The Spectator Audio Interview With Nicholas Shakespeare, The Biographer Of Ian Fleming, The Creator Of James Bond

I just listened to a fine audio interview of Nicholas Shakespeare (seen in the below photo), who wrote the new biography of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond thrillers. 

Sam Leith of The Spectator interviewed Nicholas Shakespeare about Ian Fleming’s role in WWII naval intelligence, which Shakespeare noted was much more important to the war effort than previously thought, based on recently declassified documents. 

Nicholas Shakespeare also spoke of Ian Fleming’s personal life and his role as a journalist prior to WWII and afterwards, as well as what Fleming thought of actor Sean Connery as James Bond in the early Bond films. 

As an Ian Fleming aficionado, I look forward to reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man when it becomes available in the United States. 

You can listen to the interview via the below link:  

Nicholas Shakespeare: The Complete Man | The Spectator

You can also read my previous post on Nicholas Shakespeare and Ian Fleming: The Complete Man via the below link:  

Paul Davis On Crime: British Book Launch of Nicholas Shakespeare's New Biography Of The Late, Great Thriller Writer Ian Fleming

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent

Nicholas Shakespeare at the Spectator offers a review of Owen Matthews’ An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent.

Interviewed on the Today programme on 7 March, a former executive of the gigantic Chinese tech firm Huawei admitted: ‘It is the nature of humanity to spy, to conduct espionage.’ A gold-plated incarnation of this impulse is the tall, craggy-faced German journalist who was arrested in his pyjamas in his Tokyo house in October 1941. ‘I am a Nazi!’ he insisted to the Japanese police, who, before entering his study, had politely removed their shoes. On the sixth day of his interrogation, he finally broke. He raised his vigilant, deep-set blue eyes, which could have charmed the whiskers off Blofeld’s cat, and said: ‘I will confess everything.’

Over the course of 50 interrogation sessions, Richard Sorge removed the scabbard of ‘a slightly lazy, high-living reporter’, which had shielded him for 12 years, and revealed his inner steel: the blade of an unyielding communist and consummate dissembler, the only person in history in the reckoning of Owen Matthews, his latest and most thorough biographer, to have been simultaneously a member of the Nazi party and the Soviet Communist party. ‘No other agent had served Moscow for so well or so long.’

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/richard-sorge-the-soviet-unions-master-spy/ 

The King Kong Of The Thriller: The Phenomenal Output Of Edgar Wallace, Once The World’s Most Popular Author

Michael Moorcock at The Spectator offers a piece on a new book about the late thriller writer Edgar Wallace.

At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of short stories, several volumes of verse, countless newspaper and magazine articles, movie scripts, radio plays and more. His work was dictated, transcribed and sent directly to the publisher. In one year alone (1929) he wrote a dozen books. People joked about getting ‘the weekly Wallace’.

Despite their speed of creation, Wallace’s stories were, said The Spectator, written in plain, clear English and ‘read by everyone, from bishops to barmen’. His influence on the thriller genre was extensive, profound and continuous. He inspired a thousand imitators with The Four Just Men, Mr J.G. Reeder, Sanders of the River and Educated Evans. He wrote humour and thrillers, SF and reportage. With instincts for a good publicity stunt, he created a brand image: long cigarette holder, stetson, jodhpurs, riding boots.

A quarter of the English public read his books. One of his many publishers alone sold 30 million copies. He led an extravagant life, gambled heavily, bought race-horses and stood for Parliament. His generosity was famous. At his death he owed millions. His enormous debts were settled in a couple of years.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9424761/the-king-kong-of-the-thriller-the-phenomenal-output-of-edgar-wallace-once-the-worlds-most-popular-author/

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal

Philip Henson at The Spectator offers a review of Ben Macintyre's new book on the British traitor, spy and rotter Kim Philby.

The story of Kim Philby is, of course, like so many English stories, really one of social class. He was one of the most scandalous traitors in history, and from within the security services sent specific information to the Soviets during the early years of the Cold War that resulted directly in the deaths of thousands of men and women. Among them were the Albanian guerrillas, hoping to liberate their country, who found Soviet-sponsored troops waiting at their landing places to shoot them. A list of non-communist opposers to the Nazis in Germany was passed on to the Russians who, advancing into Germany in the last years of the war, summarily executed 5,000 named people.

