There are two collections of James Bond short stories – Quantum of Solace published in 1960 containing five stories – and Octopussy and The Living Daylights containing just those two stories and published in June 1966. When the paperback edition of the latter was published in 1967 another story, The Property of a Lady, was added; and the short sketch, 007 in New York, was added to the Penguin paperback edition in 2002.
1. The Living Daylights
(32 pages) First published in The Sunday Times colour supplement in February 1962.
The barbed wire fence which would evolve into the Berlin Wall was only erected in August 1961. This story a) comes from the period before there was any physical barrier between East and West, b) is the only Bond story set anywhere near the Eastern bloc.
Agent 272 has a been a long-term sleeper inside the Soviet Union. He has accumulated a wealth of information about their atomic missile programme. Now he’s trying to escape and he’s made it as far as East Berlin. He radioed a ciphered message saying exactly where he will run across the line from East to West Berlin on one of the following three evenings. However, the message was intercepted by the Russkies, who have sent their top sharp-shooter, codenamed ‘Trigger’, to be ready & waiting to kill 272 as he makes the crossing.
MI6 know about the message interception, and so have sent Bond to kill ‘Trigger’ before ‘Trigger’ can shoot 272.
So Bond undergoes a few hours intense target practice with a state-of-the-art sniper rifle at a military firing range at Bisley, before driving to London airport and flying to Berlin.
Tired, he is taken by a Foreign Office minder, Sender, to a service flat overlooking the wasteland between the Russian and Western zones (where the Berlin Wall would eventually be built) and here makes a base. The rifle he’ll use can be set up on a stand and Bond can lie on the mattress of a bed set against the window, which is almost completely covered by curtain, so that just the rifle barrel pokes out.
Sender explains that ‘Trigger’ will almost certainly be based in a big, new, concrete block for East German officials which is off to one side of the waste land – hence the rental of this derelict flat and the orientation of the window, and so on, to give Bond good sight over the ‘killing zone’ but also up into the Russian building.
Over the next three days, Bond spends the daylight hours ambling aimlessly round Berlin (which he doesn’t like very much) making sure he is back in the flat ready for the 5pm set-up and for the expected crossing time around 6pm. Two nights in a row he gets tense and hot in his blackout clothes, finger on the trigger, scanning the windows of the big Russian building – but nothing happens.
However, during these trial runs he notices something. Every day a Russian women’s orchestra troops into the Russian building and spends a couple of hours rehearsing. Bond realises that, among all the musicians, the cello player’s cello case is suspiciously light, too easily swung and carried. The woman carrying it is an attractive, vivacious blonde, smiling and joking with her fellow players. Slowly Bond forms the conviction that she may be ‘Trigger’.
On the third evening Bond is all set to go when Sender jumps to life and says he can see through his binoculars a man in the shadows on the other side – must be 272. And, yes, Bond sees a gun barrel being poked out of one of the windows of the Russian building. Bond uses his powerful telescopic sight to zero right in on the protruding gun barrel, as Sender gives him a running commentary of how our man is approaching the wide open stretch of floodlit ground where the dash for safety will take place.
With a last minute look round, 272 makes a break for it, running into the illuminated strip of land. At the same moment Bond sees in his scope a blonde head move forwards over the enemy gun. He hesitates a fraction of a second, allowing ‘Trigger’ to get off a burst from her Kalashnikov, then fires one well-aimed sniper bullet. It hits the enemy gun and sends it spinning out the window to the ground. Bond tells Sender to duck and a fusillade of bullets pours through their window. But 272 is safely across and into the waiting Opal car kept revved up by a British Army corporal, which now speeds off.
Sender and Bond crawl into the relative safety of the windowless kitchen where Sender tells Bond off, saying he will have to report that he hesitated, and then did not kill ‘Trigger’ as ordered. That hesitation could have led to 272’s death!
Bond considers lying but then tells the truth. He had developed a fellow feeling for this beautiful woman, who is his mirror image – also a paid assassin. His shot a) disabled her gun b) probably broke her hand or even arm. And she will be severely punished by the KGB for her failure. It is enough.
Bond is sick of killing. Send your message to my boss, he tells Sender. Maybe it will get me out of the wretched 007 section and into a nice cushy desk job.
Comment
The waiting for someone to cross the neutral zone is reminiscent of the opening of John le Carré’s breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Bond’s malaise, sick of killing, reflects the illness and depression which afflicted Fleming at the end of his life.
2. The Property of a Lady
(42 pages) First published in The Ivory Hammer (Sotheby’s annual) in November 1963.
