What I learned from this book (in no particular order):

1.tThe ideal Soviet master assassin is a man who is:

a.tthe offspring of a German wrestler and a Southern Irish hooker;
b.textremely muscular and hairy;
c.tpossessed of a high threshold for pain;
d.tmanic during the full moon; and
e.tasexual (“Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual”) --- but love to parade around naked.

2.tUgly women are mannish and have breasts that looked like badly packed sandbags, and when they pull back their hair into a bun, it would be obscene.

3.t“Colonel Klebb of SMERSH was wearing a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crepe de chine. She looked like the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.” Ugly, dumpy, middle-aged, Soviet lesbians are SCARY.

4.t“A purist would have been disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s.” Too much exercise could turn a perfect 10 of a woman into a muscular, ugly bitch. Fortunately, the face and breasts would still be pretty, as it is impossible to exercise them too much. She would still be good enough for the hero.

5.tTo impersonate an English secret agent, you must learn to be a gentleman. It is advisable to add a touch of eccentricity, for the English pride themselves on their eccentricity, and treat the eccentric proposition as a challenge.

6.t"Just as, at least in one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned." Bond is a man of many vices, but sloth is the only vice that could actually destroy him.

7.tHaving crushes on men who they know only from photographs is a "grisly" female habit.

8.tIf you are staying at a dingy hotel and are suddenly upgraded to a luxury honeymoon suite with ceiling mirrors ahead of a romantic assignation with a pretty woman, beware.

9.tIf you are manly Turkish man, you have to tame your girlfriend by chaining her naked to your dining table, and then father a dozen children with various members of your harem. When they are grown up, you could have them help out in your spice/espionage business.

10.tIf you are a virile Gypsy man, you could have girls fight to the death naked for you, and then get to keep the winner until her breasts fall off.

11.tIf you are a comparatively enlightened Western man, all you could do is spank your girl when she gets too fat for making love.


The book is sexist and probably racist/imperialist*, but it is also a damn good spy thriller. The action and espionage set pieces --- a nighttime jaunt through a rodent-infested tunnel under the ancient Hall of the Pillars in Istanbul, a sniper fight in the dark alleys by the Bosphorus, a mano-a-mano on the Orient Express -- - are expertly staged and spine-tinglingly exciting. The writing is vivid and crisp, peppered with piquant observations (“Bond recognized them as the eyes of furious dissipation.”) and insights (“Only Track No. 3, and its platform, throbbed with the tragic poetry of departure”). The exotic locales are atmospherically evocative, with just enough authentic details to lend an illusion of plausibility to the fantastic plot. Bond is a master spy, but also a man who gets scared during a turbulent flight, has doubts about the moral fallout of his mission (“What would he think of the dazzling secret agent who was off across the world in a new and most romantic role --- to pimp for England?”), and has genuine tendre for the woman whom he is supposed to seduce. If this is pulp fiction, it is pulp fiction of the highest order.


*I’m not too bothered with the un-PC-ness: Fleming was a product of his age, and he was writing about hard men who lie and kill for their country --- who are surely no boy scouts. The misogyny and brutality that he assigned to them ring true for these characters. Bond himself is not above enjoying the spectacle of a naked Gypsy catfight and has a rather patronizing attitude towards women, but despite all his talk about spanking, never laid a hand on any woman. The rest are so over the top that they’re actually funny.


Other Random Observations

Number of extremely ugly villains: 1

Number of henchmen with congenital analgesia: 1

Number of scenes involving naked people, gratuitous or otherwise: 4

Number of Martini units consumed by the protagonist: 2

Number of times the word “violet” is used as an adjective in the last 8 chapters : 12 (what’s up with that?)

