Ian Fleming Vs John Le Carre: Event Report On The Two Giants of Spy Novels

I tend to agree with the late, great actor George C. Scott, who refused his Oscar for the film Patton, saying that art should not be compared and should not compete.

Scott said that you can not hold up two great paintings and say "And the winner is.."

Ian Fleming (seen in the above photo) is often compared to John le Carre (seen in the below photo), with le Carre being offered as the anti-Fleming when it comes to realism. Yet le Carre has often stated that his novels come more from his imagination than from his five years as a British intelligence officer.

In my view, Fleming and le Carre are two very different kinds of writer. I prefer Fleming, with From Russia With Love as my favorite novel, but I also read and enjoy le Carre's novels, especially his early novels, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Both are great Cold War spy novels and they can both be read and reread and enjoyed.

Fleming and le Carre should not be pitted against each other.

And yet I was interested in reading Tom Cull's piece at the James Bond website MI6 - not to be confused with the British intelligence agency - on the Ian Fleming vs John le Carre debate.

Within the fitting grandiose setting of the Emanuel Centre in London’s Westminster, last Tuesday saw two of the most influential writers working today make the case for their respective choices for the greatest spy novelist of all time.

In one corner Anthony Horowitz, the author of the latest Bond continuation novel “Trigger Mortis”, argued for Ian Fleming.  He was pitted against David Farr, who recently adapted John Le Carre’s “The Night Manager” for our screens with global success.

Accompanying them were four esteemed actors who added colour to the debate by performing readings of each author’s novels, who included Simon Callow, Lesley Manville, Alex Macqueen and Matthew Lewis.

... The Bond films, of course, are intertwined with the book’s success and yet whenever the film franchise chooses to stick closely to the original texts, they are all the better for it. Fleming’s Bond was the first modern spy and Mr. Horowitz stressed that in those early books he was no cartoon hero and Fleming adroitly made him vulnerable.

Mr. Horowitz discussed Fleming’s wonderful use of language as only he wished he could write and asked, “did Le Carre ever write a sentence with such a smile?” The sheer number of great set pieces, book titles and iconic moments are incredible for one writer to have created in 12 books. Do we really know Le Carre’s characters in the same way?

Fleming’s Bond is in our national identity. 

...In Le Carre’s novels, he is seeking himself just as his characters seek their nemesis. Deep ideas but never high-brow. He tackles moral problems, which tests the reader and asks the sort of questions that we ask ourselves about our own identity.

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

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/event-ian-fleming-john-le-carre-debate?id=04194

And you can listen to audio of the debate via the below link:

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/ian-fleming-vs-john-le-carre-anthony-horowitz-and-david-farr/

Trigger's Lucky Berlin Escape: A Look Back at 50 Years Of Ian Fleming's 'The Living Daylights'

This past June saw the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ian Fleming's last James Bond book,  Octopussy and The Living Daylights, published two years after his death.

To mark the anniversary, Tom Cull at www.ianfleming.com offered a piece on Fleming's The Living Daylights.   

The Living Daylights had a few working titles including ‘Trigger Finger’, but first appeared in The Sunday Times colour supplement in 1962, under the title ‘Berlin Escape’. Written in two weeks at the end of September, before On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and after the disappointing reception of The Spy Who Loved Me, this short story was a serious, back-to-basics effort, which took Bond to his secret service roots. Not for nothing did Bond own a Double-0 status and this was Fleming’s way of proving it: by the no-nonsense briefing from M, target practice at the Century Range in Bisley, then off to Berlin to assassinate a deadly KGB sniper codenamed ‘Trigger.’

It is a taut, tough and brutally realistic window into a fraught Cold War Berlin, which by 1961 was still emerging from economic and political divisions from a war that destroyed 50% of the city and left 8 million dead. Two very different political ideologies were pitted against each other between the Soviet socialist sector in the East of Berlin and the Allied sector in the West. The Soviets dismantled much of the industries and transport that existed, which encouraged a thriving black market economy and culminated in the ultimate segregation – the Berlin Wall. When Fleming visited Berlin for part of his Thrilling Cities volume, he described the Eastern Sector where ‘death and chaos and, worst of all, present drabness hang most heavily in the air.’

