by Colin Watson
The Fellowship of the Frog – Wallace, 1924
The car responded gallantly and shot forward in a violent swerve across the path of the lorry … A space of cigarette-paper dimensions separated the rear wing of the car from the lorry’s bumpers, but there was no collision.
Blackshirt Strikes Again – Bruce Graeme, 1940
… a blow that shattered teeth in their sockets and smith-ereened a jawbone as if it had been made of glass.
The Saint Closes the Case – Leslie Charteris, 1930
Argels handed the card to the maître d’hôtel … ‘Serve us with double dry martinis at once – dry, but not too dry, mind. Just a dash of Italian. That suits you, Miss Withers?’ ‘Perfectly,’ she assented. ‘You are evidently an epicure.’ ‘I try to be,’ he admitted, leaning gallantly across the table towards her.
Moran Chambers Smiled – E. Phillips Oppenheim, 1932
But what about the flamboyance, the showmanship that is discernible in all these extracts and which enabled Wallace and the others to get away with every literary crime from implausibility to stylistic archaism? Fleming did not possess it. He was a confident story-teller and his books have pace and a certain verve. But Fleming used quite different tactics from those of his predecessors to disguise absurdity of plot and paucity of characterization. If Wallace and his fellows may properly be compared to ringmasters whose fine airs and whip-cracking distract attention from the mange and lethargy of their lions, Fleming’s equivalent is the advertising man, glossing the mediocrity of The Product with pseudo-science and snob-appeal. The old masters of the swashbuckling type of crime and spy fiction did not condescend to try and reconcile the events they described with real life probabilities. Thus did Wallace on one occasion arrange for a bullion convoy to be captured by the filling with carbon dioxide of a hollow in the English countryside through which the lorries were to pass, so that their drivers would be asphyxiated. A wildly impractical scheme if ever there was one, but neither Wallace nor his characters had time to bother with rationalization; another fiendish happening was just around the page.
By their refusal to make concessions to likelihood, no less than by their jingoism and their snobbery, the older writers were asserting personal faith in the stability and moral health of their society. Of course, they seemed to be saying, we all know that such things do not really happen in this well-ordered community of ours: it is only because they do not that people find them entertaining as tales.
Fleming and his successors were so to sophisticate the ‘shocker’, as John Buchan had termed it, that it would become an illusion within an illusion. Into what essentially was still the old-style hokum – the gunplay, kidnapping, chases, escapes and so forth – was elaborately insinuated the proposition that not only were these things happening in very truth, but they were unavoidable, directed to patriotic ends, and approved moreover by that esoteric but admirable minority, the Men in the Know. The process amounted to what is known in the advertising trade as a promotion job.
Admittedly, espionage is in more need of promotion, in that advertising sense, than most human activities. W. Somerset Maugham, who actually did some (its object was only to prevent the Russian Revolution) declared in his preface to Ashenden in 1928: ‘The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable.’ Malcolm Muggeridge also once had his thumb in the Intelligence pie: tomfoolery was what he thought it. That verdict is not entirely discredited by such record as there is of Fleming’s own role in Naval Intelligence which he is supposed to have benefited from by such ideas as freezing clouds to make gun platforms and sinking concrete blocks containing men with periscopes to watch the French coast.
The Bond books romanticize the secret service, but to no greater extent than did Ashenden, let alone Buchan’s Hannay stories or the old William Le Queux fantasies about dashing Duckworth Drew. Fleming worked harder to achieve verisimilitude than to make sentimental appeal. He chose for his settings real places and took his characters on journeys that could be plotted on maps. He dropped pieces of globetrotter’s lore with the persistence of an ageing cocotte letting fall handkerchiefs. His affectation of multilingualism left some pages looking more like menus than accounts of adventure. The apparently obsessive use of brand names may be seen as a further means of boosting credibility. Finally, Fleming set himself diligently to make his hero into The Product for which the circumstances and mood of the times guaranteed a mass sale.
James Bond is a healthy, physically powerful man, with no social responsibilities and no personal ties. He has a zest for life and travels all over the place, drinking and smoking heavily without permanent ill effect. He is enormously attractive to women and a great stud performer. He has no intellectual interests whatever, but is impressively knowing about food and drink, sports, motor-cars, weapons and the appurtenances of high life. He is, when required to be, a ruthless fighter. His political thought is minimal, but would just about turn litmus paper blue. He would not be found dead, if he could help it, anywhere, but least of all in a library, a theatre, a concert hall or an art gallery. He himself kills people pretty often, but they are rotten people, better dead. His job, which is secret and indescribably important, gives him the right to kill people. He is a patriot and unmarried.