Number of product placement: at least 19
(Sea Island cotton shirt, Dunhill lighter, Girrard-Perregaux watch, Beretta gun, De Bry coffee, Chemex coffee brewer, Tiptree Little Scarlet Strawberry Jam, Cooper’s Vintage Oxford Marmalade, Fortnum’s Norwegian Heather Honey, Minton china, Bentley, Rolls Royce, B.E.A., Swaine and Adeney attaché case, Wilkinsons throwing knife, Palmolive shaving cream, Lambretta scooter, Diplomates cigarettes, Ritz Hotel)

In ways this is my favorite Bond book so far. Not sure why. Perhaps because the writing feels a bit more mature...in ways.

Fleming spends a lot of time developing the backgrounds of the villains. Bond doesn't come actively on to the scene until well into the book.

The pacing feels slow for the first two thirds, then it gets ramped up for the end. The plot is straight forward and even intentionally telegraphed, so it will probably bore modern day readers.

"A blue and green dragon-fly flashed out from among the rose bushes at the end of the garden and hovered in mid-air a few inches above the base of the man’s spine. It had been attracted by the golden shimmer of the June sunshine on the ridge of fine blond hairs above the coccyx. A puff of breeze came off the sea. The tiny field of hairs bent gently. The dragon-fly darted nervously sideways and hung above the man’s left shoulder, looking down. The young grass below the man’s open mouth stirred. A large drop of sweat rolled down the side of the fleshy nose and dropped glittering into the grass. That was enough. The dragon-fly flashed away through the roses and over the jagged glass on top of the high garden wall. It might be good food, but it moved."

I've said this before. Fleming really could write. It is snippets like the above which have kept me interested in the Bond series, despite my dislike of the "hero" of the books.

With "From Russia with Love", however, I have reached a new low point in my already strained reader-author relationship with Ian Fleming. In fact, I would probably abandon the series, if I wasn't on this quest to investigate the myth of Bond for myself, away from the legend created by the films and the franchise, and also if wasn't so much fun to read this as a buddy read.

So, let me count the ways in which I hate this book - I hope you have time, it's quite a list:

1. Buffoonery:

"THE BLUBBERY ARMS of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline. In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him."

Yeah, because only a decade after the horrors of the second World War, romanticizing war was totally acceptable. How else would Bond be able to prove his manhood?!

Oh, yes, of course, by pimping himself out for Queen and country, which is basically what the plot is about: Bond is tasked with romancing a Russian spy who is supposedly "fangirling" over him and offers a coding machine to the Bond if only she can meet him.

It's a trap of course, but why would that stop Bond, whose only concerns are whether he would be able to perform if the spy turned out to be unattractive.




2. Petty preconceptions:

"Character would greatly depend on upbringing and, whatever Pavlov and the Behaviourists might say, to a certain extent on the character of the parents. And, of course, people’s lives and behaviour would be partly conditioned by physical strengths and weaknesses."

Hooray, let's bring in references to scientific authority to mix up with the author's own bias.

2. Racism:

Not Bond, but one of the main characters, who is half English, half Turkish, and whom Bond seems to admire comes up with a lot of hateful utterances while they are having dinner in Istanbul:

"Kerim harangued the waiter. He sat back, smiling at Bond. ‘That is the only way to treat these damned people. They love to be cursed and kicked. It is all they understand. It is in the blood. All this pretence of democracy is killing them. They want some sultans and wars and rape and fun. Poor brutes, in their striped suits and bowler hats. They are miserable.'"

Yes, you read that right. There are more of these pearls of wisdom throughout the book. I'll get back to Kerim's favourite subject - women - later.

I should add that I read the book before the news about Turkey broke. It adds another layer of hatefulness if you imagine that this sort of comment could have appeared on social media in the last few days, when this is just a mere passing comment in Fleming's book. Probably even his time. Maybe his own social circles.
It is sad that this is still relevant 60 years later. However, the fact it is still relevant, does not make the expressed attitude less awful.

