Bond liked cheerful, expansive people with a zest for life.
(For Your Eyes Only, page 146)
Five short stories. Four of them started life as plots for a TV series that was never made, indicating: a) how happy Fleming was to engage in popular culture, and b) how keen to monetise his creation. The hardback editions had a sub-title which seems to have been dropped from my paperback version – Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond.
1. From a View to a Kill
2 For Your Eyes Only
3 Quantum of Solace
4 Risico
5 The Hildebrand Rarity
1. From a View to a Kill
Although he lost his virginity there on a wild night when he was 16 (p.6), Bond has cordially disliked Paris since the War. ‘One cannot drink seriously in French cafés.’ (p.5) Paris has been pawned to East Europeans, tourists, Germans. In his opinion, you can only actually see it properly for two hours between five and seven am; after that it is hidden by a thundering stream of black metal (p.8), ie monstrous traffic (and this is 1959!). Bond is feeling stale after a mission to extract a Hungarian from the East went wrong (the defector was blown up in a minefield).
Into Bond’s ennui bursts a car screeching to the pavement and a glamorous woman walking right up to his table. Turns out to be Mary Ann Russell from the service; there’s a flap on at Station F. Bond is driven there and briefed. A motorbike courier to SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) has been shot and his Top Secret documents stolen. Bond drives to the SHAPE headquarters in northern France, is greeted by the unhelpful American Colonel Schreiber in charge, and sets about interviewing everyone.
Slowly Bond puts pieces together and is particularly intrigued by the story of a group of gypsies who recently vacated a clearing along the Route Nationale where the cyclist was shot. Bond investigates and finds a suspicious-looking mound at the vacated site. He dresses in camouflage and returns to stake out the clearing. After a very long time, to his amazement, the mound divides in two and people come out of it: a motorcyclist dressed in NATO uniform, helped by two assistants. Off he drives, the assistants withdraw inside the secret hideaway, then the mound slowly closes up. Bond waits a long time then slips away.
Next day he borrows a NATO motorcyclist outfit and sets off on the morning run. He is not surprised when an identically-dressed motorbike courier cruises up behind him. Before the assassin can take a shot, Bond himself swerves his bike and shoots the baddie, who goes flying into a tree. Dead.
Bond motors to the clearing where NATO troops are waiting. When he enters with the bike, the mound opens as the assistants think it is their leader; but when he doesn’t reply to some question put in Russian, a fight breaks out. Shots are fired, Bond is jumped on by one of the baddies who pummels him to the ground and the baddie is making for his gun when a shot rings out and the baddie’s body goes flying. Bond looks up to see Mary Ann Russell striding among the soldiers, dressed in brown shirt and tight jeans, a smoking .22 pistol in her hand. Lucky, eh? And sexy.
This story is so silly it’s hard to know where to start. I sympathised with the notion of Paris ruined by traffic, and enjoyed descriptions of the cafés and geography of north Paris where Bond likes to stay. After that… nonsense.
2. For Your Eyes Only
Introducing a posh old couple, the Havelocks. Their family have owned one of the best estates in Jamaica for 300 years, given it by a grateful Oliver Cromwell to an ancestor who signed King Charles’s death warrant (just as Honeychile Riders’ ancestor was alleged to have done in Dr No, and just as falsely).
Out of the blue they are visited by three Hispanics, led by a Major Gonzales. They represent a businessman in Cuba who wishes to buy the property. Gonzales unzips airline bags which contain half a million dollars cash and offers to pay on the spot. Mr Havelock refuses and angrily tells the three to leave his property, at which Gonzales sighs, signals to his two assistants, who step forward and pump the Havelocks full of bullets. They return to their car, which is stolen, drive down to the bay and abandon it, take a dinghy out to a waiting yacht and sail away.
Cut to M briefing Bond in London. He is uncertain and shifty because he is personally involved: turns out he was best man at the Havelocks wedding in 1925. Gonzales is the hit man for an ex-Nazi, von Hammerstein, who’s made a fortune working for the Cuban dictator Batista’s Intelligence Service. Now it looks like Castro’s communists might take over, von Hammerstein, like others, is getting his money out of Cuba and investing in nearby property, ie in Jamaica. Now the same gang is intimidating the Havelocks’ daughter, Judy, into selling. What does Bond think?