Philby worked for the British security services for years, almost all the time passing significant information to our country’s enemies. He was closely associated with those other traitors, Burgess and Maclean, and clearly helped them to escape. Despite very substantial evidence against Philby, he was allowed to retire from the service and left unprosecuted. MI6 seems to have protected and defended him; MI5 wanted to bring a case, but was rebuffed.

Much later, working in Beirut as a journalist for the Observer and the Economist, Philby was recruited once again by the security services. He was only finally unmasked when a woman he had attempted to recruit in the 1930s came forward with undeniable evidence. Philby’s old friend, Nicholas Elliott, a senior figure in the service who had protected him for years, went out to Beirut to interrogate him, and seems to have allowed him to escape to Moscow, like Burgess and Maclean before him. Elliott’s much later attempts to justify himself, in conversations with John le Carré, provide  an afterword to Ben Macintyre’s book, written by the novelist.

How did Philby get away with it, and how, at the last, confronted with indisputable evidence of his treachery in his exile in Beirut, was he allowed to flee to Moscow? The answer, according to Macintyre, is the British class system, and in particular the loyalty felt on account of social standing by two men, Nicholas Elliott and James Jesus Angleton of the CIA. Angleton seems to have handed over the details of every one of those Albanian landings during immensely long boozy lunches in Washington. What was Elliott’s responsibility? Why did he allow Philby to slip through his fingers at the end? They are questions which still can’t be answered.   

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9150411/a-spy-among-friends-by-ben-macintyre-review/

James Bond, Author: The Writer Ian Fleming Invented, And His Literary Influences

Matthew Woodcock at The Spectator offers an interesting piece on Ian Fleming's iconic character, James Bond, and Bond's literary influences.

There is one last James Bond book from the late 1950s that remains unpublished. We will not find the typescript lurking in the archives, nor hidden amongst the papers held by Ian Fleming’s estate, for this book is not about James Bond but written by Bond himself. It is from Fleming’s 1959 novel Goldfinger that we learn that 007 spends his hours on night duty at the Secret Service compiling a manual on unarmed combat called Stay Alive!, containing the best that had been written on the subject by his peers in intelligence agencies around the world. Bond is more industrious in the field than at the typewriter and no more is heard about this great unfinished work once his thoughts drift back to his previous assignment and time spent enjoying the company of the ill-fated Jill Masterson.

It should come as no surprise that Fleming’s hero has writerly pretensions. Yet again, Bond and his creator have interests or characteristics in common, along with their shared dash of Scottish ancestry and background in naval intelligence, and a similar penchant for custom-made Morlands cigarettes.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9097832/bringing-bond-to-book-essay/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Ian Fleming and James Bond via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/06/casino-royale-revisited-film-that.html

Journalist, Novelist, Patriot, Spy: The Life of John Bingham, Role Model For John Le Carre's George Smiley

Stella Rimington, the former director of the British security service MI5, reviewed Michael Jago's biography of John Bingham for the Spectator.

John Bingham joined MI5 before the war from Fleet Street, recruited by Maxwell Knight, a maverick but brilliant agent runner. Bingham worked on the Double X operations then, when the Service cut its staff after the war, took a post in the Allied Control Council in Hanover, trying to detect Soviet infiltrators among the flood of refugees seeking asylum in the Western zone. It was an experience which convinced him of the fragility of the security of Western Europe.

In 1950, at a time of increased focus on communism and Soviet espionage, following some sensational spy cases, the Service was recruiting again and Bingham rejoined. It was then that he began his parallel career as a crime writer, with the publication in 1952 of his first, partly autobiographical, novel, My Name is Michael Sibley.

When the much younger David Cornwell joined MI5 in 1958, Bingham became his professional mentor and also helped start him on his writing career by introducing him to his literary agent. Bingham’s son Simon records that Cornwell’s pen name, Le Carré, came from the office nickname for his father, ‘The Square’. In a radio interview in 1999 Cornwell revealed that Bingham was a model for Smiley, though in the following year, in an introduction for the re-publication of some of Bingham’s early novels, he says that Bingham was one of two men who went into the making of George Smiley.