3. Snobbery:

After dismissing the secret service of all other nations, Fleming has one of characters utter this judgement of value:

‘England is another matter altogether. I think we all have respect for her Intelligence Service,’ General Vozdvishensky looked round the table. There were grudging nods from everyone present, including General G. ‘Their Security Service is excellent. England, being an island, has great security advantages and their so-called M.I. 5. employs men with good education and good brains. Their Secret Service is still better. They have notable successes. In certain types of operation, we are constantly finding that they have been there before us. Their agents are good. They pay them little money – only a thousand or two thousand roubles a month – but they serve with devotion. Yet these agents have no special privileges in England, no relief from taxation and no special shops such as we have, from which they can buy cheap goods. Their social standing abroad is not high, and their wives have to pass as the wives of secretaries. They are rarely awarded a decoration until they retire. And yet these men and women continue to do this dangerous work. It is curious. It is perhaps the Public School and University tradition. The love of adventure. But still it is odd that they play this game so well, for they are not natural conspirators.’

Yeah, ok, so maybe this was the wrong time to be reading this book. You know, what with the political crap that is going on in the UK at the moment, and which seems to be fuelled at least partly by nationalist bullshit.

Oh, and lets not forget to praise the notion of the public school tradition, which seems to produce such admirable individuals so effective at providing the nation's security, all by themselves. Why would they need the help of their international counterparts?



5. Women

The aspects of the book that really caused me to reach for the sick bucket are, however, Fleming's misogyny and sexism. It's been present in all the Bond books I've read, but this one has really taken top spot:

Not only do we have Kerim Bey's sick generalisation that rape is romantic,

"My father was the sort of man women can’t resist. All women want to be swept off their feet. In their dreams they long to be slung over a man’s shoulder and taken into a cave and raped. That was his way with them."

and that it is perfectly acceptable to keep a woman as a slave,

"I wanted to have my women where my mother would not know. There was a stroke of bad luck. I had a little Bessarabian hell-cat. I had won her in a fight with some gipsies, here in the hills behind Istanbul. They came after me, but I got her on board the boat. I had to knock her unconscious first. She was still trying to kill me when we got back to Trebizond, so I got her to my place and took away all her clothes and kept her chained naked under the table. When I ate, I used to throw scraps to her under the table, like a dog. She had to learn who was master."



We also have two "gypsy" women fight to the death over man and being described as animals:

"While Kerim spoke, Bond examined the two beautiful, taut, sullen animals in the centre of the ring. They were both gipsy-dark, with coarse black hair to their shoulders, and they were both dressed in the collection of rags you associate with shanty-town negroes – tattered brown shifts that were mostly darns and patches. One was bigger-boned than the other, and obviously stronger, but she looked sullen and slow-eyed and might not be quick on her feet. She was handsome in a rather leonine way, and there was a slow red glare in her heavy lidded eyes as she stood and listened impatiently to the head of the tribe. She ought to win, thought Bond. She is half an inch taller, and she is stronger. Where this girl was a lioness, the other was a panther – lithe and quick and with cunning sharp eyes that were not on the speaker but sliding sideways, measuring inches, and the hands at her sides were curled into claws. The muscles of her fine legs looked hard as a man’s. The breasts were small, and, unlike the big breasts of the other girl, hardly swelled the rags of her shift. She looks a dangerous little bitch of a girl, thought Bond."



And if this isn't enough, we also have Fleming assert his shallowness by describing the characters' attitudes and value as a human being through their looks. Mind, he does not do this with the male characters, only the female ones.
The magnificently evil baddie, Rosa Klebb, is described as follows:

"Rosa Klebb would be in her late forties, he assumed, placing her by the date of the Spanish War. She was short, about five foot four, and squat, and her dumpy arms and short neck, and the calves of the thick legs in the drab khaki stockings, were very strong for a woman. The devil knows, thought Kronsteen, what her breasts were like, but the bulge of uniform that rested on the table-top looked like a badly packed sandbag, and in general her figure, with its big pear-shaped hips, could only be likened to a ’cello. The tricoteuses of the French Revolution must have had faces like hers, decided Kronsteen, sitting back in his chair and tilting his head slightly to one side. The thinning orange hair scraped back to the tight, obscene bun; the shiny yellow-brown eyes that stared so coldly at General G. through the sharp-edged squares of glass; the wedge of thickly powdered, large-pored nose; the wet trap of a mouth, that went on opening and shutting as if it was operated by wires under the chin. Those French women, as they sat and knitted and chatted while the guillotine clanged down, must have had the same pale, thick chicken’s skin that scragged in little folds under the eyes and at the corners of the mouth and below the jaws, the same big peasant’s ears, the same tight, hard dimpled fists, like knobkerries, that, in the case of the Russian woman, now lay tightly clenched on the red velvet table-top on either side of the big bundle of bosom. And their faces must have conveyed the same impression, concluded Kronsteen, of coldness and cruelty and strength as this, yes, he had to allow himself the emotive word, dreadful woman of SMERSH."