Assassinate them, says Bond. M gives him the file marked ‘For Your Eyes Only’ which shows that von Hammerstein, Gonzales et al are holed up in a luxury ranch near a place called Echo Lake in Vermont, USA, up near the Canadian border.
Bond flies to Canada (he doesn’t like the new faster, bigger jets: less luxury, everything more cramped and rushed; it’s interesting that Fleming records these journeys in such detail just as luxury travel began to be degraded by the advent of mass tourism.)
Bond meets a security man from the Mounties, Colonel ‘Johns’, who humorously says this whole operation is off-the-record but they’ll give him all the help they can, before handing over maps, a hunting rifle and permits, directions, clothes, a hired car.
Bond drives off south, crosses the border into the States on foot, finds his way to the lakeside house – very nice – tests his sights, waits for sunrise except – a voice tells him not to move! A young woman dressed like an Amazon is pointing a bow and very modern steel arrow right at him. She is Judy Havelock and she has also come here to kill von Hammerstein, to avenge her parents, and if Bond gets in her way, she’ll shoot him too.
After some bickering they reach an agreement that Judy has first shot. The group of baddies come out to frolic in the morning sunshine, von Hammerstein an ugly, squat, hairy, pasty man, Gonzales a creepy Hispanic. The two goons have an impromptu competition to shoot empty champagne bottles thrown in the air, the winner gets a night with one of the two scantily-clad hookers who are fawning and simpering around them.
As von Hammerstein goes to dive off the edge of the quay into the lake a steel arrow shoots him through the heart. In a second Bond has shot dead one of the goons with his hunting rifle, then turns to the next one, misses, then hits. But all this has given Gonzales time to let off bursts of machine gun fire into the woods where Bond and the girl are hiding and then push over and hide behind a steel table on the lakeside lawn. After taking pot shots at each other, Gonzales makes a break for the house and Bond stands and nails him with one shot.
Then he finds Judy, wounded and bleeding, hit by one of the goons’ bursts of firing. Disappointingly, she has been transformed from no-nonsense Amazon into simpering girly. When they originally met and were bickering Bond said several times ‘This is man’s work’ and I was hoping she would humiliate him, somehow save him when he got into trouble and generally kick this saying back in his teeth. Alas, the narrative, Fleming and Bond all confirm the saying, as poor girly Judy now says she had no idea it would be so brutal and so horrible and, as Bond ties a tourniquet round her bleeding arm, allows him to kiss her, then kiss her again.
I enjoyed the banter and repartee with the Canadian Mountie, ‘Colonel Johns’, who sets things up for Bond, the working bond created between two professionals who know what each other are about. But the entire hit man storyline is morally dubious, and then the last minute ‘James you’re so manly!’ conversion of tough woman into fawning girl is as sick-making as the similar ‘sudden conversion’ ending of Goldfinger.
3. Quantum of Solace
This is the standout story of the collection, and in a different class from the others.
Bond has done a job in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, a place he cordially dislikes because it is so disgustingly rich. The job was throwing firebombs into two ships carrying arms to Castro’s forces in Cuba. (Historical note: Castro’s communist forces officially overthrew Batista on January 1, 1959.) Now Bond’s just had to endure a gruellingly formal and dull dinner party at the Governor’s place, but the other guests – a Canadian natural gas millionaire and his chatty wife – have left and, over drinks, after a bit of chat, the Governor settles in to tell Bond a story.
The Governor was telling it in a rather elderly narrative style which gave it a ring of truth. (p.106)
It’s about a man the Governor was at Oxford with, ‘let’s call him Philip Masters’, who won a place in the Foreign Office and was posted to Nigeria. Very shy, troubled childhood (parents divorced, brought up by an aunt) he found happiness among the kindness of Nigerians. On a flight back to the UK he is strapped in and generally fussed over by a stunningly attractive air stewardess, Rhoda Llewellyn. By the end of his flight, he invites her for a date, one thing leads to another, and they get married. Then he is posted out to the Caribbean which is where the Governor ran into him again, in Bermuda.