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

http://www.ianfleming.com/triggers-lucky-berlin-escape-50-years-of-the-living-daylights/

For The Love Of Diamonds: Celebrating The 60th Anniversary of Ian Fleming's James Bond Thriller, 'Diamonds Are Forever'

I've enjoyed reading and rereading Ian Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever over the years.

I love that the story takes place in America and deals with diamond smuggling, fixed horse races, crooked casino gambling and murder. I also love that James Bond goes up against American gangsters.

I was disappointed in the 1971 film based on the novel. It was good to see Sean Connery back as Bond after a one-film absence, but I thought the film was a silly spoof and they left out some of the best scenes from the novel.

I'd like to see the Bond film producers remake the film as a true thriller and remain faithful to Fleming's novel.

With the novel celebrating a its 60th anniversary, Tom Cull at IanFleming.com offers a look back at Fleming's novel.

“Bond put down the piece of quartz and gazed again into the heart of the diamond. Now he could understand the passion that diamonds had inspired through the centuries, the almost sexual love they aroused among those who handled them and cut them and traded in them. It was domination by a beauty so pure that it held a kind of truth, a divine authority before which all other material things turned, like the bit of quartz, to clay. In these few minutes Bond understood the myth of diamonds, and he knew that he would never forget what he had suddenly seen inside the heart of this stone…” 

Ian Fleming said this of Diamonds Are Forever in an interview with the Daily Express in 1956:

“I’ve put everything into this except the kitchen sink. Can you think of a plot about a kitchen sink for the next one? Otherwise I am lost.”

And indeed he did. Whereas some of his books relied heavily on his imagination, this vastly under-rated fourth novel published 60 years ago in 1956, required lots of first-hand research and travel.

Fleming’s twin love of travel and ‘things’ were indulged to their fullest potential in this novel. The central plot revolved around diamond smuggling – a hot topic at the time – and like many, he was enchanted by their lustre, permanence and chatoyance:

“When jewels have chatoyance the colour in the lustre changes with movement in the light, and the colour of this girl’s eyes seemed to vary between a light grey and a deep grey-blue.” (Diamonds Are Forever, 1956)

He was also fascinated in the power and allure of these jewels that could provoke people, even of good standing, to smuggle them. 

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

http://www.ianfleming.com/for-the-love-of-diamonds-diamonds-are-forever-60th-anniversary/

You can read Andrew Lycett's biography of Ian Fleming to learn more about the man who created James Bond.

And you can read my Crime Beat column on Ian Fleming via the below link:

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

The Gold Standard: A Look Back At Ian Fleming's Classic Thriller 'Goldfinger'

Tom Cull at ianfleming.com looks back at Ian Fleming's classic thriller Goldfinger.

It is with little surprise that Anthony Horowitz chose to begin Trigger Mortis just at the point where Bond wraps up the case in Goldfinger. By his own admission, Horowitz has loved this particular Bond novel since childhood.

“Goldfinger has Bond himself, tired and cynical after a dirty assignment at the start of the book. The sequence at Miami airport as he watches the sun set and considers the vicissitudes of fate is writing of the highest order.”

Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger is perhaps overshadowed in popular culture by the overwhelming success and iconography of the film adaptation. However, it is the novel that provided two of the greatest villains of all time in Auric Goldfinger and his henchman Oddjob, and of course one of the best Bond girls; the salaciously named Pussy Galore, who features in Horowitz’s Trigger Mortis. 

Perhaps occluded due to Gert Frobe’s excellent performance is the fact that Auric Goldfinger’s Fort Knox plan speech was taken almost verbatim from the novel.

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

http://www.ianfleming.com/the-gold-standard-ian-flemings-goldfinger/

You can also read an earlier post on Godlfinger via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/03/interplay-between-truth-and-fiction-ian.html