Oh, and because she is the baddie of the piece, she must of course also be "abnormal" with respect to her sexuality,

"And, reflected Kronsteen, much of her success was due to the peculiar nature of her next most important instinct, the Sex Instinct. For Rosa Klebb undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a Neuter. Kronsteen was certain of it. The stories of men and, yes, of women, were too circumstantial to be doubted. She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance. For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this psychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with."

I assume there is no need for me to point out that, to my knowledge, Fleming does not go into such detail when describing the male baddies. What is even more annoying is that, Klebb would have been a great evil character even without this nonsense regarding her physical description. There are a few descriptions of torture scenes that get the point of her malice across quite effectively and would have benefited so much from less focus on her appearance and "personal life" as Fleming calls it.

Lastly, there is the Bond girl, Tatiana Romanova, who is supposedly working in this special department, but is riddled with self-doubt about her appearance -

"What about the mouth? Was it too broad? It must look terribly wide when she smiled. She smiled at herself in the mirror. Yes, it was wide; but then so had Garbo’s been. At least the lips were full and finely etched. There was the hint of a smile at the corners. No one could say it was a cold mouth! And the oval of her face. Was that too long? Was her chin a shade too sharp? She swung her head sideways to see it in profile. The heavy curtain of hair swung forward and across her right eye so that she had to brush it back. Well, the chin was pointed, but at least it wasn’t sharp. She faced the mirror again and picked up a brush and started on the long, heavy hair. Greta Garbo! She was all right, or so many men wouldn’t tell her that she was �� let alone the girls who were always coming to her for advice about their faces. But a film star – a famous one! She made a face at herself in the glass and went to eat her supper."

You know, because she's a princess (yep, there is an actual reference to her being a Romanov princess!) that needs to be rescued. Presumably, by Bond in a shiny suit of armor....



Interestingly enough, but no longer a surprise, we don't learn a lot of Tatiana's thoughts and internal monologue in this book. I mean, she was press ganged into working on this mission by threats to her family and loved ones. It would have given the book a layer of complexity to learn what her plans were - was she merely looking to complete the mission? Was she looking to make an escape? And then what?
There is no need for that though, because Fleming merely created Tatiana as an object of desire for Bond to play with, and besides, why would women have any thoughts about anything other than how they looked?

"In fact Corporal Tatiana Romanova was a very beautiful girl indeed. Apart from her face, the tall, firm body moved particularly well. She had been a year in the ballet school in Leningrad and had abandoned dancing as a career only when she grew an inch over the prescribed limit of five feet six. The school had taught her to hold herself well and to walk well. And she looked wonderfully healthy, thanks to her passion for figure-skating, which she practised all through the year at the Dynamo ice-stadium and which had already earned her a place on the first Dynamo women’s team. Her arms and breasts were faultless. A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s."

Seriously, what utter bullshit!

I seriously cheered at the end of the book, not just because of the way it ended but mostly because the torturous reading experience was finally over.

If I had not borrowed my copy from the library, I would have gladly ripped it to shreds - and I don't normally advocate violence of any kind.

During the discussion with my reading buddy, we looked at the book from different angles - it being a ground-breaking work of spy fiction in its time, it being a classic, etc.