The appeal of The Product is considerable. Sales prove it. Most of its qualities, as has been pointed out, are derived from the work of earlier authors in the same area. The exoticism, the fisticuffs, the ingenious hardware, the sinister flora and fauna – these all are variations on old themes; so are the torture scenes and the much over-condemned sex interludes, which have about as much depravity about them as did Sydney Horler’s admiration of ‘scanties’. But there is another element of the Bond books which, though not an invention of Fleming, was presented by him in higher concentration than the public had ever before shown itself prepared to accept. It is, to use another of the so appropriate metaphors of advertising, his Product’s ‘Ingredient X’, and it is compounded of equal parts of moral abdication and supra-legal arrogance.
Bond is a hero and was intended to be accepted as such. There is no question of his being a tragic or sleazy or pathetic figure caught in political machinery and morally castrated by it. That occupational hazard may await characters in the world of Graham Greene and John le Carré and Len Deighton, but Bond was designed to be both physically and mentally indestructible. By tradition of popular fiction, so enormous an advantage ought to be employed for good and against evil; immortality has always been considered dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. Yet Bond, and all the quasi-Bonds of Fleming’s imitators, are depicted as acting entirely without reference to any code other than that curious mixture of bureaucratic nicety and murderous licence whereby, we are assured, the under-cover agents of government everywhere conduct their affairs.
Although the authors of the espionage fiction that has proliferated in the last twenty-five years might have intended otherwise, what they really have fathered is a secret police literature. James Bond has been erroneously labelled ‘spy’ too long. He is, and always has been, a secret policeman. So are the heroes of James Mitchell, alias Munro, of Deighton and le Carré, of William Haggard and Helen Macinnes. They and others in the same fashionable mould may be supposed to owe their allegiance to M.I.5, to the Deuxième Bureau, to the C.I.A., to this or that or the other currently approved agency of human supervision, but all are as surely secret policemen as were those dour men in belted raincoats who once sauntered through Europe on the errands of Heinrich Himmler.
It is curious that something of which people throughout the world, and perhaps the English and Americans in particular, have always declared their abhorrence is now an accepted element of their leisure reading. By no means all secret police fiction invites admiration for its central characters in the old sense of cheering the goodies. But t
he non-committal novel in this field as well as the openly propagandist one finds a public ready to be fascinated by any kind of a tale about political subterfuge, however squalid or vicious. This could be simply a sign of human adaptability. As the number of ways in which we can feel superior to one another is diminished by the erosion of class frontiers, perhaps our repugnance to privily wielded power is being modified by recognition of its incomparable value in the status game.
“BE CAREFUL, IT’S VERY DANGEROUS THIS SIDE OF THE GENERAL. THIS IS THE ARM HE INVARIABLY SWEEPS THE COUNTRY FREE OF BOLSHIES WITH AT DINNER.”
Index
Agate, James, 1
Alington, Dr C. A., 1
Allingham, Margery, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Alphonso, King, 1
Amis, Kingsley, 1, 2, 3
Arlen, Michael, 1, 2, 3
Arnold, Matthew, 1, 2
Auden, W. H., 1
Austen, Jane, 1, 2
Ayres, Ruby, M., 1
Bailey, H. C., 1, 2, 3
Baldwin, Stanley, 1, 2, 3
Barrie, J.M., 1
Beardsley, Aubrey, 1
Beaverbrook, Lord, 1, 2
Beecham, Sir Thomas, 1
Belloc, Hilaire, 1
Bennett, Arnold, 1, 2
Bentley, E. C., 1, 2
Biggers, Earl Derr, 1, 2, 3, 4
Bogart, Humphrey, 1
Boot, Jessie, 1
Boots Booklovers’ Library, 1, 2
Brady, Ian, 1
Bramah, Ernest, 1
Brand, Christianna, 1
Brock, Lynn, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Buchan, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Bullett, Gerald, 1
Burnett, Ivy Compton, 1
Capone, Al, 1
Carr, John Dickson, 1
Carré, John le, 1
Chandler, Raymond, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Charteris, Leslie, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Chase, James Hadley, 1, 2
Chesterton, G. K., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Cheyney, Peter, 1, 2
Christie, Agatha, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Cole, G. D. H. and M., 1
Collins, Wilkie, 1, 2, 3