Briefly, the wife slowly gets bored of being the wife of a colonial official, it’s not at all as glamorous as she’d imagined. They take up golf but she far outshines her husband and enjoys flirting with the men at the club. Eventually, the inevitable happens and she takes up with one of the rich young men in the fast set, son of a millionaire with his own speedboat etc. Doesn’t bother hiding it, brazenly open, demands a separate bedroom from her meek retiring husband, walks all over Masters, humiliates him in public.
The Governor calls Masters in for a meeting, tells him he’s getting a terrible reputation, says he’s packing him off to Washington for five months to handle trade negotiations, during which he must sort out his private affairs.
During those five months, while her husband is away, the millionaire playboy gets tired of Rhoda and, prevailed on by his parents, very publicly dumps her. Chastened and suddenly shunned by posh and smart society, she decides to change her ways and is ready to be meek and obedient when her husband returns. Unfortunately, Masters has also changed and returns utterly ruthless, focused and decisive. He announces he is divorcing her in one year. His private detective has gathered all the evidence required for a quick legal action. For that year their house will be partitioned in two so their paths never cross, he will never see her and, from this point onwards, never speak to her. She pleads, she begs, she breaks down in tears – he doesn’t relent.
By now Bond, despite himself, is genuinely hooked. And this is where the Governor introduces his theory: human relationships can be repaired and made to work as long as there is a bare minimum amount of affection between the partners, just enough warmth for communication to remain open – as long as there is a quantum of solace, the tiniest particle of warmth and sympathy. That gone, everything is gone.
So none of Rhoda’s pleading made any impact, the couple put up a diplomatic facade of man and wife for the rest of his posting, but had not a shred of affection. In his final week before Masters leaves for his next appointment – not taking her – Rhoda pleaded for some money to live on after he left and he rubbed salt in the wounds by grudgingly giving her the car and the radiogram (the house had been rented for the duration of his appointment). When she goes to the car dealer, after Masters had departed, she finds both car and radiogram were themselves hired and have outstanding bill on them, which she has to pawn her belongings to pay. Masters has systematically reduced her to poverty.
Rhoda carries on for a while, eking a living hanging round with the flash set at the golf club, being passed from one man to another until she has sunk to the level of being a sort of posh courtesan. Finally, one of her patrons, a lofty Lady who disapproved of all her behaviour but still pitied her, got her a job as receptionist at a hotel in Jamaica, where she moved, relieved to flee the Bahamas at last.
Throughout the narrative Bond has occasionally commented on the story or the Governor has paused so they can top up their drinks or light a cigar. Reminiscent of the many chaps-chatting-over-port-and-cigars frame narratives of Victorian and Edwardian times, found in Sherlock Holmes stories or, most famously, in the long after-dinner narrative which makes up Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness.
By this point in the story, the Governor and Bond have left the panelled drawing room and walked through the landscaped grounds down to the security gates. The pace of the frame narrative has been beautifully timed to accompany or bring out the detail of the main story.
It is here, at the gates, that the Governor turns and adds the conclusion of his tale. It was while working as receptionist that Rhoda made an impression on a rich guest, a millionaire from Canada. They got married and have been very happy ever since, Rhoda turning out to be the most devoted and loyal of wives.
And – in the unexpected, simple and breath-taking twist – the Governor reveals that this was the very couple who Bond had shared such a dull dinner with earlier that evening, the Canadian millionaire and his twittering wife.
Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real passion – of the Comédie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments. (p.128)
The Wikipedia article on this collection says one of the stories was a conscious homage to Somerset Maugham. Surely it is this one, with its leisurely, slow-paced account of human weakness, set against a civilised after-dinner frame story, reminding me of the urbane and brilliantly persuasive stories in Maugham’s own spy novel, Ashenden.
4. ‘Risico’
It’s interesting to see that herion smuggling was enough of a topical issue/concern in 1959 to base fiction on.
Bond is sent to Rome to contact an Italian heroin smuggler-turned-CIA-informant, Kristatos. Kristatos tells him the Big Man behind the smuggling into Britain is the padrone of the very restaurant where they’re eating, one Enrico Colombo. And sure enough we see Colombo a) eating his spaghetti like a pig b) conferring with his beautiful German concubine/assistant, Lisl Baum c) using gadgets hidden in a chair to record Bond and Kristatos’s conversation, during which K says he’ll break up the smuggling ring if Bond will kill Colombo. So Colombo discovers Bond is out to kill him. It’s all written so as to make us think Colombo is a Drax-Dr No style baddie.
