For Everyone's Eyes Only: Bond in Short Form

Ian Fleming's James Bond has left a huge stamp on my life. After seeing 1995's "Goldeneye" in the theater my love of super secret agents was firmly ignited. I wanted more and I dove deep. There was more movies? I rushed to Blockbuster (dating myself) and found myself discovering Sean, Roger, Timothy and even George. There were James Bond books? I dove in. Past the character I found out about Leslie Charteris "The Saint" via Roger's show. "The Man From U.N.C.L.E?" I'm there. Hundred of hardback and paperback hero-spies later eventually it led me to the spawn of Bond, the Men's Adventure paperbacks.

Gotta have a retirement plan.

I'm at the point now where my young adult readings of the Ian Fleming have dulled with age. They aren't clear in my mind, save a few that I have listen on audio book. It's time for a reread of the novels. But there was a bit of unread Fleming I had never experienced: the short stories, collected in "For Your Eyes Only" and "Octopussy." The slim paperbacks have sat unread on various shelves of mine for years mostly likely because I didn't want the party to end. The various continuation novels for James Bond are a mixed bag. Kingsley Amis's almost scratched the itch, it's certainly the top of the heap. John Gardner's work was strong sometimes and then very weak a lot of the time but his Boysie Oakes books are absolutely BRILLIANT. I fear his heart wasn't always in it. Raymond Benson straddled the line of movie/book very well, they seemed like novelizations to unmade films. The smattering of "modern" authors that try their hands at Bond has also left me cold. I didn't finish Sebastian Faulks or William Boyd efforts, literary authors produce poor escapist-ism which is what Bond ultimately is. Jeffery Deaver's didn't interested me in the least. I will have to try Anthony Horowitz's take on Bond, as I have read and immensely enjoyed the first of his Alex Rider books. I would have been absolutely obsessed with them if I was a middle schooler when I read it, but as an adult it still pack a good old-fashioned punch. I  So, before my toe dips into rereading (something I VERY rarely do) I figured I should finish what I started many years ago. The two books came to my coffee table where I have bounced between the two.

The starter story in "From a View to a Kill" is near perfect distilled Fleming. The hallmarks are present, food and drink talk, feisty (though not funny named) women, the hints of real-life espionage blended with the absolute fantastical villainy and of course the well researched locales. Bond is wasting time thinking about the perfect day drink in Paris after a botched job and gets involved with a mysterious murder of a motorcycle dispatch rider with secret papers. Along the way he meets a crazy-driving .22 packing station agent named Mary. Along the way he poses a dispatcher rider giving us a little motorcycle talk, has some action with his fists and his "long barrelled Army .45" and sieges a hidden base brilliantly disguised. All this is in 23 pages, the short page count only hinders one aspect of the brilliance of Fleming: his villains. There's indefinable ones here, simply "evil agents." It's not too much of a knock, the things moves along too quickly for you to notice too much. No part of Roger Moore's "View To a Kill" pulls anything from this short. No Grace Jones in sight.

I do think Fleming grew tired of Bond but understood it was his cash-cow to milk. Bond changed as a character as Fleming grew older, the vigor ran low. The Bond of "Moonraker" is not quite the Bond of "You Only Live Twice." I prefer the earlier pulpier stuff, but the later more literary Bond's are surely better books, I just have skewed taste-buds. Any-who, the title cut to "Octopussy" is light on Bond, he stands around and basically listens to a story. It's a find story that sweeps right to a very Fleming ending but it probably would have been stronger as a standalone tale. Bond is basically playing the policeman part of the story coming to bring someone in. It's an awkward fit. It did give me a lust for a Fleming series of Scotland Yard mystery/adventures. Nearly all of his literary output is comprised of Bond it would have been interesting to have had a stand-alone or another series character to compare to OO7. A more hard-boiled detective operating a near-Bond world of evil masterminds and global conspiracies would have been killer, all wrapped in nice Pan paperback covers? Good gravy, one can dream.