Significant that it was published in the Sotheby’s annual since this the whole story is an advert of sorts for the famous auctioneer’s. A valuable Fabergé egg worth anything up to £100,000 has been given to Sotheby’s to auction. It is given as ‘the property of a lady’ but M explains to Bond that it’s actually been put up by one of their own MI6 staff, a certain Miss Freudenstein. Miss F is in fact a double agent working for the KGB. We learned this after she had been hired but before she took up her post, and so MI6 created a special section just for her, the ‘Purple Cipher’ department, which handles worthless information mixed with occasional nuggets of disinformation. For three years Miss F has been cunningly passing secrets to the KGB which are not secrets at all.
Now she has come into possession of the egg, apparently legitimately. An expert who works with Her majesty’s Customs says a parcel insured for £100,000 was stopped by Customs and opened. it contained the egg along with validating documents showing that is had been in Miss F’s family since before the revolution. On the death of her mother, it is being willed to Miss F.
M explains this is probably a legitimate way of rewarding Miss F’s devotion to duty without the messiness of bank accounts. The egg will be sold for a fortune, and thus some ‘capitalist’ collector will be in effect paying a KGB spy. Very droll.
Bond has an idea: the KGB will probably send along to the auction an ‘underbidder’, someone who is paid to make the running on an expensive lot, and push it to the maximum before abandoning the chase just in time. In all probability the ‘underbidder’ at the egg auction will be the KGB’s Resident in London.
So Bond organises for a photographer and other officials to attend the auction and identify their man. Sure enough, after the opening salvoes, the bidding settles down into a battle between someone invisible in the crowd and the very cultured and helpful Fabergé expert, Mr Snowman, who works for the firm. The ‘underbidder’ pushes it all the way to £155,000 then quits. The photographer and Bond both get a view of the stocky, anonymous figure who did the bidding. Outside Bond jumps in an MI5 taxi and tells it to follow the stocky man’s.
Sure enough Mr Stocky’s car turns into Kensington Palace Gardens and he enters the Russian embassy. Bond’s scheme has ensured he will be identified as the Soviets’ Resident in London and expelled. A small victory in the endless chess game of the Cold War.
Comment
I was expecting a clever reverse or unexpected twist – which never came. Maybe Fleming wrote it as a favour or special commission and the real point was to flatter Sothebys.
3. Octopussy
(44 pages) Posthumously serialised in The Daily Express from the 4th to the 8th October 1965.
I think this is Fleming’s second best short story after Quantum of Solace and, seeing as that was a deliberate pastiche of Somerset Maugham, maybe this is the best. It combines a number of Bond themes: it’s set in Jamaica (as so many of his stories); there’s skin diving and the beauty of the undersea world; there’s Bond’s stern, almost Puritanical, sense of duty; and, by complete contrast, Fleming’s feel for the Alps and mountains which he got to know so well as a young man.
What’s missing is sex, gadgets or an overblown baddy. For once a Fleming fiction is a realistic portrait of the failings of human nature.
Major Dexter Smythe was a fine figure of a man during the war in the latter part of which he commanded an Intelligence section. Now he is 54, fat, drinks and smokes too heavily and has had two heart attacks. He is, in other words, something of a self-portrait of Fleming himself, who had a dashing war but by the early 1960s was in failing health.
Since Smythe’s wife died he has let himself go and now only barely manages to stay alive with the help of numerous pills. One of his last pleasures is patrolling the acre or so of foreshore off his beach-front house, where he puts on a snorkel and enjoys feeding the fish and other fauna on the reef. Recently he has been trying to tame an octopus – feebly nicknamed ‘Octopussy’ – who has a home in a certain part of the reef, and is interested in conducting a little experiment – he wants to see how the octopus will react if he offers it a scorpion fish, one of the most poisonous fish in the world.
However, his world has just been turned upside down, because that morning a man from London, a man named James Bond paid him a call. Bond coldly and officially told him that the authorities have uncovered the full story of his wartime crime. The body has been found and the bullets identified as coming from his gun.
As the pair of chaps politely sip their drinks, Smythe slips into a flashback which dominates the rest of the narrative. He begins to explain the situation at the end of the war, and his role of visiting German command bases with a mission to confiscating all their paperwork, assessing it and sending it back to London. Mostly boring, until he found one sheet among thousands, which seemed to refer to hidden Nazi gold.
Smythe pinpointed the location of the stash in a climber’s hut up a nearby mountain, checked the location on Army maps, then burned the incriminating document. He made some casual enquiries and got the name of a local mountain guide, one Herr Oberhauser. Smythe drives out to Oberhauser’s hillside house and terrorises him into accompanying him up the mountain.