Colombo and Baum then play act a massive row, complete with her throwing wine in his face, just as Bond is leaving the restaurant, so that Bond steps in as the English gent and offers her a lift in a taxi back to her hotel. This is a long enough journey for her to tell Bond she’s moving onto Venice tomorrow, and she’ll be sunbathing out on the beach of the Lido, if he fancies meeting.
So Bond takes the train (and is amusingly grumpy about the rudeness and discomfort of Italian trains), checks into a hotel, then goes out to the Lido. Here he traipses across the beach to find the almost naked blonde bombshell sunbathing, as promised. But barely have they started flirting before three goons in dark suits start approaching up the beach. Bond walks fast towards the village end of the strand in a bid to escape, but two of the men cut of at an angle across the spit of sand until BOOM! one of them is blown up – it is an abandoned minefield which the Italian authorities, typically, haven’t got round to clearing. Gruesome.
Meanwhile, Bond had arrived at the concrete sea-wall and was walking along it towards a group of fishermen and safety until – he realises the fisherman are all pointing their spearguns at him and the fat one in the middle is Colombo! They have just begun to have typical good guy-bad guy banter (‘So Mr Bond…’) when the third of the goons sneaks up behind Bond and knocks him unconscious with the hilt of his Luger.
Bond comes to in a ship at sea. The door is open and he goes on deck to find Colombo tremendously happy and chatty. In the TWIST or volta in the story, Colombo tells Bond that Kristatos is the one who is running the heroin smuggling operation into Britain. Sure, Colombo is a smuggler and a crook, but he absolutely refuses to touch drugs. Bond finds himself trusting the open, smiling, hearty man before him who gives him his gun back. Somehow they have become friends.
And – in what is becoming a routine revelation – it turns out the heroin which goes through the pipeline to Britain to hook and undermine the nation’s youth is supplied by Russia, from her poppy fields in the Caucasus. No matter how remote and fantastical the plot, somehow Fleming always manages to make SMERSH at the root of it.
Colombo explains that their ship is about to enter the harbour of Santa Maria, where they will find Kristatos’s gang of hired Albanian thugs loading massive rolls of newsprint (remember the massive rolls of newsprint towards the end of Moonraker?) onto a ship moored at the quay.
Colombo’s boat comes alongside and throws grappling hooks into the Albanian ship and the shooting starts immediately. Bond saves the day by shooting out the man in the warehouse who was using a machine gun on our boys, then dodges behind the warehouse to see Kristatos a) set off a boobytrap, which blows up the warehouse b) jump into his car and speed off. Third shot lucky, Bond shoots him in the back and the car careers out of control.
Bond is taken back onto Colombo’s ship with much back-patting and Italian gratitude for shooting the machine gunner in the warehouse. Now, the Italian assures him, this massive drug peddling pipeline has been closed down. To round things off, Colombo tosses Bond a hotel key: the key to the room of Lisl Baum – she’s waiting for him.
So he saves the day for England, makes a new foreign friend, and gets to sleep with the pretty blonde. Job done!
(P.S. The title ‘Risico’ is how Kristatos pronounces ‘risk’: so there’s an irony in Kristatos’s word being taken as the title, since the whole adventure turns out to be not just risky, but fatal for him.)
5. The Hildebrand Rarity
The story opens with Bond scuba diving in the Seychelles, and shooting a massive sting ray. Apparently, Fleming himself had scuba diving lessons in Jamaica from the legendary Jacques Cousteau, so knew what he was talking about – but the ability to convey the wonder and beauty of the underwater world is entirely his own.
Bond is in the Seychelles at the order of M to investigate alleged sabotage and infiltration by communist forces. He finds nothing to report on and is left with a week in hand, hence the diving. His local contact, Fidele Barbey, member of an influential local family, picks him up on the beach and says he knows Bond is bored and so has got him a few days helping out with the diving on the luxury yacht of an American millionaire who’s visiting the islands.
Bond takes an instant dislike to the millionaire, a rude and boorish man (of German descent) named Milton Krest, who insists on calling the galley the kitchen, the luxury yacht – the Wavekrest – ‘it’ (instead of ‘she’) and generally outraging all good naval traditions and Bond’s sense of the proprieties. Krest is rude about Britain, then about Europeans generally, before going on to insult the Seychellois.
