn’t happen to a lot of motorcars.
Now, the Studebaker supercharged Avanti is the same thing. It will start as soon as you get out in the morning; it has a very nice, sexy exhaust note and will do well over a hundred and has got really tremendous acceleration and much better, tighter road holding and steering than the Thunderbird. Excellent disk brakes, too. I’ve cut a good deal of time off the run between London and Sandwich in the Avanti, on braking power alone. So I’m very pleased with it for the time being."
Thanks Revelator, and it's hilarious to see 007 described as "Britain's answer to Perry Mason"!!!
Yes, I'm not quite sure what the writer was thinking there! Are there any similarities at all? I also wonder if Bond himself would have eventually driven a Studebaker Avanti if Fleming had lived longer. After all, Bond drives a Thunderbird in TSWLM.
Comments
(Copy to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and all borough and county councils). (Daily Graphic, Sept. 18, 1952)
By Frank Gray [Ian Fleming]
Dear Mr. Lennox Boyd —
With road casualties mounting towards the quarter of a million a year mark, there is genteel heart-searching in the public prints and a new coat of paint for the zebras.
The cosy fiction that “BLANKTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS” no more stems the tide of and shattered limbs and lives than do the other polite admonitions and mild scolds which greet the hasting family saloon on its merry way to that last rendezvous.
4,000 a week
It seems that so long as “MAJOR ROAD AHEAD” remains our most strident warning alike of a dangerous crossroad with a notorious death-roll and of a fairly innocent intersection, the price of myosis and well-bred understatement will continue to be about 4,000 casualties every week. (Five hundred casualties a day on our railways or air services would cause a bit of a stir!)
Even the compelling Black Widow poster, a most notable attempt by the authorities to make us think about keeping death off the roads, was the subject of so much squeamish clamour from our sensitive citizens that it was replaced by those folksy extortions, seen but not perceived, to do something about sudden death, civil defence, the Lord Mayor's fund, or making fish-cakes out of barracuda—one never reads far enough to find out which.
Raise Voice
Are good manners more valuable than all these lives and all this misery? Is it not time to borrow a little emphasis from abroad and let our road-safety signs raise their voices a trifle?
In America, at black spots which have caused many deaths, there are skull and crossbones signs with the previous year’s casualty total inscribed above.
Different towns and districts and even private concerns have their own campaigns and slogans, the latter often on two or three hoardings some twenty yards apart, building up to a punch-line.
Here are some of them:
“DON'T LEARN SAFETY … BY ACCIDENT" “WANT TO DIE? ... DRIVE CAREFULLY.” “LOSE A MINUTE … SAVE A LIFE.” "DRIVE CAREFULLY ... THE LIFE YOU SAVE … MAY BE YOUR OWN,” and the poignant “DEATH IS SO PERMANENT.”
Wrecks or cars are left at dangerous corners with “HE DIDN'T MEAN TO” inscribed above them, and garages put out signs like this: “DANGEROUS CORNER...SLOW DOWN...WE'LL FIX YOUR WRECK...IF YOU DON'T.”
An undertaker has this: “STEEP HILL...BAD CURVE HALFWAY DOWN...WANT AN APPOINTMENT?...ZOKOWSKIS’ FUNERALS...WE’RE WATCHING YOU.”
At holidays
At holiday times you will see the following: “DON’T LET DEATH TAKE YOUR HOLIDAY,” “DON'T GIVE YOUR LIFE FOR CHRISTMAS,” “DON’T GO OUT WITH THE OLD YEAR.”
At pedestrian crossings: “DON’T KILL A PEDESTRIAN … BECAUSE HE IS WRONG,” and “LOOK FIRST ... LIVE LONGER,” “DON’T TAKE A SHORT CUT … TO DEATH,” “THE SMALLER THE CHILD ... THE BIGGER THE ACCIDENT,” “KIDS DON’T KNOW … HELP THEM ... DRIVE CAREFULLY,” and so forth.
I admit these signs are strident, vulgar and ugly. But I really believe they’ll make the road-hog in his juggernaut and the motorcyclist trying to break through the sound barrier remember that he is aiming a loaded gun from the moment he leaves the garage—and that goes for the havering, crown-of-the-road, pride-of-the-family saloon, too.
Try Again
Incidentally, “BLANKTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS” was the fragrant thought (and the waste of paint) or another government.
I hope you’ll agree, Mr. Lennox-Boyd, that something more Winstonian should now be tried.
P.S. An afterthought—please declare illegal all stickers, celluloid canaries, pendant doilies and notices saying “KEEP OFF MY TAIL” on the windows of motor-cars. They obscure the vision, they are cheaply ostentatious and they diminish one’s love of one’s neighbour.
Fleming fans will of course recognize "the poignant 'DEATH IS SO PERMANENT'" as the title of chapter 24 in Diamonds Are Forever.
Detail-oriented readers might also recognize that this article doesn't actually have anything to do with the title of this thread, but I couldn't resist sharing it with you.
If you're curious why Fleming appeared under a pseudonym, Andrew Lycett has the details:
From IAN FLEMING, Special Representative of The Sunday Times
ISTANBUL, Saturday.
The Twenty-fourth General Assembly of the International Criminal Police Commission, generally known as “Interpol,” opens here on Monday. Through the courtesy of the United Kingdom delegate, Sir Ronald Howe, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, I shall be able to report on some of its deliberations.
Interpol is the longest arm of the law: with the major exception of the Iron Curtain countries, it reaches all round the world. Its object is to counter the growing internationalism in crime and to abolish national frontiers in pursuit of the criminal. From its modest foundation in 1923 in Vienna, Interpol has continued to expand. Today it is firmly established in fifty-two countries, and the murderer, counterfeiter or smuggler can hardly find safe refuge on the face of the earth from the deadly hand of the central Interpol radio station near Paris.
Every year the police chiefs of the member States meet to coordinate new methods of detection so as to keep ahead of the constantly improving science and ingenuity of the criminal, and every stock “Commissaire: from the detective fiction of the world is today arriving in this romantic city by air and sea and, more appropriately, by Orient Express.
On Monday, under the presidency of the formidable Monsieur F. F. Louwage, O.B.E., Inspector-General of the Belgian Ministry of Justice and President of the I.C.P.C. since 1946, there will begin a week of conferences on the major aspects of modern crime. These are some of them:
Drug Smuggling
First, the General Secretariat will present a report on the Illicit Drug Traffic, notably in opium, cannabis, morphine and cocaine. The Secretariat will report that Lebanon remains one of the principal supply centres for opium; that the Chinese, followed by the French and Italians, are still the chief traffickers in opium and that the amount of opium seized in 1954 increased by nearly 250 per cent, over 1953.
As to cocaine, it will be no news to the delegates from the American Narcotics Bureau that the United States remains the chief target of traffickers and that Cuba has developed into an important entrepôt for the Bolivian suppliers, and it will only confirm their suspicions that Italy, with its channels into American gangland, remains the chief European centre for the cocaine traffic.
The report gives details of certain cases in which the I.C.P.C. played a decisive role. Typical is the capture of about 330 kgs. of opium, hashish and morphine-base, and the twelve arrests effected as a result of co-operation , through the I.C.P.C, of the American Narcotics Bureau with the police forces of Greece, Lebanon Turkey and Syria. This is one of the biggest hauls since the war.
Scotland Yard's Concern
The conference will leave this realm of high drama and depravity to listen to some suggestions by Sir Ronald Howe for tightening up the policing of air traffic.
Apart from the flight of criminals, the smuggling of gold bars, diamonds and drugs by air has, in different parts of the world, become a serious problem, as has the security at airports of legitimate air freight such as bullion, precious stones and banknotes.
These problems are complicated by the speed with which a criminal can cross the world—perhaps before his crime has been discovered; by the ease with which privately chartered planes can land in a pretended, emergency at unguarded airfields, and by the vast expanse of aerodromes themselves.
Counterfeit Cheques
Mr. J. W. Kallenborn, the great authority on forgeries and head of the I.C.P.C. office at The Hague, will next raise the whole subject of cheque forgeries which, particularly with the increased use of travelers’ cheques, is becoming vastly more important than the counterfeiting of currency. Mr. Kallenborn’s recommendation is that a standard form of cheque should be adopted for each country and that an attempt should be made to make cheque forms as inviolable to counterfeiters as most currencies now are. He will even mention cases of cheque forgers printing cheque forms of their own design and drawn on imaginary banks, knowing that these can be passed through bank employees already confused by the present multiplicity of shapes, sizes and designs. Even before the war, counterfeit cheques yielded far greater returns than counterfeit notes and Mr. Kallenborn will quote some fabulous achievements, including in 1931, the cashing of a forged cheque for the then majestic sum of 3,007,000 French francs, the full story of which I would very much like to know.
Bank Robbery
Mr. Kallenborn’s plea will be supported by Dr. Giuseppe Dosi, head of the National Central Bureau in Rome, who will discuss the general relationship between policing and banking. He will detail the most modern methods of bank robbers (those who have seen the French film “Rififi” will have little to learn from them), including the latest electric drills, oxy-hydrogen blowpipes and the like, and he will make the unqualified statement that there is no such thing as a perfectly secure underground vault, safe or metal container, which can be depended on to protect its contents unless supplemented by a permanent guard or regular inspection. The dictum of Dr. Dosi is: “The degree of safety of any safe is inversely proportional to the time available to the safe-breakers.”