Colman, Ronald, 1
Connolly, Cyril, 1
Cox, Anthony Berkeley, 1, 2, 3
Crofts, Freeman Wills, 1, 2, 3
Dane, Clemence, 1
Deighton, Len, 1
Dell, Ethel M., 1, 2, 3, 4
Dickens, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Donegall, Marquess of, 1
Douglas, Alfred, Lord, 1
Douglas, James, 1
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
Edward VIII, King, 1
Eliot, T. S., 1
Ellis, Havelock, 1
Epstein, Jacob, 1, 2, 3
Fairlie, Gerard, 1, 2
Farjeon, J. Jefferson, 1
Faulkner, William, 1
Fields, Gracie, 1, 2
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1
Fleming, Ian, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Fletcher, J. S., 1
Ford, Ford Madox, 1
Forster, E. M., 1
Frankau, Gilbert, 1
Freeman, R. Austin, 1, 2
George V, King, 1, 2
Gerard, Louise, 1
Glyn, Elinor, 1
Gollancz, Victor, 1
Graeme, Bruce, 1
Greene, Graham, 1
Grey, Zane, 1, 2
Haggard, Rider, 1
Haggard, William, 1
Hammett, Dashiell, 1, 2, 3, 4
Hardy, Thomas, 1
Hare, Cyril, 1
Haycraft, Howard, 1
Hindley, Myra, 1
Hodder-Williams, Ernest, 1, 2
Hope, Anthony, 1, 2
Horler, Sydney, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Hornung, E. W., 1, 2
Iles, Francis, see Anthony Berkeley Cox
Innes, Michael, 1
Isherwood, Christopher, 1
James, C. P. R., 1
Jameson, Storm, 1
Joyce, James, 1
Kelly, Mary, 1
Kennedy, Milward, 1
Kent, Duke of, 1
Knox, Ronald A., 1, 2, 3
Lane, Margaret, 1, 2
Lang, Matheson, 1
Lawrence, D. H., 1, 2, 3
Lawrence, T. E., 1, 2
Leavis, Q. D., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Le Fanu, Sheridan, 1, 2
Lewis, C. Day, 1, 2, 3, 4
Libraries, chain, 1
Libraries, circulating, 1, 2
Lodge, Oliver, 1
Lorac, E. C. R., 1
Lytton, Bulwer, 1, 2
McAllister, Allister, see Lynn Brock
MacDonald, Ramsey, 1, 2
MacGrath, Harold, 1
MacInnes, Helen, 1
Mackenzie, Compton, 1, 2, 3, 4
Mannin, Ethel, 1
Marryatt, Captain, 1
Marsh, Ngaio, 1, 2
Marx, Karl, 1
Mason, A. E. W., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Maugham, W. Somerset, 1, 2, 3
Meyrick, Kate, 1, 2
Mille, Cecil B. de, 1
Mitchell, Gladys, 1
Mitchell, James, 1
Mole, William, 1
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 1, 2, 3
Montgomery, Robert, 1
Moore, George, 1
Moore, Henry, 1
Moore, Roger, 1
Morland, Nigel, 1
Mudie’s Library, 1
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1
Münthe, Axel, 1
News Chronicle, 1, 2
News of the World, 1, 2
Northcliffe, Lord, 1
Novello, Ivor, 1
Oland, Warner, 1
Oppenheim, E. Phillips, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Orczy, Baroness, 1
Orwell, George, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Pearson, John, 1
Poe, Edgar Allen, 1, 2, 3, 4
Postgate, Raymond, 1, 2
Powell, Dick, 1
Powell, William, 1
Priestley, J. B., 1, 2
Proust, Marcel, 1
Punshon, E. R., 1
Queux, William Le, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Rhode, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Richler, Mordecai, 1
Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 1
Ripper, Jack the, 1
Robins, Denise, 1
Rohmer, Sax, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Rothermere, Lord, 1
Sabatini, Rafael, 1
‘Sapper’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Sayers, Dorothy, L., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
Scott, Walter, 1
Shaw, G. B., 1, 2, 3, 4
Sim, Alistair, 1
Smith, W. H. and Son, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Snelling, O. F., 1
Spillane, Mickey, 1
Spring, Howard, 1
Standish, Robert, 1, 2
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1
Stoker, Bram, 1
Stopes, Marie, 1
Strachey, John, 1
Strand Magazine, 1
Street, Cecil John Charles, see John Rhode
Swaffer, Hannen, 1
Symons, Julian, 1, 2
Tauber, Richard, 1
Thackeray, W. M., 1
Trevor, Ralph, 1, 2, 3
Trollope, Anthony, 1
Trollope, Mrs, 1
Unwin, Stanley, 1, 2
Van Dine, S. S., 1, 2, 3
Wallace, Edgar, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Ward, Arthur Sarsfield, see Sax Rohmer
Wells, H. G., 1, 2
Wheatley, Dennis, 1
Williams, Francis, 1
Williams, Valentine, 1
Winn, Godfrey, 1
Wodehouse, P. G. 1, 2
Woolf, Virginia, 1,
2
Wren, P. C., 1, 2
Yates, Dornford, 1, 2
About the Author
Colin Watson was born in 1920. He worked as a journalist but was most famous for his twelve ‘Flaxborough’ novels, set in a small fictional town in England. Four of the Flaxborough novels were adapted for television by the BBC under the series title Murder Most English and Watson’s Detective Inspector Purbright remains one of the most intellectual detectives in the crime genre. Colin Watson died in 1983.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Colin Watson, 1971
The right of Colin Watson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28743–7