Turns out Krest commissioned his yacht as a tax fiddle: he tells the US taxman it is engaged on ‘scientific research’ expeditions. To justify this he has to find and send back specimens to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. He has already, crudely and corruptly, bought most of the specimens on the list he was given from local zoos and aquariums: all he needs now is the extremely rare Hildebrand Rarity.
Bond and Barbey are introduced to Krest’s (stunningly beautiful) English wife, Elizabeth, and the crew of hard-faced Germans, and then they set sail to remote coral islands where the Rarity was once sighted before the war.
Over dinner, Krest gets drunk, insults everyone and lets it be known that he not only verbally abuses his wife, but whips her with a dried-out stingray tail, which he calls ‘the Corrector’. Bond is fascinated by her craven ‘slave’ mentality, and the word slave recurs numerous times throughout the story, for although Krest routinely reduces her to tears, Elizabeth defends her husband to the others.
What must this woman have to put up with, this beautiful girl he had got hold of to be his slave – his English slave?… There was something painfully slavish in her attitude towards him. (pp.194-195)
The Wavekrest anchors off an isolated atoll and Bond and Barbey go snorkelling although, ironically, it is the shouting, can-do Yank, Krest, who actually spots the Rarity. He kills it – and everything else around it – by pouring a five-gallon drum of poison into the water. (Bond shows an unexpected but actually quite characteristic sensitivity about killing – murdering – all these beautiful innocent sea creatures, and describes their death throes in pitiful fashion.)
That night Krest gets more drunk than usual, abuses Bond and Barbey, tells his wife he’s going to beat her tonight, despite her tearful pleading to be ‘forgiven’ and, when he finds Bond out on the after-deck with her, for just a moment, threatens to kill Bond – or have him killed by his thuggish crew. As he walks drunkenly back into the main cabin, Krest’s silhouette looks like a baboon. Yes, he is a very bad man.
Resisting the temptation to beat the daylights out of him, Bond instead sleeps out on deck and hears Krest clamber drunkenly into his hammock several decks away. In the middle of the night he’s woken by the sound of choking and struggling. He gets to Krest’s deck to find the millionaire has been choked to death, with the Hildebrand Rarity rammed down his throat.
Bond coolly assesses this, the umpteenth scene of a violent death which he’s encountered in his career, and decides to fake the cause of death. He removes the fish and replaces it in its specimen jar in the main cabin, then carefully frays one of the ropes supporting Krest’s hammock, snaps it, and throws Krest’s body overboard. The best he can do to make it look like an accident.
Job done. Now Bond is intrigued to discover which of the other two did it: the wife has an obvious motive but Barbey is hot-blooded and was getting angry at Krest’s racist taunts over dinner. Next morning both turn out to have a lazy breakfast and sunbathe as if nothing had happened. Eventually Bond gets impatient and asks after their host, sparking a search, during which the crew discover the broken hammock, signs that the disoriented, drunk man may have fallen over the guard rail etc.
The crew are horrified and radio the authorities, but neither Mrs Krest nor Barbey are at all upset. Mrs Krest – lithe, beautiful bikini-wearing Mrs Krest – asks Bond if he will accompany her for the four-day cruise on to Mombasa. Suppressing his suspicions that she is the murderer, Bond agrees. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do…
The story features a very exotic location and the (then) luxury pastimes of snorkelling and diving; Fleming’s dislike of the vulgar rich, and of vulgar rich Americans in particular; along with an extended, if rather shallow, treatment of the sado-masochistic master-slave relationship, some superficial pondering why women stay with men who beat and abuse them. But all reconciled in the promise of four days of sexual pleasure with the said abused wife. And so a trite, sailing into the sunset wind-up.
You can see how the four treatments for TV episodes have the quick, violent action necessary for TV, the lack of depth and the cheap resolutions. As stories they are entertaining enough, but Quantum of Solace is in a class of its own.
Credit
For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming was published in 1960 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
Other thrillers published in 1960
- The Doomed Oasis by Hammond Innes
- 1960 saw the debut of the TV series Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan as secret agent John Drake.
Books & Boots 