But the John Bingham who emerges from the pages of Michael Jago’s book seems, in everything but appearance, to be about as far from Smiley as you could get. Certainly F4, with its nurturing relationship with its agents, many of whom worked for the Service for years and ended with a pension, was a very different place from the nuanced, ethically ambiguous world of Smiley and his colleagues. Le Carré wrote that Bingham felt betrayed by his cynical portrayal of the intelligence services. Bingham himself went on to write a considerable number of successful crime stories, but though he carried on writing until his old age, he never achieved his ambition of producing a spy story to rival the success of Le Carré’s books.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8852241/journalist-novelist-patriot-spy/

Mudscape With Figures: Ian Fleming On Thrillers

Thanks to the web site http://debrief.commanderbond.net, we can read a piece the late great thriller writer Ian Fleming wrote for The Spectator in 1955.

You can read the piece below:

Mudscape With Figures

By Ian Fleming

Some people are frightened by silence and some by noise. To some people the anonymous bulge at the hip is more frightening than the gun in the hand, and all one can say is that different people thrill to different stimuli, and that those who like The Turn of the Screw may not be worried by, for instance, The Cat and the Canary.

Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the atmosphere of suspense into horrible acts. Poe, Stevenson and M R. James used to frighten me most, and now Maugham, Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Graham Greene can still raise the fur on my back when they want to. Their heroes are credible and their villains terrify with a real ‘blackness.’ Their situations are fraught with doom and the threat of doom, and, above all, they have pace. When one chapter is done, we reach out for the next. Each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier behind a fast motor-boat.

Too many writers in this genre (and I think Erskine Childers, on whose The Riddle of the Sands these remarks are hinged, was one of them) forget that, although this may sound a contradiction in terms, speed is essential to a novel of suspense, and while detail is important to create a atmosphere of reality, it can be laid on so thick as to become a Sargasso Sea on which the motor-boat bogs down and the skier founders.

The reader is quite happy to share the pillow-fantasies of the author as long as he is provided with sufficient landmarks to help him relate the author’s world more or less to his own, and a straining after verisimilitude with maps and diagrams should be avoided except in detective stories aimed at the off-beta mind.

Even more wearying are ‘recaps,’ and those leaden passages where the hero reviews what he has achieved or ploddingly surveys what remains to be done. These exasperate the reader who, if there is to be any rumination, is quite happy to do it himself. When the author drags his feet with this space-filling device he is sacrificing momentum which it will take him much brisk writing to recapture.

These reflections, stale news through they may be to the mainliner in thrillers, come to me after rereading The Riddle of the Sands after an absence of very many years, and they force me to the conclusion that doom-laden silence and long-drawn-out suspense are not enough to confirm the tradition that Erskine Childers, romantic and remarkable man that he must have been, is also one of the father-figures of the thriller.

The opening of the story— the factual documentation in the preface and the splendid Lady Windermere’s Fan atmosphere of the first chapters—is superb.

At once you are ensconced in bachelor chambers off St. James’s at the beginning of the century. All the trappings of the Age of Certainty gather around you as you read. Although the author does not say so, a coal tire seems to roar in the brass grate; there is at glass of whisky beside your chair and, remembering Mr. Cecil Beaton’s Edwardian decors, you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass. The smoke from your cheroot curls up towards the ceiling and your button-boots are carefully crossed at the ankles on the red­-leather-topped fender so as not to disturb the crease of those spongebag trousers. On a mahogany bookrest above your lap The Riddle of the Sands is held open by at well-manicured finger.

Shall you go with Carruthers to Cowes or accompany him to the grouse-moor? It is the fag-end of the London season of 1903. You are bored, and it is all Mayfair to a hock-and-seltzer that the fates have got you in their sights and that you are going to start to pay for your fat sins just over the page.