Crime and Disease
The nature of delinquency invariably takes up a great deal of the time of each General Assembly. Next week Dr. J. F. de Echalecu Y Canino, Professor of Criminal Psychology and of Neuropsychiatry of the Direccion General de Seguridad, Madrid, will re-affirm the theory that the more serious types of crime have their ultimate origin in the region of the cortical and the sub-cortical layers, and that nearly all crime is a bio-sociological phenomenon.
On the same line of country, Professor Castroverde Y Cabrera of Cuba will urge that health statistics should invariably accompany crime statistics in the dossier of a criminal because of the close connection between disease and crime. The painful stimulus of disease, he will say, provokes the individual to extremes of action and, since all extremes of action are anti-social, to crimes.
The Australian delegation will come back to earth with some hard facts about the migration of criminals, with particular reference to certain groups of “new Australians” who have settled in Australia since the war. Among them are Europeans whose crimes indicate that the perpetrators were trained in their nefarious activities in their mother countries, and the Australian police will make a plea for timely warning of the arrival of these undesirable migrants.
Since certain of the member States may be very happy to ship such people off to the other side of the world, I am doubtful that they will achieve more than airy promises.
The Face of Crime
However, the Australian police may make progress with their plan for coding the visual identification of the human being, which is basically an extension of the finger-print system to cover the human face. There is nothing new in the use of a “Portrait Parlé” such as “John Brown. 50 years. 5 ft. 9 in. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Low forehead. Straight nose. Wide straight mouth. Round chin and double neck cords,” but the Australians would codify this particular description into “John Brown. A4, D2, E3, R3, G4, H4, H2, I2, L13, M10, U41” which will certainly have attractions for the Radio Communications Branch of the I.C.P.C. Their documentation contains the complete catalogue of Portrait Parlé descriptions, from which I am interested to note that there are fourteen official face shapes from “pyramid” to “flabby”; seventeen nose peculiarities from “lump on tip” to “dilated nostrils” and five splendid eyelids described as: “hooded bags under eyes, blear-eyed, crying eyelids” and “reversed lower lids.” I also observe that violet eyes do not exist, but that green eyes do, and that “soup-strainer moustache” is officialese.
Radio Security
On problems of communication, the General Secretariat will make a plea for better radio discipline, and Inspector Sanjuan of Madrid will demand a secure cypher for all Interpol transmissions. He will preface his request with a short history of the secrecy of communications beginning with a method which was new to me. Apparently the first means of secret communication was to shave the head of a slave and write the message in indelible ink on his bald pate. Once the hair had grown to a reasonable length, the slave would be sent out on his journey and at his destination the hair would be shaved off again and the message read. This strikes me as more ingenious than those bits of paper modern heroes are always swallowing.
Forged Finger-prints
Amongst other subjects to be dealt with will be some highly technical proposals by Professor Charles Sannie, head of the Criminal Identity Department of the Paris Prefecture de Police, for an extension of the Bertillion finger-print system. His object is to defeat forged finger-prints—an ingenious invention of the modern criminal by which he actually profits from the accuracy of the finger-print system.
As an example. Professor Sannie will mention the case of a prisoner in gaol who impressed his prints on a piece of glass and gave the glass to someone else. This second party left it on the scene of a burglary which was committed while the owner or the prints had the best possible alibi of being himself in prison. He will also mention the moulding of false finger-prints on to rubber finger-stalls and other ingenious gambits.
Child and Bogeyman
Perhaps the most important but least technical discourse will be given by the President of the I.C.P.C. himself. Monsieur Louwage will discuss aspects of juvenile delinquency, and it is pleasant to record that in urging police all over the world to avoid becoming “bogeymen,” he will quote as the desirable attitude the firmness but friendliness of the London “Bobby,” and the success with which he gains the confidence and affection of youth. There will be nothing particularly new in what Monsieur Louwage has to say, but his words will certainly not be amiss in a conference of the chief bogeymen from fifty-two very different countries.
Note: As you may have guessed, this report was written a week before Fleming's report on "The Great Riot of Istanbul." Next week I'll bring you Fleming's report on the actual proceedings of the conference, written after the riot.
From IAN FLEMING, Special Representative of The Sunday Times at the International Police Conference
ISTANBUL, Saturday.
Despite the respective resignation and dismissal of its joint hosts, the Turkish Minister of the Interior and the Istanbul Chief of Police, the Twenty-fourth General Assembly of the International Police Commission tactfully averted its gaze from the surrounding shame and chaos, completed its labours and on Wednesday, discreetly thankful, took to its heels. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the secretariat much was achieved and many criminal loopholes have been blocked. But the most solid achievement was not in the final minutes of the assembly but in the public and private airing of the problems and cases of the police chiefs from 52 different countries.
Here, without committing Governments, and without the befogging intrusions of national sentiment, embarrassing topics could be discussed on the technical level. Thus the head of the Australian delegation could talk over piracy from the Pacific pearling grounds with the Police Chief of Tokyo, the head of the Egyptian Sureté could raise with the Inspector-General of Police of Tel Aviv the increased drug traffic from the Arab countries, and Mr. Donald Fish, B.O.A.C. chief security officer, could offer private advice to the director of the new Delhi intelligence bureau on certain ingenious ruses used for concealing gold bars in aircraft.
Juvenilia
Unofficial pooling of experience and knowledge is far more important and practical than the adoption of joint resolutions by representatives of 52 different countries with widely varying customs and legal systems. For example, juvenile delinquency sounds an easy topic to discuss. Everyone agrees that there should be less of it. But no resolution will cover even the words “juvenile” and “delinquency” as applied to, say, India, Scotland and Norway, let alone the other 49 States.
What about the criminal status of juvenile homosexuality, for instance? When you come to statistics, how do you explain that as against an international norm of 17 per cent., the percentage of crime committed by juveniles is 0.5 per cent. in Denmark and 44.5 per cent. in Scotland? In fact, the age of puberty—much later in Denmark—comes in as well as the differences in criminal law and the relative stringency of Scottish courts, and perhaps the Irish element in Glasgow. That is an example of the difficulty of codifying crime and therefore of codifying methods of prevention.
Illicit Gold
On the other hand, on a matter like gold-smuggling Interpol can be of real value, and it is probable that India, which is the chief target for the traffic, as America is for narcotic smugglers, will get real co-operation as a result of the remarkable facts her delegation laid before the assembly. It seems that she is being deluged with illicit gold. During 1954 nearly 40,000 ounces, valued at about £6 million, were seized by customs and police in 229 cases, involving 236 foreign nationals, and the delegation admitted that this haul can represent only a fraction of the illegal imports. Apparently it is coming in from all the gold-producing countries of the world— from Australia by steamship via Macao, Hongkong and Singapore; from Africa by fast lugger via Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf; from America by air via London, France, Switzerland and the Middle East. All this represents one of the most fabulous criminal networks in history, and the many Interpol States involved will now co-operate to crush it.
Other smaller points of interest that came up in discussion include the following. The U.S. Customs are particularly troubled by diamond-smuggling from Belgium and by the smuggling of watches and watch-movements from Switzerland. Regarding the latter. Dr. Grassberger, from Vienna, where next year’s Interpol conference will take place, observed that it is better to get real smuggled Swiss watches than counterfeit ones. For the past two years an Austrian gang have been running a side-line to the smuggling of watch-movements: they put cheap watch-movements in formerly discarded watch-cases, forge famous names on the dials and smuggle these too.
The United Nations delegate reported an interesting technical process for discovering the geographical origin of smuggled narcotics. The U.N. Narcotics Division has discovered that by alkaloid and spectrographic analysis the nature of the soil in which captured opium was grown, and thus its country of origin, can be determined, greatly facilitating the pursuit back down the pipe-line.
Policing Air Routes
Sir Ronald Howe, deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, presented the common-sense view of the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office on many recommendations where a conservative voice was needed. For instance on the occasion when the delegate from Chile suggested that your finger-prints should be verified before you could cash a cheque! As chairman of the sub-committee on policing the air routes, he fought for the rights and comforts of the passenger, and as a result we may see a simplification of the dreadful embarkation and disembarkation cards and a check to the practice in some countries of depriving the transit passenger of his passport during overnight stops.
(Incidentally I found unanimity among the senior delegates that Sir Ronald should be invited to become President of Interpol when M. Louwage of Belgium in due course resigns. This will be a great tribute to the prestige abroad of Scotland Yard.)
The corridors of the ornate Chalet Palace where the meetings were held were a splendid listening post. Here the Chief of Police of Thailand told me of the two elephants which form his riot squad. “Very effective against small villages,” he explained. Mr. Charles Siragusa, head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, explained his methods for “leaning on” Lucky Luciano, the famous American gangster who was deported from America and now lives in Naples. “He won't explain how he happens to stay so rich,” said Mr. Siragusa; “so my Italian police friends have interpreted this as withholding information from them and have put him on parole. That means that he may not consort with criminals and has to be indoors by 11 o’clock every night. One day soon he will happen to talk to a waiter with a police record or get home a few minutes late and will find himself in gaol. That is what we call ‘leaning on’ someone.”
The Director of the Paris Sureté talked of the iron-clad conspiracy of silence among the Dominici family. The Australian delegate complained of the expense of the Petrov case, which has not only left Australia with the burden of keeping Petrov alive but has meant the abstention of Russia from Australian wool sales for over a year. The famous Professor Soedermann, from Sweden, told me of a hitherto unpublicised plot to kill Hitler in 1942, and so on.
Ignorance is Bliss
The one police chief who has been sadly missed this year is the delegate from Burma. Last year at Rome the assembly was discussing sex crimes, and one by one delegates from the major Western powers reeled off their formidable and grisly statistics. Finally the Burmese delegate diffidently climbed to the rostrum. “I must apologise to the assembly,” he said, “for I have no statistics on this subject. We are a backward nation and have no sex-crimes. But as our civilisation catches up with those of the distinguished delegates who have been speaking I hope we may do better. Next year I will try to bring some good statistics on this matter.” Perhaps this year he was ashamed to come back still empty-handed.