The film version  of "The Living Daylights" is one of my favorites, the short story in "Octopussy" is
also one of my favorites. I do believe I read it a million years ago, but I could have just been experiencing flashbacks from the film as it's fairly faithfully recreated as the pre-title sequence. It's the strongest entry in this collection. Bond is sent to Berlin to act as a counter-sniper to protect a defection. It's a few days spent in Berlin and restless nights waiting for the moment of action. Bond of course sends it eating eggs, drinking and wandering. He also reads "Verderbt, Verdammt, Verraten" a fictional German pulp novel with a half naked woman on the cover, which is about the trials and horrible tribulations of a German woman. It's a nice parallel to the female character in the short, which we learn absolutely nothing about but would have had a hard-go of it because of her circumstances. The story builds into a fine piece of action and we see Bond being as temperamental as ever, cursing his rank and the stuffed shirt the service stuck him with as a sniper spotter.

"The Hildebrand Rarity" is a tight nautical noir of a James Bond story. I enjoyed it but it didn't scream James Bond to me. Bond ends up on the yacht of Milton Krest (the name popped up in the film "License to Kill, gotta squeeze every drop out) and gets entangled in murder. Not really wanting to get himself involved with an investigation Bond does a little evidence tampering then sails off with the dead man's wife who may have killed him. That's the most Bond thing to do. A lot of these stories just feel like the pre-title sequence or a chunk of the middle of a Bond movie, they make you wonder about the rest of the story. That's damned fine short tale telling, Fleming paints broad pictures with short word counts.

I'm going to save "For You Eyes Only," "Risico," "Property of a Lady" and "Quantum of Solace" for another time. Oh, I'll get "OO7 in New York" out of the way real quick here at the end. Bond's in New York to tell a agent that her boyfriend's bad news bears and his recipe for scrambled eggs is actually pretty good. The story is super short and actually fairly humorous. Fleming was a guy who could write. The Bond shorts aren't going to change your life, they are pretty much only there for when you've ran through all the books and don't want to touch a Gardner. None of them are objectionable, they may be forgettable which is worse. Fleming was better in long form when he could take his time and talk about what people should eat and wear and have all the deformed villains he could ever want. 

This relic of a toy has been in various Bond since middle school.

 

Malko #2: Operation New York by Gerard de Villiers

In 1962 the tidal wave that was James Bond washed up a million spies ashore in film and books. The shaken not stirred cocktail that is Ian Fleming's secret agent code-name OO7 was irresistible and the public quickly wanted more and more to satisfy the spy-fi habits. Every pulp-writer worth his salt took up pen to write about some sort of agent, British, American, French,official or unofficial, private eyes became spies, cops became spies, everyone got in on the phone, it didn't matter they just hoped that they struck gold and got some of the Fleming-level recognition (and money) for the work.

Pretty much no one did.  Bummer. But a few captured energy and excitement of Fleming's early Bond novels.

MINI-RANT: With "Casino Royle" Fleming was simply trying to bring the Sapper "Bulldog Drummond" school of English thriller in to the modern post-W.W.II world of blood, guts and sex. He was writing pulp of the English variety. As he wrote he wrote with more authority and literary intentions. By the time you get to the "Blofeld Trilogy," comprising of "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and "You Only Live Twice" he's shattered Bond to his core and is working to rebuild him before Fleming's death. Without a doubt Fleming's greatest achievement is "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," Bond has grown up with his readers and dealt his baggage enough to fully fall in love again, after the events of "Casino Royale." Bond at this point isn't the Bond of pre-Thunderball, he's more reserved, thinks more, acts less and generally more morose. Fleming may have grown old and tired of writing tales of derring-do and beautiful women. The later books are extremely well-written and fascinating looks into the end of one of the most recognizable characters ever created. BUT to me they are simply lacking in what I want to read in escapist fiction. So, yeah if you have never read a Bond book, first off shame on you, second off don't expect the movies and thirdly start with the early books and work up through the series. I'd suggest "Moonraker," and "Diamonds are Forever." "Moonraker" has the best example of the full blown "Fleming-Sweep," of escalating action which really didn't start until the second book "Live and Let Die." "Diamonds are Forever" is the dark-horse I'll recommend cause it's kinda just Fleming going through the motions, but it's motions by this books that he's perfecte.