Thus, in the dressing-room, so to speak, you and Carruthers are all ready to start the hurdle race. You are still ready when you get into the small boat in a God-forsaken corner of the East German coast, and you are even more hungry for the starter’s gun when you set sail to meet the villains. Then, to my, mind, for the next 95,000 words there is anticlimax.

This is a book of great renown; and it is not from a desire to destroy idols or a tendency to denigration that this review—now that, after the statutory fifty years, The Riddle of the Sands has entered the public domain—is becoming almost too much of an autopsy. But those villains! With the best will in the world I could not feel that the lives of the heroes (and therefore of my own) were in the least way endangered by them.

Dollmann, villain No. 1, is a ‘traitor’ from the Royal Navy, whose presence among the clucking channels and glistening mudbanks of the Frisian Islands is never satisfactorily explained. His job was ‘spying at Chatham, the blackguard,’ and the German High Command, even in 1903 when the book was first published, was crazy to employ him on what amounts to operational research. He never does anything villainous. Before the story opens, he foxes hero No. 1 into running himself on a mudbank, but at the end, when any good villain with his back to the wall would show his teeth, he collapses like a pricked balloon and finally disappears lamely overboard just after ‘we came to the bar of the Schild and had to turn south off that twisty bit of beating between Rottum and Bosch Fat.’ His harshest words are ‘You pig­headed young marplots!’ and his ‘blackness’ is further betrayed by the beauty and purity of his daughter, with whom hero No. 1 falls in love (it is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have.)

Von Bruning, villain No. 2, is frankly a hero to the author, and is presented as such: and No.3, Boehme, though at first he exudes a delicious scent of Peter Lorre, forfeits respect by running away across the mud and leaving one of his gumboots in the hands of hero No. 2.

The plot is that the heroes want to discover whist the villains are up to, and, in a small, flat-bottomed boat, they wander amongst the Frisian Islands (and two maps, two charts and a set of tide-tables won't convince me that they don’t wander aimlessly) trying to find out.

This kind of plot makes an excellent framework for that classic ‘hurdle race’ thriller formula, in which the hero (despite his Fleet-Foot Shoes with Tru-Temper Spikes and Kumfi­Krutch Athletic Supporter) comes a series of ghastly croppers before he breasts the tape.

Unfortunately, in The Riddle of the Sands there are no hurdles and only two homely mishaps (both of the heroes’ own devising)—a second grounding on a mudbank, from which the heroes refloat on the rising tide, and the loss of the anchor chain, which they salvage without difficulty.

The end of the 100,000 word quest through the low­-lying October mists it a hasty, rather muddled scramble which leaves two villains, two heroes and the heroine more or less in the air, and the small boat sailing off to England with the answer to the riddle. Before 1914 this prize must have provided a satis­factory fall of the curtain, but since then two German wars have clanged about our beads and today our applause is rather patronising.

The reason why The Riddle of the Sands will always be read is due alone to its beautifully sustained atmosphere. This adds poetry, and the real mystery of wide, fog-girt silence and the lost-child crying of seagulls, to a finely written log-book of a small-boat holiday upon which the author has grafted a handful of ‘extras’ and two ‘messages’—the threat of Germany and the need for England to, ‘be prepared.’

To my mind it is now republished exactly where it belongs—in the Mariner's Library. Here, a thriller by atmosphere alone, it stands alongside twenty-eight thrillers of the other school— thrillers where the action on the stage thrills, and the threatening sea-noises are left to the orchestra pit.

When The Going Got Tough: A Review Of The Early Works Of Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers, so I'm pleased that Penguin is issuing another complete edition of his novels, biographies and travel books.

You can read Paul Johnson's review of the early books for The Spectator via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/7094563/when-the-going-got-tough.thtml

The Genius Of Raymond Chandler

David Blackburn at The Spectator wrote about the late, great crime writer Raymond Chandler and why his novels endure.

Blackburn also reports that BBC Radio 4 will air four radio plays from Chandler's novels this month.

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/6665918/the-genius-of-raymond-chandler.thtml

You can also read my column on Raymond Chandler's influence on crime novels and films via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2009/11/on-raymond-chandlers-influence-on-crime.html