By IAN FLEMING, The Sunday Times Special Representative
VIENNA, Saturday.
Allegorical figures representing industry, thrift, invention and wisdom look down on the police chiefs of 55 countries gathered in the Academy of Sciences here for the 25th assembly of the International Police Commission. The dark goddesses of sex, greed and narcotics would have been more appropriate witnesses.
The international drug traffic, gold smuggling, counterfeiting and prostitution are on the agenda, but much (too much) of this meeting will be occupied with a revision of Interpol’s statutes and with the election of a new president. Sir Ronald Howe, deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard, would have taken the place of the veteran M. Louwage of Belgium, but Sir Ronald is retiring to join a firm of merchant bankers, and M. Erie Ros, Stockholm’s chief of police, is likely to be elected.
Austrian Teddy-boys
Just as last year the criminal elements of Istanbul cocked a snook at Interpol by smashing up the city around the delegates, so, this year, have Austrian Teddy-boys shown their disdain by raiding the police museum at Graz and taking the pick of the modern revolver exhibits. These teen-age gangsters are known here as “halb-starke”—the half-strength ones—and their uniform is shiny leather jackets, shoes with two-inch soles and long greasy hair. The public is terrified.
A more attractive criminal element is the band of desperadoes who act as guides through the Iron Curtain. Their expert knowledge of safe routes through the minefields has so exasperated the Russians that they are moving the Hungarian curtain fringe a mile back. A conducted tour through the Hungarian Iron Curtain is cheap. I have been offered, and reluctantly rejected, a one-way passage for £2.
Greatest Safe-breaker
Vienna has a peculiar affinity with the mythos of crime. Over 100 years ago, a Viennese; Hans Gross, the first scientific criminologist, wrote his “Criminal Investigation,” and it remains the bible of the modern detective. Interpol itself was founded here in 1933, and today Vienna is the home of the greatest safe-breaker in the world—Joseph Bieraaus, who plies his trade as a locksmith.
His is a name to conjure with in the strongbox world, and he earns rich fees from the great safe-making firms. When the invasion of Britain was being planned he was asked if he could open the safes of the Bank of England and the Mint. On promising that he could, he was promoted sergeant and remained peacefully “on call.”
Then, of course, we have Nicholas Borrisov, alias Benno Blum, the original model for the Third Man, Harry Lime, who has opened his own cafe. Vienna is just the place for Interpol to meet.
Interpol, with its 250,000 card archives, seems to be increasing its cunning. Since its last meeting it has helped to come down on diamond smuggling from Africa, it has developed a new electronic method for detecting cheque forgeries and it has had some amazing successes against the drug traffic.
Drug “Shuttle-service”
One of the drug cases is interesting, because the gang used doctored cars—two Jaguars, two Buicks and a Fiat. Their own car body builder welded dummy crossbars to the chassis, capable of hiding away on each car up to 441 lb. of opium—a fortune’s worth. For two years these cars ran a regular shuttle-service between the Middle East and Marseilles. Then the police seized them all except the leader, a Lebanese “K,” who escaped.
Perhaps this summer, as you take your tryptique into some frontier office, that travel-stained Jaguar with the swarthy man and pretty girl which edged in just in front will be the redoubtable “K” with his latest girl, and perhaps if you follow their car to the next petrol station your keen eyes will notice that their tank takes only half as much petrol as your Jaguar does. Interpol in Vienna puts ideas into your head.
Fleming later wrote that his first Interpol conference, in Istanbul, "was great fun" and "by scraping together fragments from official papers and speeches and tying them up with informed gossip, I was able to write two long dispatches on 'The Secrets of Interpol' whose success was assisted by the Istanbul riots which took place conveniently over that week-end and on which I was able to give a scoop to my paper.
"The next year I went again to the conference, this time at Vienna, but my 'revelations' of the year before had put the police chiefs on their guard and, on this occasion, I was only able to produce a pretty thin three-quarters of a column. The learned papers read by the police chiefs had been more rigorously censored than before and were more carefully guarded, and the gossip dried up in my presence.
"I skipped the next year’s meeting in Lisbon, and that was the end of my acquaintanceship with Interpol."
By Ian Fleming
Some people are frightened by silence and some by noise. To some people the anonymous bulge at the hip is more frightening than the gun in the hand, and all one can say is that different people thrill to different stimuli, and that those who like The Turn of the Screw may not be worried by, for instance, The Cat and the Canary.
Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the atmosphere of suspense into horrible acts. Poe, Stevenson and M.R. James used to frighten me most, and now Maugham, Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Graham Greene can still raise the fur on my back when they want to. Their heroes are credible and their villains terrify with a real "blackness." Their situations are fraught with doom, and the threat of doom, and, above all, they have pace. When one chapter is done, we reach out for the next. Each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier behind a fast motor-boat.
Too many writers in this genre (and I think Erskine Childers, on whose The Riddle of the Sands these remarks are hinged, was one of them) forget that, although this may sound a contradiction in terms, speed is essential to a novel of suspense, and while detail is important to create an atmosphere of reality, it can be laid on so thick as to become a Sargasso Sea on which the motor-boat bogs down and the skier founders.
The reader is quite happy to share the pillow-fantasies of the author as long as he is provided with sufficient landmarks to help him relate the author’s world more or less to his own, and a straining after verisimilitude with maps and diagrams should be avoided except in detective stories aimed at the off-beta mind.
Even more wearying are "recaps," and those leaden passages where the hero reviews what he has achieved or ploddingly surveys what remains to be done. These exasperate the reader who, if there is to be any rumination, is quite happy to do it himself. When the author drags his feet with this space-filling device he is sacrificing momentum which it will take him much brisk writing to recapture.
These reflections, stale news through they may be to the mainliner in thrillers, come to me after rereading The Riddle of the Sands after an absence of very many years, and they force me to the conclusion that doom-laden silence and long-drawn-out suspense are not enough to confirm the tradition that Erskine Childers, romantic and remarkable man that he must have been, is also one of the father-figures of the thriller.
The opening of the story--the factual documentation in the preface and the splendid Lady Windermere’s Fan atmosphere of the first chapters--is superb.
At once you are ensconced in bachelor chambers off St. James’s at the beginning of the century. All the trappings of the Age of Certainty gather around you as you read. Although the author does not say so, a coal fire seems to roar in the brass grate; there is a glass of whisky beside your chair and, remembering Mr. Cecil Beaton’s Edwardian décors, you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass. The smoke from your cheroot curls up towards the ceiling and your button-boots are carefully crossed at the ankles on the red-leather-topped fender so as not to disturb the crease of those spongebag trousers. On a mahogany bookrest above your lap The Riddle of the Sands is held open by at well-manicured finger.
Shall you go with Carruthers to Cowes or accompany him to the grouse-moor? It is the fag-end of the London season of 1903. You are bored, and it is all Mayfair to a hock-and-seltzer that the fates have got you in their sights and that you are going to start to pay for your fat sins just over the page.
Thus, in the dressing-room, so to speak, you and Carruthers are all ready to start the hurdle race. You are still ready when you get into the small boat in a God-forsaken corner of the East German coast, and you are even more hungry for the starter’s gun when you set sail to meet the villains. Then, to my, mind, for the next 95,000 words there is anticlimax.
This is a book of great renown; and it is not from a desire to destroy idols or a tendency to denigration that this review--now that, after the statutory fifty years, The Riddle of the Sands has entered the public domain--is becoming almost too much of an autopsy. But those villains! With the best will in the world I could not feel that the lives of the heroes (and therefore of my own) were in the least way endangered by them.
Dollmann, villain No. 1, is a "traitor" from the Royal Navy, whose presence among the clucking channels and glistening mudbanks of the Frisian Islands is never satisfactorily explained. His job was "spying at Chatham, the blackguard," and the German High Command, even in 1903 when the book was first published, was crazy to employ him on what amounts to operational research. He never does anything villainous. Before the story opens, he foxes hero No. 1 into running himself on a mudbank, but at the end, when any good villain with his back to the wall would show his teeth, he collapses like a pricked balloon and finally disappears lamely overboard just after "we came to the bar of the Schild and had to turn south off that twisty bit of beating between Rottum and Bosch Fat." His harshest words are "You pigheaded young marplots!" and his "blackness" is further betrayed by the beauty and purity of his daughter, with whom hero No. 1 falls in love (it is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have.)
Von Bruning, villain No. 2, is frankly a hero to the author, and is presented as such; and No.3, Boehme, though at first he exudes a delicious scent of Peter Lorre, forfeits respect by running away across the mud and leaving one of his gumboots in the hands of hero No. 2.
The plot is that the heroes want to discover what the villains are up to, and, in a small, flat-bottomed boat, they wander amongst the Frisian Islands (and two maps, two charts and a set of tide-tables won't convince me that they don’t wander aimlessly) trying to find out.
This kind of plot makes an excellent framework for that classic "hurdle race" thriller formula, in which the hero (despite his Fleet-Foot Shoes with Tru-Temper Spikes and Kumfi-Krutch Athletic Supporter) comes a series of ghastly croppers before he breasts the tape.
Unfortunately, in The Riddle of the Sands there are no hurdles and only two homely mishaps (both of the heroes’ own devising)--a second grounding on a mudbank, from which the heroes refloat on the rising tide, and the loss of the anchor chain, which they salvage without difficulty.