Okay, now that that is all out. I found myself in a quandary. I wanted more 60's spy thrills in the vein of the early Fleming's. Some series quenched the thirst quite well James Mayo's Charles Hood books were close, ditto with James Dark's Mark Hood books, the two of which I always confuse myself with. Nick Carter Killmaster by Nick Cater would certainly do but with an army of ghostwriters you never knew what you were going to get. Mark Denning's John Marshall books are shamefully unknown. In the Gold Medal World Edward Aaron's Sam Durrell, Richard Telefair's Monty Wash or Earl Drake by Dan J. Marlowe could pass the time. Recently Michael Kurland's War Inc. books proved to be excellent examples of the genre. Only Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm and Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise ever came close to the pure excitement of a Bond book.

Then I met Malko or his His Serene Highness, an Austrian Prince with a crumbling castle and bills to pay. So what does he do? A former arms dealer, he works for the CIA to pass the time and soak up some cash. Each of the Pinnacle books start off with a "dossier" on Malko, his habits, accomplishments, weapons and beverage choices etc. etc. to get you to know the man, the myth, the legend that his Malko. Over TWO HUNDRED BOOKS he, together with Turkish former-killer butler Elko and later his girlfriend/fiancee Alexandra, Malko fights killers, Nazi's, enemy agents of all nationalities, and has TONS of sex that's always told in a blatant kinky detail. Malko is the epitome of the "sex and snobbery" school that Fleming created told in a undeniably French manner.

Gerard de Villiers created Malko in 1965 at the height of Bond-mania and wrote with the gritty authority of the journalist that he was but with enough the fantasy (and sex) that readers craved. They craved it so much that he wrote and wrote and wrote right up until he died, Malko tackling each modern problem that came up in every corner of the world.  See Malko lives in a world of grimy spies and killers that de Villier's rips from real-life. de Villier's had a network of friends and sources on all sides of the espionage world, he uses real-life figures to blend realism into his escapism true to life spycraft that was read by real-life counter-espionage agents, diplomats, kings and presidents. It's a surprising mixed drink of a book. I really don't think the series should work. It's all too gimmicky, a prince spying for the CIA with fictitious versions of real people running around and car chases, and gun fights and brutal torture? It should be too much to take in.

But nope, it's perfect. The books read like hard R-rated espionage fairy tales for adults.

"Operation New York" was originally printed in French in 1968 as the 11th in the series, it was also published in English in England (makes sense) as "Black Magic in New York," which is a spiffy title. This edition was the second book that Pinnacle put out to bring Malko to the Americans. The risk with translated fiction is having a translated that can speak the language but who also can write, because when you translate you are essentially rewriting a novel. I don't speak French so I'll never know what spark I may be missing from de Villier's writing but luckily the translators working on the Malko books did a fine job in making highly readable books. No. 2 finds Malko set-up in the most spectacular way. After being drugged and tattooed the word is out that he is actually Rudi Guern an asshole Nazi who's been in hiding since after the war. Malko now has to find Guern to prove his innocence. To do this he will wade through Nazi's, nazi-hunters, women, witness horrifyingly brutal torture and perform some masochistic sex, you know for the greater good. Malko isn't the most active hero in this book, I think he was still forming as a character for de Viller's at this point or things were lost in the translation (literally) but he's durable enough and produces enough charm to keep the book moving along at a Grand-Prix level pace. According to the OUTSTANDING Spy Guys and Gals website the translator for this books was Nicholas Leonard and it may or may not be the only one he did so he might not have proven to be a good fit for the series. This book is probably not be the best place to start with the books which can be read in any order. I started with #7 "The Countess and the Spy" which was translated by Lowell Blair who did a good chunk of the series and I read it in nearly a sitting. Blair also translated a couple books in Jean Bruce's longer running OSS-117 French spy books that pre-dated Bond and Malko, but that's a tale for another time.

Pinnacle bottomed out at producing 15 translations which just really blows. One more came from Medallion Books and recently five modern books from fancy pants-publisher Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, which is far too few books for me. Unfortunately people have caught on to how good Malko is and the books (save the Black Lizard ones) are hard-to-find and pricey but they are worth it.  Maybe I just need to learn to read some French, there's a whole world of pulp existing just beyond my reach which is a shame. But I mean I have thousands of books unread in a language I can read so maybe it's for the best not to add. My shelves might not be able to take it.