I'm no longer sure that whether my anger at this book stems from the combination of all the elements of dumbassery that Fleming releases in this book or whether there is one single aspect that I would find fault with most. I really can appreciate the book within the time it was written. However, that does not change my outlook. Just because there are aspects that are non-pc now does not mean that they did not suck back in 1957. The perception depends on the reader more so than what decade it is read in. The main example, would be the promotion of rape culture. Not acceptable now, nor then, nor before then. Maybe not talked about, but I would argue that this is more of an indication of a lack of forum than an indication of social acceptance.

I do not believe that readers at that time needed an awareness of political correctness to know whether something was right or wrong.

From Russia with Love was the fifth of Ian Fleming's 007 books, published in 1957. Apparently he wasn't sure whether he wanted the franchise to continue, and you have to read the sequel, Dr. No, to find out how some of the plot points in this one were resolved.

Interesting, I think, is that the movie Dr. No (based on the sixth book) was the first James Bond film, and From Russia with Love was the second. Swapping the order of the plots actually necessitated some changes to the stories. In the movie, Dr. No is part of an international crime syndicate, SPECTRE. However, the Russian coding machine (based on the German's WWII Enigma device) was called Spektor in the novel and apparently renamed Lektor in the movie. SPECTRE is nowhere mentioned in either of the novels. In the novel From Russia with Love, it is the Russian assassination bureau SMERSH that hatches the plot to kill Bond using the Spektor and a beautiful woman as bait. In the movie, the planner Kronsteen instead works for SPECTRE, which intends to steal the Lektor along with luring Bond, then kill him and return the machine in return for a big SMERSH ransom payment.

Bond is a somewhat anachronistic character now, a gentleman bad boy back when most heroes played nice. Now they're all bad boys, and worse. And he was an unabashed male chauvinist. I'll leave it for the reader to marvel at rather than explain too much, but Tatiana Romanova is a rake's pipe-dream of a character, like all of the Fleming babes. She lives to serve the fantasy image she's created of Bond in her mind, and she commits the spy's cardinal sin of starting to believe her own cover story.

This book starts very slowly, with much more expository heavy lifting than you'd expect from a spy thriller. The action only accelerates about two-thirds of the way through. Fleming's literary predecessors included Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, and his slow storytelling pace seems like a throwback.

Also odd, it seemed to me, were his opinions of Istanbul. Fleming hates the Turkish food and finds the city dirty and under-lit at night. Contrast this image with today's Istanbul, which has a population of fifteen million and growing (larger than Los Angeles) and world-class amenities.

[ Cross-posted on www.boychiklit.com ]

Oh, James...



Probably the best one yet, though Fleming makes the unusual structural choices to both not introduce Our Hero into the action until nearly 40% through the book and also to end on a cliffhanger.. These peculiarities notwithstanding, the intricacies of the tradecraft, the outré (for its time) discussion of sex, power dynamics, and attraction, as well as the unforgettable characterizations of Soviet archvillains Red Grant, Rosa Klebb and Kronsteen, which is probably why they were retained with very little alteration in the film version although the very real dangerous geopolitical tensions of the early 60s saw the screenplay attribute the plot to kill Bond to the international criminal syndicate SPECTRE and not the Soviet state agency SMERSH.


Just a bit of horseplay between trusted colleagues.

Now for the fun part! If you're keeping track the principle problematic elements of the individual books now go as follows:

Casino Royale - Misogyny
Live and Let Die - Racial pandering
Moonraker - Paranoia re: 'Enemies within', particularly post-War Germans and the Soviets
Diamonds are Forever - Homophobia
From Russia With Love - Sexual Harrassment James makes no end of inappropriate comments to his own secretary (not Moneypenny yet in the literary version) but it's bisexual Rosa Klebb's jaw dropping "job interview" of poor Tatiana that really takes the cake.




Onward to Dr. No soon enough though first I need a bit of a break.


Tut, tut, when will these gauche Commies ever learn?