The end of the 100,000 word quest through the low-lying October mists is a hasty, rather muddled scramble which leaves two villains, two heroes and the heroine more or less in the air, and the small boat sailing off to England with the answer to the riddle. Before 1914 this prize must have provided a satisfactory fall of the curtain, but since then two German wars have clanged about our heads and today our applause is rather patronising.
The reason why The Riddle of the Sands will always be read is due alone to its beautifully sustained atmosphere. This adds poetry, and the real mystery of wide, fog-girt silence and the lost-child crying of seagulls, to a finely written log-book of a small-boat holiday upon which the author has grafted a handful of "extras" and two "messages"--the threat of Germany and the need for England to "be prepared."
To my mind it is now republished exactly where it belongs--in the Mariner's Library. Here, a thriller by atmosphere alone, it stands alongside twenty-eight thrillers of the other school--thrillers where the action on the stage thrills, and the threatening sea-noises are left to the orchestra pit.
Notes:
Readers with long memories might remember that I posted this article a few years ago, but no collection of Fleming's literary journalism is complete without it, since "Mudscape" is one of his best and most sustained critical essays.
We already knew Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Greene, were influences on Fleming, but it's good to hear we was also influenced by Poe, Stevenson and M R. James. What Fleming praises in these authors are his own qualities as a thriller-writer. "Above all" he values pace and in a thrilling metaphor says "each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier." Pace is of great value in the Bond books, since it's used to hustle the reader past implausibilities and plot defects.
Fleming's counsel against getting bogged down in detail might sound hypocritical, but Fleming had to convince his readers of far wilder events and characters than the comparatively realistic Childers. And Fleming certainly took his own advice in avoiding "leaden" recaps. He kept his books short.
Predictably, Fleming is most entranced (and seeks to entrance the reader) by details of clothing and furnishings ("you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass"), down to the hero's spongebag trousers of the hero. As many have stated, he was sometimes more interested in things than people, but his interest was deep and sensual.
Fleming's biggest complaint against Childers involves his villains. Fleming's own, full of "blackness," are among his greatest strengths, and it is no coincidence that the weakest Bond books are those with the least substantial villains. We also have an amusing namecheck of the "delicious" Peter Lorre, who had already played LeChiffre by the time Fleming penned this article.
"It is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have." Is this why Draco was made so loveable ally? And why Tracy was killed so soon after the wedding? I jest.
By Ian Fleming
British Caving: An Introduction to Speleology
Members of the Cave Research Group, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 35s.
"Down in a deep dark hole sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk." Irreverently the dummy hexameter jingled through my head as I digested this weighty tome on a subject which should surely not be taken quite so seriously. ‘The Science of Speleology!’ The sport of exploring caves really cannot be rated a science any more than mountaineering (Montophily?) or treasure-hunting (Thesauromania?). It is true that the science of geology is involved, also physics and geophysics, biology (‘biospeleology’ to the potholers if you please!), palaeontology and so forth. But these can also be part of mountaineering and even of treasure-hunting. Somehow these underground mountaineers have been persuaded to take themselves very seriously indeed and this tome is one of the results.
I am sorry that the Reverend Cecil Cullingford, the editor, did not fight shy of the project. He is the author of that cheerful and expert little handbook Exploring Caves which deals with the sport at exactly the right level, as an entertaining pastime with undertones of romance and adventure. Now he treats us to a volume so comprehensive that the only subject connected with caves that is omitted (or avoided) is the psychology of speleologists—why people like exploring caves—which would have been far more interesting than the sections on meteorology, mammalogy and gravimetric surveying.
Personally I should guess the whole business has something to do with a return to the womb. Certainly there is a touch of infantilism involved, as one may learn from the commonsense chapter on "Caving Code and Ethics" in which the writer criticises the speleologist’s love of secrecy and the jealousy with which he keeps his caves to himself, barring and locking them from others with the result that ‘the relationship between the potholer and the ordinary country folk is now in danger’. Then:
"The manners of some of them are deplorable. At the village Saturday night dance they argue with the doorkeeper about the price of admission, or steal in when no one is looking. One party even stole in to a dance by an unattended door and were dancing in spiked boots, wearing their safety helmets!"
Stalactites are stolen from caves and gypsum flowers and cave pearls "have been filched in their hundreds from near Settle".
But enough of deflating these excellent people. The best amongst them are incredibly brave expert mountaineers responsible for bringing to light a great deal of archaeological and cultural interest and who, in this scholarly though pompous work, remind us that our forebears lived in these caves, fighting for possession with sabre-toothed tigers, cave-lions, hippopotami, wolves, bears, rhinoceri, leopards and even mammoths. It is a thrilling and romantic sport that makes the skin crawl and the spine tingle and for those who enjoy it or who wish to become expert, and even for those who don’t know a spelunca from a hole in the ground, this book contains all the hard facts and some very beautiful photographs. I just wish that cavers wouldn’t call themselves speleologists.
By Ian Fleming
I have become very leery of “underwater” books. The best one was Cousteau’s The Silent World and little but trash has followed. There are three aspects of submarine literature which particularly offend—the general archness of the writing (some of those translations from the French are excruciating), the dreadful jokiness, in which Haas painfully excels, and the bare-faced cheating of the reader about the perils of the deep, heightened by trick photography.
There are sea myths still to be explored—the mile-deep battles between sounding whales and giant squids, with eyes a foot in diameter, is one that particularly attracts me—but anyone who writes with bated pen about octopuses, shark, barracuda or the manta ray is a bluffer.
Two books before me offer reassuring evidence that the literature is settling down. Above all, they are factual. James Dugan received his underwater education from Cousteau. He helped with both the book and the film of The Silent World, and his The Great Iron Ship qualifies him as one of the finest research workers in romantic fact. His Man Explores The Sea (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.) is a history of undersea exploration from Alexander the Great's diving-bell to the bathyscaphe. It is a long book, splendidly illustrated, and it contains more excitement and adventure than any book I have read this year.
There are accounts of the great underwater treasure troves; the most dramatic incidents in the evolution of the submarine; the development of underwater photography (A catalogue sent to a South American amateur diver was returned with the notation “Undeliverable. Addressee eaten by a crocodile”); scientific underwater research on fish, minerals and oil; the great discoveries in undersea archaeology and gripping tales of underwater sabotage. Here is a sample:
There appeared before me out of nowhere a large white form. It had arms and legs, heavy and puffed like pillows. It had a dome-shaped head and a white eye. It was a Japanese diver wearing white burlap overalls over his diving dress to offer a less-attractive surface to octopi. He stayed there for two minutes watching my line strain, then he disappeared. He was going off to let me die, fouled in the kelp. I was hopelessly lost; with a tremendous effort I got to my feet. There, right behind me, with a knife in his hand, was the Jap diver. He was cutting my lines…
It is a thrilling and, with the exception of an occasional unnecessary note of farce, admirably written book which will be given for many Christmases to come to anyone who has put on goggles and gazed into this other world.
***
The Collins Pocket Guide to the Undersea World (Collins 21s.) is exactly what it says, and Ley Kenyon is to be congratulated on producing a really comprehensive and attractively written handbook on the sport of skin diving. There is everything here, with splendid photographs and drawings, and I am unable to fault it for common sense and basic general knowledge.
Captain Cousteau’s Underwater Treasury. By Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan. (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.)
By Ian Fleming
Swimming is really an extremely dull activity unless you are showing off to the spectators or competing at it. Swimming in the sea is just as dull as going for a walk in the middle of a snowfield or a desert. There is nothing to look at or occupy your mind, and you go on, automatically moving your limbs, until you are tired and it is time to go back.
Around 1942 Jacques Cousteau and his happy band of comrades altered all this. It was he who taught the common man to look under the sea as he swam, and, suddenly, swimming became interesting. Interest and curiosity, the act of focusing one’s eyes, and mind, have results you do not expect. I suppose I can swim for pleasure about half a mile before I get bored and therefore tired, but, with a mask on, and if the underwater territory is a new one, it is almost impossible for me to stop swimming. A mile or two is nothing, and I have a feeling that if I were to visit the Great Barrier Reef, I wouldn’t stop until a mud fish or a giant clam got me.
Cousteau, unhonoured and scantily sung, has put man back under the sea where he came from, and, from what the scientists say, he has done this by chance just at the moment in history when anyway we are being driven back into the oceans in search of more food and raw materials.
I am sure he never meant to cause this world-wide revolution, though, being the extraordinary man he is, he would certainly have been a pioneer in something. What first inspired him might, be expressed in the words of Thomas Fuller: “He goes a great voyage that goes to the bottom of the sea.”
***
Unfortunately, Cousteau writes far too little about his experiences. I doubt if The Silent World would ever have got written but for James Dugan, who somehow squeezed the book out of him. Cousteau just has not got patience for writing, and he is totally uninterested in the paraphernalia of fame. Fortunately, James Dugan keeps on at him, and one day we shall get his second volume of biography, the fantastic tale of his last ten years in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles, prospecting for oil for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (most successfully, I understand), plumbing the great ocean deeps, and other thrilling exploits of which we read only scraps in the newspapers.
But now James Dugan, who I am sure again did most of the work, has made him put together in this thick and beautifully illustrated volume more than sixty of his favourite underwater adventure stories from all literature. Everything is here—sharks, octopuses, treasure, submarine battles, exploration, archaeology, the glorious beauty of the coral reefs. Everyone who has ever put on an underwater mask will enjoy this fat, rich anthology, and if any teacher is looking for a wonderful source for reading aloud to boys—and girls, for that matter—of from ten to over twenty, then this, and especially now, on the threshold of the Ocean Age, is the book for him.
