The Anger of Compassion

Shaken, Not Stirred

When first we meet Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, he's reading a memo in his office:

Barely three months later, on the 13th April, there was passed in France Law No. 46685 entitled Loi Tendant a la Fermeture des Maisons de Tolerance et au Renforcement de la Lutte contre le Proxenitisme.

(When M. came to this sentence he grunted and pressed a switch on the intercom.

'Head of S?'

'Sir.'

'What the hell does this word mean?' He spelt it out.

'Pimping, sir.'

'This is not the Berlitz School of Languages, Head of S. If you want to show off your knowledge of foreign jawbreakers, be good enough to provide a crib. Better still, write in English.'

'Sorry, sir.'

M. released the switch and turned back to the memorandum.

"This" refers, of course, to the fictional world of M.I.6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and Admiral Sir Miles is the legendary M., the quite competent and completely in control Head of the Service. Actually, we don't even discover his name until we've read almost every book in the series. He's just M. Secret Service indeed!

S, by the way, is, according to the source, "the section of the Secret Service concerned with the Soviet Union." We don't meet him again in Casino Royale, although one of his subordinates is important to the story. Nor do we meet Clements, the head of Bond's department, although in the third story, Moonraker, we do learn that Bond is the senior operative of three in that department, in which one earns a Double-O number due to having had to kill in the course of an assignment.

As for James Bond himself, we meet him, and the series of books, thus:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling -- a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension -- becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it.

James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough, and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.

He shifted himself unobtrusively away from the roulette he had been playing and went to stand for a moment at the brass rail which surrounded breast-high the top table in the salle privee.

Le Chiffre was still playing and still, apparently, winning. There was an untidy pile of flecked hundred-mille plaques in front of him. In the shadow of his thick left arm there nestled a discreet stack of the big yellow ones worth half a million francs each.

Bond watched the curious, impressive profile for a time, and then he shrugged his shoulders to lighten his thoughts and moved away.

Le Chiffre is the villain in 1953's Casino Royale, and quite the villain he is. The evil organization in this tale is SMERSH, Russian for "Death to Spies," but the action between Bond, Le Chiffre, and SMERSH is ... well, just read Casino Royale.

We also meet the American Felix Leiter, Bond's CIA pal in many of the novels and movies:

'I may be able to help,' said Leiter. 'I was a regular in our Marine Corps before I joined this racket, if that means anything to you.' He looked at Bond with a hint of self-deprecation.

'It does,' said Bond.

It turned out that Leiter was from Texas. While he talked on about his job with the Joint Intelligence Staff of N.A.T.O. and the difficulty of maintaining security in an organization where so many nationalities were represented, Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemd to come from Texas.

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's first novel, was followed in the spring of 1954 by Live and Let Die, and the two form a kind of pair, really, in that they are far more violent than any of the rest of the books in the series. Another quality they share is that they are quite unlike the James Bond films which share their names -- actually, most of the Bond movies depart radically from the novels, to the detriment of the movies. The very best, by far, of the onscreen Bond jobs was the first one, Dr. No. Those accusing me of arriving at this judgment because of the presence of Ursula Andress in the movie are obviously not among the literary and artistic cognoscenti, to say the least.

So there you have it. The James Bond of the Ian Fleming novels had it all: the facility with languages, with unarmed combat, and with women; the cars (Bentley coupe); the pistols; the languages (French and German, at least, and some Russian); the Macedonian cigarettes rolled for him by Morland's of Grosvenor Square; the patriotism (even if he hated the new pound notes of the 1960s); the wit; the ruthlessness. The Bond of the movies wasn't witty, he was a wise-cracking fop with a Walther PPK.

Oh, and he had, of course, a drink: the Vesper, but you'll have to read Casino Royale to find out what it was, because it's in none of the movies, and I'm not revealing it here. "Shaken, not stirred..." well, check it out.

And what about "he always acted on the knowledge," huh? How's that for integrity in action?

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, died on August 12, 1965.

Posted by Craig Ceely at August 12, 2005 12:05 AM