It was a tough five hour hike, described by Fleming in gritty detail, but they eventually reached the hut and found the cairn of rocks indicated in the document. At which point Smythe cold-bloodedly shot Oberhauser in the back, threw his body into a crevasse, and dismantled the cairn to find an old ammunition box containing two huge bars of Nazi gold. He lugs it down off the mountain – again described in gruelling detail – and hides it in some woods. Back to base, shower and a deep sleep. Next morning Smythe is up with his unit and travelling on to the next base.
Six months later, well after the end of the war, Smythe returns, find the stash in the forest, and uses his security clearance to fly several times back and forth from Germany to England – with a gold bar each time in his suitcase.
Smythe then he met and married a pretty, middle-class gel, Mary, and told her they were moving to Jamaica. Here he rented a desirable property and made enquiries, quickly discovering that the most powerful underworld figures were a couple of Chinese brothers, the Foos, in Kingston. He approaches them with the bars and they agree to dispose of them for a 10% commission.
And from that day to the present Smythe has lived a merry life – no work, golf all day or skin diving, bridge at the club or dinner parties in the evening. But he has gone to seed. In fact it was his heavy drinking that set Mary against him, nagging him to stop until he took to hiding bottles and lying about them, and then everything else. Finally, Mary made a ‘cry for help’ overdose which actually resulted in her dying – since when he hasn’t cared about anything.
And now this man Bond arrives with his accusations. ‘How did you know?’ Smythe asks. Bond explains: The glacier has given up the dead body of the Oberhauser, along with his identity papers. The bullet holes in the skull made the cause of death obvious. His family identified the British officer he left with, all those years ago. The trail led to the Foo Brothers who have admitted their role in disposing of the gold. It is a cut-and-dried case.
We realise the flashback narrative we’ve just read was also Smythe telling Bond the true story. Confessing. Bond stands; the interview is at an end. He says the police will be here to arrest him in a week at most and prepares to leave. ‘Yes, but why do you care, why are you here?’ Smythe asks him, puzzled.
James Bond looked Major Smythe squarely in the eyes. ‘It just so happened that Oberhauser was a friend of mine. He taught me to ski before the war, when I was in my teens. He was a wonderful man. He was something of a father figure to me at a time when I happened to need one.’ (p.44)
What can Smythe say. Bond looks at him with contempt, and departs.
And so Smythe has a few more stiff drinks, slips on his diving mask and goes out into the sea in search of a scorpion fish to tempt his ‘Octopussy’ with. And sure enough he finds one, with its odd ‘eyebrows’ hanging over its glaring red eyes, and the spine of venomous quills rising from its back. As he goes to spear it, the fish darts up and under Smythe’s stomach and then off into a crevice in the reef. But Smythe spears it a second time and wades out of the sea holding his trophy aloft. Only when he sits on a rock on the beach does he realise there’s a numb patch on his stomach. Christ, the bloody scorpion fish must have stung him with is poisonous barbs! He knows from the books that he could be saved by anti-histamines and antibiotics, but the nearest doctor is an hour away. And he knows he has just fifteen minutes to live.
Smythe pulls on the mask, determined to continue his silly experiment and wades back out into the reef with the dead scorpion fish on his spear. He arrives at the Octopussy’s grotto, but is delirious with pain by now. ‘Octopussy, octopussy, look what I’ve brought for you,’ and he feebly jabs the dead fish at the octopus. But Octopussy recognises a real feast when she sees one and darts out a tentacle which grips Smythe’s arm. And then another tentacle. And, as Smythe screams into his mask, the octopus’s other tentacles close around him, pulling him into range, and the creature’s big sharp beak starts to bite!
Comment
What sets the story apart is the sense of gnawing guilt for his wartime crime which both made and ruined Smythe. He is no typical Bond baddy, no garish ogre. He is an all-too-fallible human being. The gruesome climax of the story has all the elements of the sadistic and macabre which Bond fans could want – but it is the surprising psychological power of Smythe’s wartime narrative which lingers in the memory.
Credit
Octopussy and The Living Daylights by Ian Fleming was published in June 1966 by Jonathan Cape. Page references are to the 1985 Panther paperback edition.
Related links
Other thrillers published in 1966
- Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton
- The Comedians by Graham Greene
- When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair MacLean
- Wyatt’s Hurricane by Desmond Bagley
- No Bond movie was released in 1966
- 1966 saw the start of the The American TV series Mission Impossible
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