(No, not
but the real thing)
I've mostly stopped posting at FECC, but I am a regular commenter on Elvis at the Steve Hoffman music forum.
That sounds interesting. Do you have a link to these sites/posts by any chance?
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/music-corner.2/
https://www.elvis-collectors.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=8e016c361129e166a166d00ccdba9e06
Thank you very much, Barbel. I'll be sure to check those out. I'm no Elvis expert (more of an MJ fan) but I enjoy his music and have a few CDs and books on him. I think my favourite song of his is his last, 'Way Down'. -{
By I.L.F. [Ian Lancaster Fleming]
Did you know that “trump” was originally “triumph”? Did you know that spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs were originally swords, cups, coins and staves, representing the nobility, the clergy, tradesmen, and peasants—the main social classes of the Middle Ages?
Have you reflected that not even the French Revolution or the Communists succeeded in replacing the kings and queens in the pack with other symbols, and were you aware that Wild Bill Hickock shot all the pips out of a ten of spades at twelve paces?
Not me, and I still don’t know the rules of “Canasta,” the new card game which is sweeping America on the heels of gin rummy, after reading The Complete Card Player, by Albert Ostrow (The Bodley Head, 15s.). Nor do I know the latest contract bridge rules and I don’t know the odds for drawing a card at “chemin de fer.” These are serious lapses in an American card encyclopaedia “which should challenge Hoyle as the general reference book.”
But if you want to play Bimbo high-low at poker, Blind Hookey, Cedarhurst Gin, Clobberyash, Double-dummy with a widow, Idiot’s Delight, Oh Pshaw, Seven-toed Pete or Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle—this is the book for you.
Gamesmanship. By Stephen Potter. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 6s.)
By Ian Fleming
On the analogy of white lies, this little book is an aid to the white cheat, hereafter referred to as a “gamesman.” We have all met gamesmen and perhaps been defeated by their gamesmanship. It has fallen to Mr. Potter to be their first champion, the first chronicler of their “ploys” and, who knows, perhaps the subversive guide towards a new golden age in British sport when Ryder Cups, Ashes and the goblets of Wimbledon, Henley and the Olympics will all come home again.
After some introductory remarks on the history and origin of gamesmanship, the author proceeds to the “flurry” ploy, of which the basic axiom is “the first muscle stiffened (in the opponent) is the first point gained.”
His description of preparations for leaving home in the opponent’s car en route for the tennis courts is a workmanlike summary of the “primary hampers” which all of us have experienced at the hands of gamesmen. (There is a helpful “Sketch Plan to show specimen wrong route from Maida Vale to Dulwich Covered Courts.”) While touching on “clothesmanship” and “stakesmanship” the author sounds a note of warning against the counter-gamesman, and readers will be wise to draw wider conclusions than are suggested by the single example, the “Frith-Morteroy Counter.”
Reading on, it will seem to many gamesmen that the “Jack Rivers opening” is weak. I prefer the more deadly “Huntercombe” variant (not mentioned by Potter) which goes like this. On the first tee: Gamesman: “I say, did you see that article of Cotton’s in the ‘Lancet’?” Opponent: “No, what did he say?” Gamesman: “Well it seems you breathe in on your upswing and out on the downswing, and the point is I’m sure he’s wrong. I do just the opposite. Let’s see what we really do during this round and we can write in a letter shooting him down.”
Potter is on firmer ground in his remarks on “Basic Fluke Play” and I concur when he states categorically that there are only eighteen ways of saying “Bad luck”; but many will think that his chapters on Brinkmanship, Clubmanship, etc., are amateurish and even naive, and readers will have little faith in his rudimentary advice to card players. (He does not even touch on “Voice Control” in husband and wife partnerships at the bridge table!)
I have said enough to show that, though not definitive, Potter on Gamesmanship is a Christmas “must” for partners and opponents and for anonymous despatch to “that woman” at the Bridge club. Colonel Frank Wilson’s diagrams and illustrations, particularly his anatomical chart of the golfer’s stance on the putting green (show to opponent in the third week) are in the best tradition of English Sporting Prints.
By Ian Fleming
The decline in the Faculty of Attention is neither new nor peculiar to America (Wordsworth remarked upon it in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads nearly 150 years ago), but America has developed to a finer art than we the technique of attracting without actually engaging attention. Hollywood, the Tabloids, the Comics, the Shiny magazines, the Digests, Radio and “Video” provide a daily dish of premasticated pulp which is rapidly conditioning the American palate away from any mental fare whose absorption requires an effort. (Hollywood is filming The Forsyte Saga under the title of That Forsyte Gal because “Saga” is considered a “difficult” word.)
In order to sell their 15s. novels (the standard price), American book-factories (as opposed to reputable publishers ) tempt the reluctant reader’s appetite by pressure-salesmanship of brightly wrappered sop-stuff—the title of this report is from a well-known blurb—with the result that writers and readers “with teeth in them are a rapidly dying race in America.”
James Marquand, for instance, has at last produced that bedtime story in swansdown prose towards which some of his recent work has, alas, been hinting. Point of No Return, which has led the fiction bestsellers for months past, is an agreeable meander through the life and pale loves of a character who closely resembles that American comic ineffectual, Mr. Milquetoast. These are harsh words, but from a sincere admirer of H. M. Pulham, Esq. and So Little Time.
Leading the general list is Cheaper by the Dozen (coming from Heinemann on October 10), a most engaging piece of real-life whimsy which describes the methods used to educate the 12 children of Mr. Gilbreth, an American consulting engineer and efficiency expert. Written by two of his children, it comes in much the same package as The Egg and I, which sold a million in America last year and has since done very well over here. Some religious books are being widely read, and there are many popular pink pills for pale psyches, such as Peace of Soul, Peace of Mind, The Mature Mind and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
It is sad to have to predict that admirers of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 will find themselves disappointed with The Rage to Live, the wearisome chronicle of a Pennsylvania family with a viper named Grace Caldwell in its bosom. This windy saga is not redeemed by extreme coarseness in parts, and it has the worst contrived ending of any novel I can remember.
Another casualty is Marc Brandel, whose adult and macabre Ides of Summer found him a discriminating English public last year. The Barriers Between is full of the turgid ruminations of a sensitive ex-G.I., whose heavy drinking in Mexico is too much for his sensitive stomach.
It is pleasant to be able to record that English authors continue in handsome demand. Mr. Churchill’s Their Finest Hour still outstrips all domestic war memoirs published this year and qualifies him for his newest laurels as chief literary dollar-earner for England (and top scrivener, for Sir Stafford!). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is also having a phenomenal success. Featured by Life and then by The Reader’s Digest, this brilliant book is more than repeating its reception in England. Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate is a best-seller, as was her The Pursuit of Love, despite the unfamiliar idiom and cliquishness of this comedy of lost manners. Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral is proving an excellent corrective to the American popular theory that we never fought the Japanese.
Finally, a book which will do much for our battered self-esteem, Our English Heritage, by Gerald Johnson. Mr. Commager, in The New York Times, concludes a review which would make all England blush with the words: “Every nation inherits a good part of its culture and its institutions. The United States has been fortunate because its inheritance comes from a nation whose peculiar contribution to civilisation has been integrity of character.”
Note: The Hollywood film of The Forsyte Saga was eventually titled That Forsyte Woman. Released in 1949, it starred Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young.
I haven't read H. M. Pulham, Esq. (or anything else by the now-forgotten John P. Marquand), but I can recommend the film version, directed by the great King Vidor and starring the brainy and beautiful Hedy Lamarr.
From Ian Fleming.
Tipping is a pestiferous business and it would be a wonderful thing if U.N.E.S.C.O. or the U.N. Commission on Human Rights would establish a World Tipping Code. On my last night in the Ocean Belle my advice on the subject was sought by a group of three American couples bearing names which you would know.
My eyes started from my head as each couple showed its hand. “I always give my cabin steward £20.” “We’ve done a lot of entertaining in the Veranda Grill and we're dividing £40 between the head waiter and the two others” “Would £5 be enough for the Turkish Bath man?” “And what about you?”
I was torn between various emotions. My feelings for the working-man triumphed. “I think you're being very generous,” I said. “You’ll certainly all get an extra couple of teeth in the farewell smile.”
Under cover of their rather thin laughter I escaped with my pair of jacks unseen. For the four nights, I tipped my cabin steward £2. He seemed perfectly happy.
***
These Names Make Bad News
For a time the Coronation (“It’s going to mean a great religious revival round the world” is a comment I have heard several times) ousted McCarthy as topic “A” in New York and I believe throughout America, but now he is top-billing again, and you simply can’t stop talking about him or reading about him.
There are various reasons for this: he has a really expert publicity machine, he is always springing or cooking-up a new surprise, people are terrified and fascinated by him, and “he may be a sonofabitch but, darn it, he's always right.” Homosexuals in the State Department, British ships trading with China, un-American books in American embassies abroad.
Each scandalous broadside has missed with ninety-nine calumnies and hit with one. And that one is enough in a country where every man is born with a chance to be President and where, in consequence, every man aches to prove the Administration wrong. McCarthy is just pressing the trigger of a gun which is loaded and aimed by a huge cross-section of the public.
Walter Winchell has been doing much the same thing for thirty years, and he goes on doing it on radio and TV to a guaranteed public of around ten million every week. Is there a connection between them? And what role does Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. play in all this, the Washington Fouché who has controlled the American secret police for the amazing span of twenty-seven years? These three men are the recipients of all the private grudges of America. They are the overt and covert crusaders against un-Americanism. The sun would indeed be darkened if history were to bring them together, or any closer together, before this giant country has found itself.