Lotte Lenya as the ‘improbably evil’ Rosa Klebb in the 1963 film adaptation

From Russia with Love is the fifth Bond novel by Ian Fleming. SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, aims to demoralize the British Secret Service and hatches an elaborate plan to assassinate their most famous agent James Bond. But first SMERSH must lure him to Istanbul.

I really enjoyed From Russia with Love. Its structure was wonderfully daring: the first 10 chapters narrate SMERSH’s plan and Bond isn’t introduced until page 129. Then came my favourite part of the novel, the central section set in Istanbul, involving Darko Kerim, the Secret Service’s man in Turkey. He was a fantastic character, who provided many chapters of entertainment. The main plot is not enacted until about two thirds into the novel. Although unusual in the Bond series, this structure was highly effective.

A valid criticism of the novel, pointed out by Umberto Eco in his essay ‘The Narrative Structure in Ian Fleming’, is that Bond’s adversaries, namely Rosa Klebb and Donovan Grant, ‘are so monstrous, so improbably evil that it seems impossible to take them seriously.’

This notwithstanding, From Russia with Love was perfect escapism, and I am looking forward to reading Dr No.

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming adapted for the BBC

Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...


-tIsn’t the title fabulous?
-tAnd yet such a preposterous proposition

I mean, coming from Russia it can’t with love.
This is my view, based on the many years during which all we’ve got around here was communism and the heinous regime…

-tNo love from that part of the world…

Jocularity aside, think of Aleppo and Sergei Magnitsky, as two more recent examples of the kind of affection coming from Russia…

-thttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_...

Or if you think these just random mistakes, or you come up with the argument that I tend to hear at the sauna- the Americans do the same or sometimes even worse- the Americans are always behind it-remember Alexander Litvinenko and the polonium they used on him.

Having said that, I must emphasis that I had five borzoi and dozens of puppies from them and I am an admirer of Russian writers:

-tChekhov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky…with Tolstoy there is a more complex situation where I loved War and Peace, Ana Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilich and the short stories but have learned horrifying things about the Lev Nikolayevich.

Coming finally to the point, I am no fan of the Soviet Union- that is established- but I generally avoid detective, spy novels as well.

So From Russia With Love could not have been a favorite of mine and I came to the subject with a biased outlook.
And to add another layer of mistrust and skepticism, I am particularly unfavorable towards James Bond.

007 is a charming, attractive, seducing, flamboyant, intelligent, athletically built, martini fan, with a good sense of humor man.
But therein lays the trouble.

No secret agent in the world could be like that.
The job description for secret agents contradicts most of the qualities and skills on display in a James Bond account.

The men working for MI6, the CIA and any other respectable agency of that kind have to be ordinary looking, blend in a crowd and attract no attention.
This is the exact opposite of what 007 does.

But let us call it artistic license.
Which does not prevent me from getting impatient when I read about how he seduces one woman after another, while drinking martinis, smoking cigarettes- at least in the days when Fleming wrote the series- and killing multitudes of opponents.

Yes there is pleasure in watching a glamorous film with Aston Martins chasing Alfa Romeos- or the other way around, especially since I own an Alfa Romeo 159, a car worthy of an art museum- but it is farfetched.

In this installment, the Soviets cook up a plot where a woman called Tatiana falls in love with the…photo of James Bond and then decides to find him and offer him a prized secret and the machine that is so sought after, while the KGB just baits their enemy into a trap and gives a coup de grace…
Even James Bond’s superior says some think like:

-tIt is such an incredible proposition, it might just be true

But if you ask me, I think that to believe that a girl just fell in love with a photo of the most famous British spy, she is working for the KGB- which is supposedly screening again and again for the toughest people around – and she decides to give herself to this James Bond, together with invaluable material seems much more than naïve to me.

On the other hand, I have just found that Ian Fleming thought this would be the last of the Bond narratives and there is at least one major surprise in store.

Oddly centered on the Russian assassin and little on Bond: a Bond that bares little resemblance to his gadget toting movie version.

Quintessential Bond - This is the best one yet!

The Soviet CIA group known has SMERSH hatch a plan to assassinate Bond by using young Tatiana Romanova as bait.