***
Tales from Kinseyland
But August 20 is K-Day and on that morning one topic will sweep away all others. For on that day will be published Dr. Kinsey’s “Sexual Report on the Human Female,” and on that day every newspaper, every dinner-table, will go hog-wild.
The Report is completed and scarifying tales and rumours are leaking out of the peaceful, beautiful campus of Indiana University where what might be described as semesters are being held to allow newspaper and magazine men (and women) to digest the huge tome and squeeze out the meatiest three-thousand word thesis for release in each paper on K-Day. Not a word more than 3,000 or someone will reach for a lawyer.
So far two semesters have been held. One in May and one in June. And there is another to come.
***
Jottings on a Nylon Cuff
Canasta has become the favourite card game of America, leading Contract Bridge by ten per cent.—a wide margin. Bolivia is the name of a new variation I do not intend to learn. Bolivia is really a standardisation of Samba, which I have also eschewed. Three packs. Going-out requires a sequence canasta and a regular canasta. Wild card canastas score 2,500 points. Black threes left in your hand cost a hundred points each against you. Game is 15,000 points. Who do you think is touring America promoting it? Who but that Queen of the Green Baize, our old friend Ottilie H. Reilly.
***
The latest and most deadly way of making a dry martini is to pour a little dry vermouth into a jug, swirl it round and throw it down the sink. Fill Jug with gin and place in ice-box until tomorrow. Then serve (or drink from Jug). Note that there is no wasteful dilution with ice-cubes.
***
The germ-consciousness of America is rapidly becoming a phobia, battened on by doctors, druggists and advertisers. People actually prefer foods that are frozen or tinned or preserved. They are more hygienic. And what about this? Brown eggs are virtually unobtainable in New York. “Customers won’t touch ‘em,” my Super-Market told me. “They’re dirty.”
***
Fifty-cent Angels
Broadway Angels Inc. has made a Common Stock issue of 570,000 shares at fifty cents a share to allow “the small investor an opportunity to employ funds in diversified enterprises connected with the Broadway Theatre.” The stock will be traded on the “Over-the-Counter-Market.” The issue was made on March 1 and the President of the Company, a Mr. Wallace Garland, tells me it is already three-quarters subscribed by some 2,000 investors.
“Of course, you can lose 100 per cent. of the capital invested in one show,” said Mr. Garland. “But look at ‘Voice of the Turtle,’ 3,000 per cent, profit. ‘Mister Roberts,’ 500 per cent profit. ‘Harvey,’ 4,000 per cent, profit. Do you think the British would be interested?”
“I’m sure they would be,” I said. “I'll tell them about it.”
(P.S. “Show Business” tells me that normally the angel has a thirty-seventy chance of making his money back. And of course, there’s Treasury permission to get. But it would be fine to own a piece of Ethel Merman.)
By Ian Fleming
Fernando Henriques: Family and Colour in Jamaica. With a Preface by Meyer Fortes. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 18s.
There are about 250 million Negroes in the world and one of the great problems of this and future generations lies in promoting their happiness and well-being. Over the centuries, this will only be achieved by an extension of the colour bar so that part of the earth’s surface—perhaps the African continent—becomes a Negro dominion or reserve, or else by progressive removal of the colour bar until, through miscegenation, the entire population of the world is coffee-coloured. In England, until very recently, we barely perceived the problem. The solitary blackamoor was a nursery figure, a pet. In the plural he was a horde of fuzzy-wuzzies to be handled with glass beads or machine-guns.
But suddenly, almost since the war, the picture has changed; or rather our eyes, educated in humanity by the twentieth-century blaze of social enlightenment, see it differently. Suddenly we perceive the Negro as a tragically unhappy man ridden by a sense of inferiority which accompanies him, like a deformity, from the schoolroom to the grave. In our sympathy we lavish education and culture and medicine upon him only to be pained when, with advancement, he reaches for the weapons we once used against him and turns them upon us—weapons of legal and political argument, weapons of “giant powder” and steel. Floundering, we bomb him in one colony and in another invite him to fork-lunches at the Residency. Here he is a tool of Moscow, there he gets the O.B.E. Now he is pacified with a new constitution, then he is threatened with a battleship. Whichever way we attempt to disintegrate the black cloud on the horizon, it still remains larger than a man’s hand and, to those who think about it, just as menacing as if it were shaped like a mushroom.
Mr. Henriques is a social anthropologist and, while he might be indulgent towards these generalizations, in Family and Colour in Jamaica it has been his concern to focus a microscope over a small portion of this black cloud and to provide a detailed field-study of the mesh of colour relationships that exist even in a community as politically advanced and socially enlightened as Jamaica. The result is not only a valuable contribution to social science but a work of general interest, written with intelligence and sympathy.
The author, himself a member of a famous Jamaican family still prominent in the island, is lecturer in social anthology in the University of Leeds. It was thus not difficult for him to return to Jamaica and move among the people with intimacy and yet with eyes wide open. He concentrated on the County of Portland and its capital, Port Antonio, and his minute focus on the habits of and customs of this parish provides some of his most interesting passages of descriptive reporting. But it is his examination of the minutiae of colour relationships within Negro society that brings out the bitter colour warfares that accompany the usual economic class struggles.
“Colour,” he emphasizes, “is evaluated in terms of actual colour, hair formation, features and skin textures,” allowing for infinite combinations all of which have social significance. Thus, a dark person with “good” hair and features ranks above a fairer person with “bad” hair and features, and so on. Families become divided on colour lines, but in other spheres there are even greater frustrations. Choice of a career, promotion, public and private acceptance by others, marriage, in fact all social position is largely determined by colour. Even poverty plays a secondary part. Always there is that dreadful moment, generally at school, when some incident on the playground, some remark overheard in the street, will suddenly bring home to the little black boy that the fair boy will have the advantage of him for the rest of his life. It is no wonder that the conclusions reached by this stimulating and humane author are not encouraging, and the only disappointing feature of the book lies in the absence of some brave and thought-provoking suggestions for the future which would stir our minds as well as our hearts.
One of Our Submarines. By Edward Young. (Hart-Davis. 18s.)
By Ian Fleming
We make terrible mistakes at the beginning of all our wars, but the worst of them is the failure to give the maximum number of people a chance to fight the enemy from the very day war is declared. The National Defence Club is hard to join. Anyone not on a waiting list gets passed, from one “Sorry, old man” to the next until his ardour and patriotism are as scuffed as his shoe leather.
To be a round peg in a round hole in wartime is rare and priceless. Edward Young was one of the fortunate. Of the three Services, the Navy is the shop most tightly closed. It has to be. Irresponsibility or inefficiency by any one man in a ship is far more dangerous and expensive than the failure of his opposite number in the normal run of service in the Army or Air Force. And the citadel of this closed shop is the Submarine Service. A week-end yachtsman, Young was graciously admitted into the R.N.V.R., and then by a fluke had a chance of volunteering for submarines. He was accepted, completed his training, moved from ship to ship just, it seemed, as the one he left was doomed, was given the first R.N.V.R. command in the history of submarines, and dodged depth-charges and disaster in the same ship until he ended the war in her with the rank of Commander and with the D.S.O., D.S.C. and Bar. A wonderful war for one young civilian. How many other fine men were lost on the clumsy machine?
One Of Our Submarines is in the very highest rank of books about the last war. Submarines are thrilling beasts and Edward Young tells of four years’ adventures in them in a good stout book with excitement on every page. He writes beautifully, economically and with humour, and in the actions he commands he manages to put the reader at the voice-pipe and the periscope so that sometimes the tension is so great that one has to put the book down.
The author tells us little about himself, which is a pity, for the hints which penetrate through his modest cloak of self-effacement make us wish for more of his personal reactions as he climbed towards the final solitary pinnacle of command. It is interesting that when he reaches that pinnacle the writing seems to become slightly constrained and the earlier attractive freedom of comment and expression gives place to the voice of authority as he takes his deadly tube against the Japanese.
To anyone who has served in submarines it will not be surprising that the little communities he describes are so happy and so closely knit. A sociologist would probably say that the ship’s company of a submarine represents the highest form of democratic unity—from fifty to a hundred men, the duties of each one vital to the safety of all of them, social barriers impossible, discipline automatic and perfectly comprehended, successes and failures completely shared and always the subconscious framework of permanent danger to override and control the selfish instincts of the individual.
All this comes out in One of Our Submarines and the book is a fine tribute to a happy and gallant Service. But what a wonderful setting for a novel—a Caine Mutiny of the Submarine Service! Mr. Young is exceptionally qualified to write it.
Man The Ropes. By Augustine Courtauld. (Hodder & Stoughton. 12s. 6d.)
This is the autobiography of a man upon whom it seemed that the sun would always shine.
It is true that innumerable governesses and school-masters beat Augustine Courtauld for various types of rebellion, and that much of his later life consisted of getting in and out of scrapes with authority and equally uneven battles with resistentialist sun, ice, rock and sea: but the tough, gay quixotry of Augustine Courtauld always won.
At one time, in 1931, when the world’s press was full of the youth missing for five months in an ice hut in the Arctic, it seemed that here was another Edgar Christian destined to a young, lonely death in the midst of one of those tom-boy expeditions into the Frozen North. But his hero, Gino Watkins, soon himself to die in the Arctic, found Courtauld as Courtauld knew he would.
There were more adventures in the Arctic; then marriage to Mollie Montgomery, and to Duet, his dream-ship, which is still part of the family. Then came the war. To me these are the best chapters: when Courtauld, Polar Medal, Watchkeeper’s Certificate and all tried to enroll in the exclusive club that was the Navy and could get no further than a Civil Servant’s job in the Naval Intelligence Division. He was put in the Scandinavian Section, which was in charge of an expert on Egypt. One day the latest intelligence on the Swedish Fleet was asked for. Courtauld hunted through the files and produced a solitary, dog-eared “secret report” dated many years previously, which announced that “owing to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease the manoeuvres of the Swedish main fleet would be cancelled.” Many such incidents went into Courtauld’s early attempts to win the war and they make splendid, ironical reading. At last he got into M.T.B.s and then into the abortive Arctic Commando under “Red” Ryder, the V.C. of St. Nazaire, which ended with the murder in Belsen of the small party which finally got to Norway. Courtauld was transferred to a destroyer and then to ferrying landing-craft across the Atlantic.
VE Day came and Courtauld went back to his family, to Spencers, his beautiful house in Essex, and to Duet. It looked as if the sun would go on shining for him until suddenly the Almighty decided that Courtauld’s life had been too happy. He turned off the sunshine. Christopher, the eldest boy of six children, caught polio, from which it took the Courtaulds three years to rescue him. Neuritis struck Augustine and put him in a wheelchair, for the rest of his life. Mollie had a long nervous breakdown. The storms of Fate blew and went on blowing.
Now at last the skies have cleared again and the battered ship is back on an even keel. This splendid, gay little book of very English adventures is one of the results. All Augustine Courtauld’s life is in the Masefield quotation from which the title comes:
The power of man is as his hopes
In darkest night, the cocks are crowing.
With the sea roaring and the wind blowing;
Adventure. Man the ropes.
Future Indefinite. By Noel Coward. (Heinemann, 21s.)
By Ian Fleming
Noel Coward is one of the most remarkable men of the century whose age (he is in his fifty-fifth year) he shares. Genius is not a word to be thrown about carelessly, but any man who can succeed in giving pleasure, in most of the creative media, to half the inhabitants of the world for thirty years must possess a measure of it.
Much of his secret lies in his passionate professionalism. A master of technique, he works extremely hard and with minute accuracy, discipline and integrity. The second volume of his autobiography shows all these qualities, and it may thus seem very unfair to complain that in this admirably written book it is just these professional virtues that sometimes obtrude upon the narrative. If only he had thrown away those diaries. If only he had not bothered so much about dates and places and ships and planes. If only he had not found it necessary to put the record straight about his war service, his court case on a currency offence, the incident of the “Brooklyn Boys.”
Mr. Coward’s public life has demonstrated that he is a man of courage, devotion to duty and patriotism. If he had done nothing more during the war years than produce In Which We Serve, he would have done as much for the Allied cause as any man in his profession; yet in this vastly readable and entertaining book there occasionally creeps in a rather querulous note of self-justification which seems out of place in a man of his attainments. But when he forgets the critic inside himself who has always been his sternest mentor and when he thinks only of the reader he provides a scintillating picture of his life before and during the war.
On every page there are passages of brilliant observation, wit and humanity, which allow one to hope that when his third volume, Past Imperfect, comes to be written, he will forget his own private pains and write only according to his particular genius, which is to give pleasure to intelligent people.
By Ian Fleming
In the United States the literary event of the year has been the publication of the first of five volumes of Mr. Churchill’s war memoirs entitled The Gathering Storm. The New York Times and Life have published long extracts from the book, as has The Daily Telegraph in England, and now a further huge section of the American public will read this great English adventure story by Britain’s first citizen.
The efforts of our official propaganda organisations are small beer beside the vast American audience created by Mr. Churchill, and it is debatable whether the handiwork of any other single Englishman will bring in more hard currency this year. The Gathering Storm, which has been acclaimed by the critics with “rave” but reverent notices, deals with the prelude to war—in the author’s words, “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm”—and with the Twilight War, ending in May, 1940. The volume (nearly 800 pages with the appendices) closes with Mr. Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.
Due largely to the shortage .of paper and cloth, the majority of the British public will not read this great segment of their own history until Messrs. Cassell publish the volume here in September.
Few other major works of general interest have appeared. "Vinegar” Joe Stilwell’s posthumous and peppery memoirs of the Burma campaign have not been praised, and Mr. Sumner Welles’s We Need Not Fail has made no stir. Dr. Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male still leads the best-sellers for the worst reasons. In fact, it is a stodgy agglomeration of statistics and graphs whose findings will be treated with respect by the medical authorities to whom it is addressed. The Hatfields and the McCoys, by Virgil Jones, is an exciting piece of folklore retelling the story of the famous family feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border. The Harvard University Press are publishing the definitive Letters of Edgar Allan Poe in October.
English authors are well represented by Edward Crankshaw’s Russia and the Russians and by Simon Nowell Smith’s scholarly piece of Henry James research, The Legend of the Master, and English novelists easily lead a barren fiction field. Evelyn Waugh’s piece of side-splitting necrophilia, The Loved One, which has so far only appeared here in Horizon (Chapman & Hall are to publish in book form), has been greeted with masochistic ecstasy, and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter has been chosen as the Book of the Month.
Forthcoming volumes include a new James M. Cain The Moth; The Sky and the Forest, a tale of Africa by C. S. Forester; No High Way, by Nevil Shute; and Ape and Essence, a new Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World vein. Ernest Hemingway’s long new novel is said to be maturing slowly.
American books are only qualitatively absent from this short survey. The output of literary chewing-gum continues apace, but the public is surfeited, probably owing to “an unfortunate combination of higher prices and lower quality,” as the Saturday Review of Literature puts it. The publishers moan and groan, but the drumming of the book clubs, the tireless superlatives of reviewers, and ever shinier book jackets are of no avail and, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a slump is a slump is a slump.
By Ian Fleming
Pleasure Island: the book of Jamaica. Edited by Esther Chapman. (Chantry Publications. 21s.)
There should be a series of Baedeker-Michelin guides to the British Empire. I offer the suggestion with respectful urgency to the Ministries concerned and to the Colonial Development Corporation.
Esther Chapman’s guide book to Jamaica provides an excellent model, edited as it is with intelligence and common sense. There should be a better map of the island, and the section devoted to the local fauna could be improved, but in a beautifully illustrated book of twenty-one chapters covering everything of interest to a tourist or a resident such minor criticisms are captious. Esther Chapman has done a great service to Jamaica.
***
Island in the Sun (Sunday Times, January 12, 1958)
By Ian Fleming
Jamaica. By Peter Abrahams. (Corona Library: H.M. Stationery Office. 25s.)
There ought to be a Baedeker series on the British Commonwealth. Living small lives in this dull little Island at its centre, we have no idea of the fabulous lands and islands in the sun that are linked to us by history, speech and currency. Not even distance separates us now that you can be in the Caribbean in twenty or Singapore in forty hours’ flying time—only poverty and, more important, our cliff-girt mentality.
While waiting for the philanthropist who will finance the series, the next best thing is the Corona Library, sponsored by the Colonial Office, an imaginative and luxuriously conceived project which has brilliantly examined Hongkong, Sierra Leone, Nyasaland, British Guiana, and now Jamaica.
Jamaica is rather more serious-minded than some of the others, and Mr. Peter Abrahams’s treatment is thorough rather than seductive. The flora and fauna, for instance, which, with the landscape, are Jamaica's glory, are given short shrift compared with politics, administration and various aspects of development and welfare; but the latter are admirably handled, generally with entertaining and illuminating scraps of conversation with the Jamaican man-in-the-street.
The production is up to the very high Corona standards, and the line drawings by Rosemary Grimble, daughter of “Grimble of the Islands,” are particularly attractive and apposite.
The Sunday Times asked three men to go to the Motor Show and to give their uninhibited views on what they found there. Two are family motorists, the third a famous racing driver. Their views have been kept deliberately non-technical. This was the “panel” of critics:
STIRLING MOSS has owned several small family saloons, the most recent a Standard 8 fitted with a 10 h.p. engine.
IAN FLEMING drives a Ford Thunderbird which is the envy of his friends.
GODFREY SMITH fits a wife and a baby daughter into a 1955 Morris Minor.
The place, Earls Court, on the day of the preview. The critics begin:
FLEMING: Nothing really startling this year. The usual difficulty in choosing between too many models with much the same good English qualities. Most of the cars are, as usual, too good for the drivers.
SMITH: There’s no doubt that this will go down in history as the two-pedal car Show. I think our manufacturers deserve a pat on the back for the way they’ve got them into production.
MOSS: I wish there had been a few more gimmicks to attract people to British cars. Rovers have done it with their turbine. And look at the crowds round that Buick Centurion mock-up. Heaven knows when it will be in production, but it’s full of blueprint ideas. I’m surprised that at least the B.M.C. doesn’t have a “Car of the Future” to get us all excited. Well, we’ve got to start somewhere. Let’s start in the millionaire’s class. The Rolls is still supreme, of course. It’s a name that commands affection all over the world.
FLEMING: I’m sorry the old basketwork Rolls has gone for ever. Incidentally, I gather it’s quite untrue they ever thought of turning out a £2,000 Rolls-Royce. Just a rumour. Their S Series Bentley is the most successful car Rolls have ever built. Waiting list of over a year. I’ve tried one, it’s like driving a Swiss watch.
SMITH: I must say I hanker after the Continental, but there really ought to be more luggage space in a car of that price. You can hardly get one normal suitcase into the boot. I’d like to see what the Italian coachbuilders could do with it.
MOSS: But for real Lord Mayor comfort give me that big Daimler. There’s room for six in the back. It’s practically a drawing-room on wheels.