The first third of the novel just focuses on the group and their motivations for picking Bond.
I felt that it gave such a fascinating extra layer to the story.

Apart from a brief recap of the past 4 adventures, this book easily standalone and would be a perfect introductory point for someone wanting to try one of Fleming’s novels.

Again, there were some pretty bad sexist and raceist parts, though not quite as bad as some in Live and Let Die. James was again rather careless. I wonder how is still alive... This is one of the few that ends with a cliff hanger too. If you can look past the dated views, it's not a horrible story.

The Orient Express
2 March 2020

tThis book was pretty awesome, particularly how Flemmig actually set the action up. For one thing, Bond doesn’t come into the picture until a third of the way through the book, though he is, of course, mentioned numerous times since what Flemming is doing is setting everything up behind the Iron Curtain first. In fact, come to think of it, that is a very Homeric thing to do (since we don’t get to meet Odysseus until book 5 for the Odyssey).

tUnfortunately, this isn’t the first one, and the other catch is that it came before Dr No, and I discovered that it ended on a cliff hanger. Fortunately, when I discovered that Dr No comes after it, the discussions between Bond and M at the beginning of that book now make a lot more sense. It also makes me wonder whether some of the discussions between Bond and M in this book references from the book that came before this one (Diamonds are Forever). Actually, I have that one as well, so I guess that is the next Bond book I’ll be reading (yeah, going backwards).

tSo, the Russians have had a few setbacks, and they want to score a big victory over the West. Well, they decided that not only embarrassing, but killing, one of their major operatives would probably be the way to go. Of course, they needed to actually set the scene, that is lure the agent out so that they can put him in a position where they can pretty much control the narrative.

tYeah, just sending an assassin to England to shoot Bond in his apartment probably isn’t going to work because, well, they aren’t able to control the narrative. So, they have to bring him out of England and put him in a position where they can create the story so that it can then be leaked to the Western media, particularly the left-wing newspapers (though it is interesting that even some of the more hard core right-wing newspapers are considered to be left-wing by some people). That way not only can they create a huge scandal, but also get rid of one of their best agents as well.

tOkay, maybe killing him was going a little bit too far, but embarrassing him, and exposing him, probably wouldn’t work as well. The thing is that many of these spies aren’t known among the general population, and even if they score a big victory for their side, they never receive any acclaim for it. This a little odd though because it isn’t as if Bond isn’t known – he certainly lets everybody know his name, and because of his strikingly handsome appearance, it is more likely than not that he could be spotted out of a crowd.

tAnother thing I noticed was that this book was actually pretty close to the movie as well. This is the one where most of the film is set on the Orient Express, which is certainly a train that one could easily film a spy thriller on, though that probably has a lot to do with Agatha Christie. The other thing was that I loved the character of Kerim, though I suspect that his attitude, especially towards women, wouldn’t go down all that well today.

With 'From Russia With Love' I thought I'd reached a book which would be close to the film. As such I was somewhat surprised by the first 100 or so Bond-less pages. And yet, that opening worked very well. Fleming has spent the last four books building up the character of James Bond, and so can take time away to show the rest of his universe. Besides, much like Harry Lime in the film of 'The Third Man', the fact he's constantly being talked about means he's actually always there.

This is the best of the Bonds I've read so far, a thriller that captures time and place and still manages to be unceasingly thrilling. Eventually the book did start to match my memory of the film, but it became no less exciting. In fact I prefered the Bond in this to Connery. He is wearier, more bruised and I thought - with Tiffany Case having left him, and Tatiana Romanova arriving in his bed - that he is almost ready to fall in love.

Two things:

Is there anything to be read into the fact that Red Grant is reading 'The Little Nugget' by P.G. Wodehouse, while Bond is reading 'The Mask of Dimitrios' by Eric Ambler?

A story I heard was that in the early 80s Lotte Lenya - who played Rosa Klebb in the film - spied Sean Connery on a New York street, and without a word walked up and kicked him as hard as she could in the shin.