FLEMING: I’m glad to hear Daimler’s have fitted a new heater. I’ve never known an engine run so coolly, but, as a result, the heater just didn’t heat.
SMITH: I think the companies should give one a total guarantee for accessories and the accessory firms should issue a guarantee to the motor manufacturers. If I buy a new suit and the buttons break my tailor replaces them. He doesn’t send me hunting round London after the button manufacturer.
MOSS: I agree. What I want is a really truthful petrol gauge that doesn't say “empty” when I’ve got another 50 miles’ driving in hand (or vice versa), windscreen wipers that don’t make a noise, and long window handles that move the window up and down with one stroke. But let’s get back to cars. Here’s the Aston Martin. Lovely car, and that body design is truly original. Stacks of room for luggage, all-round visibility and good driving positions. I’m not impressed by that open Superleggera model. Looks nice enough but visibility is poor, and there’s hardly room for anything but a small blonde with a sponge bag. May be all right for Italy. It’s the same old problem: how to marry the beautiful and the practical.
SMITH: Don’t you think the Fords come closest to doing that?
MOSS: I do. I think their styling is probably the most up to date in this country.
FLEMING: The Riley owners used to be some of the staunchest fans in motoring, but I think, since the B.M.C. took over Rileys, the fans have been slipping away. Rileys seem to be rather the ugly duckling of the B.M.C. group. All the brains seem to be going into the Austins and Morrises. Look at the Austin Healeys. They ought to bring out a Riley-Healey, and get a bit of zest back into the car.
SMITH: They’ve let Jaguar get the edge on them.
MOSS: Marvellous cars. Jaguar performance in racing since the war is one of the things we can really be proud of. Wonderful workmanship and finish. I can’t see how they do it for the price.
FLEMING: Pretty imposing front view on the new one but I don’t see why they need all those lamps and horns and traffic signals. There are ten of them altogether.
SMITH: They could have put the horns behind the radiator grille and put the traffic lights into the sidelights.
MOSS: Here’s the new Rover 105. Rover owners are still as faithful as Riley owners used to be. I’m not surprised. They’ve always built a good, car and they’ve always been forward-looking. Don’t know when this turbine model of theirs will be on the road. It’ll be quite a race with Detroit, but it’s going to be a new kind of motoring when it comes. But take the 105. It’s a genuine two-pedal car, and what’s so extraordinary about it is that it’s the only British company with its own automatic transmission and torque converter. Usual good Rover driving lay-out, and plenty of room for parcels.
SMITH: One of the reasons why It has always been a favourite with women.
MOSS: Women don’t have to worry about their comforts so much nowadays. All the big manufacturers look after them. Take the styling of that Austin Estate car. I really like that red and white combination. Their colours are some of the most dashing in the Show. It’s a big selling point, now people are less conservative about colour schemes.
FLEMING: The Armstrong Siddeley is another luxurious affair at a reasonable price. Wonderfully silent engine and as fast as you like, though I think the springing’s a bit soft for really fast driving. You can’t get that comfortable ride and still go round corners at sixty.
MOSS: They’ve tightened it up on the 238, but I think its looks could be improved. There’s a sort of downward slant about the bonnet which I don’t like. Here are Bristols next door. Good fast cars and a clean, handsome body without any nonsense. They make that 2-litre work pretty hard, but it seems to like it. Rather a dull stand with just two drab-coloured cars. One of their competition models would have livened it up.
SMITH: They’ve certainly put some work into my Morris Minor. I’d like to see a long road test between this 1,000 model and the Volkswagen. I hear that the gearbox is a beauty. And I’m delighted to find they’ve put more steam in the engine.
FLEMING: I haven’t tried either of them, but I’d rather have the Morris or the little Austin every time. At least you have an engine in front of you in case you hit something. In the Volkswagen there’s nothing under that bonnet except perhaps a suitcase.
MOSS: But here’s the M.G. I must say I like the appearance of the new hard-top. I only hope that it won’t be too noisy inside. If your father has promised you a sports car for your twenty-first birthday, there are plenty to choose from these days. There's the M.G., the Austin Healey (I like those bright colours they've laid on for the American market) and the new six-cylinder should be a smooth job. Then there’s the Triumph with disc brakes on the front wheels—they’ll all be having them in time I expect—and now there's the little Berkeley, which is pretty good value at £575. It’s stripped to essentials, but somebody had plenty of initiative to put a really cheap sports car on the road. The man on the stand says they’ve got orders of upwards of 5,000 already. Anyway, I'd like to be 21 again with all those to choose from.
FLEMING: What about the Citroen? Have you tried it? I gather they’re having plenty of trouble with it in France. It’s so revolutionary there aren’t many garages who can repair it if anything goes wrong. It came out a bit too quickly, I dare say. But Frenchmen rave about it.
MOSS: It’s probably the most comfortable jar in the show, and packed full of brilliant ideas. Huge boot, wonderful visibility and every kind of gadget. It deserves to succeed and I think it certainly will once it has settled down. Let's have a look at the Skoda and see what they’re doing on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Of course this is very much a Show model. But it’s got plenty of bright ideas too—propeller-shaft running through the main chassis member, independent front and rear springing, and notice those aluminium fittings. I don’t know why we don’t take to them instead of chrome. You’ll find them on that Swiss-bodied Alvis, too. Another fine-looking car. But this Skoda looks a workmanlike Job. Rather austere, but I suppose it’s made for rather austere people.
SMITH: Is there anything else you notice looking round the Show?
MOSS: I like the new Station Wagon models. There’ll be more of them. They’re ideal for a family and particularly for holidays abroad, and the coach builders like Grosvenor and Abbott have got a fine line into them. Wheel trims are much smarter. Take a look at the Austins. There’s still too much chrome about. Vauxhalls make such a good car that I don’t know why they have to smother it in the stuff. The same applies to those tiny chrome strips on the face of the Singer. Finish seems to be getting better and better, and I hope basic workmanship is keeping up with It. Prices on balance seem more or less constant, but we're getting more for our money—extra instruments for example. That’s about all. There’s quite a lot to be proud of here. If we’ve criticised a bit, so will the other people who come to the Show.
FLEMING: If you could have your pick of the cars, what would it be?
MOSS: I’ll have an Aston Martin DB 2.4 saloon, if you’ll quieten the engine a trifle. Off-white and silver-green.
SMITH: I’ll have a Continental Bentley.
FLEMING: An Austin 105 Station Wagon for me. Elephant’s-breath grey.
MOSS: One thing we do agree on, then. We’re all going to go on driving British.
Notes: As we'll see next week, Fleming did not buy that station wagon and did not go on buying British!
The Times obituary for Godfrey Smith, future editor of the Sunday Times notes that "His first job after Oxford was as personal assistant to Lord Kemsley, owner of The Sunday Times. In 1956, he was appointed news editor, where he got to know Ian Fleming, who was the foreign manager. When Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale, was published he gave Smith a signed copy. Among his reporters was John Pearson...They were to become lifelong friends, with Pearson always referring to Smith as 'the Guvnor'."
Those of you familiar with Ian Fleming's TV treatment "Murder on Wheels" will know that the plot involves James Bond saving Stirling Moss from agents of SMERSH, who hope to sabotage an auto race. Fleming wrote "The whole brunt of this episode is, of course, borne by the motor racing. Stirling Moss has, in fact, provided me with the two crash manoeuves as described and there is little doubt that he and Mr. Vanderwell, who designed and owns the Vanwalls, would co-operate in the filming." Alas, it was never to be.
As a further guide to would-be buyers at the Motor Show, The Sunday Times invited some of its contributors and staff, as well as some recognised experts, to say what car they would choose and why.
Ian Fleming:
I would choose a Studebaker Avanti, full four-seater V8 Gran Sport, supercharged by Paxton, styled by Raymond Loewy. Price around £3,000.
Having driven two Thunderbirds for six years, during which not a light bulb has fused and paint and chromium have not wilted, despite a garageless life, I have become wedded to American cars when they have something approximating to European styling.
I am now switching to the Studebaker, which has always produced first class cars, and
has now, with the Avanti, created something really startling—top speed with four up of over 160 m.p.h. and acceleration of 0-60 in 7.4 seconds. My model, packed with intelligent gimmicks such as switches in the roof, aircraft-type levers for the heating, disc brakes and a powerful built-in roll bar in case I turn over, is being delivered in a few weeks.
Note: In his 1964 interview with Playboy, Ian Fleming said the following about his cars:
"I like a car I can leave out in the street all night and which will start at once in the morning and still go a hundred miles an hour when you want it to and yet give a fairly comfortable ride. I can’t be bothered with a car that needs tuning, or one that will give me a lot of trouble and expenditure. So I’ve had a Thunderbird for six years, and it’s done me very well. In fact, I have two of them, the good two-seater and the less-good four-seater. I leave them both in the street, and when I get in and press the starter, off they go, which doesn’t happen to a lot of motorcars.
Now, the Studebaker supercharged Avanti is the same thing. It will start as soon as you get out in the morning; it has a very nice, sexy exhaust note and will do well over a hundred and has got really tremendous acceleration and much better, tighter road holding and steering than the Thunderbird. Excellent disk brakes, too. I’ve cut a good deal of time off the run between London and Sandwich in the Avanti, on braking power alone. So I’m very pleased with it for the time being."
Yes, I'm not quite sure what the writer was thinking there! Are there any similarities at all? I also wonder if Bond himself would have eventually driven a Studebaker Avanti if Fleming had lived longer. After all, Bond drives a Thunderbird in TSWLM.