Ian Fleming - 100 Years

I've written a tribute piece on the man over at Ed Copeland on Films. Also, for the inclined, Mark Steyn has what looks to be one of several Ian Fleming pieces up, where he makes a similar point regarding the Bond formula.

Ian Fleming in Tokyo, Pt. 2

More from Thrilling Cities. This time Fleming recounts his bath and massage experience at the capable hands of a real-life Kissy:

The night before, Dick and I had consumed large quantities of raw fish in a restaurant off the Ginza, which is one of the great pleasure street of the world, and even larger quantities of sake, a heated rice-spirit to which I took rather too enthusiastically, and now, nursing something of a hang-over, I was looking forward to the healing properties of the most famous Japanese bath-house, the Tokyo Onsen. We went there after another delicious meal which included quails cooked in raw quail's egg (Mrs. Elizabeth David, please note!), and it was indeed a remarkable experience.

Many Japanese have no baths in their houses and the two or three bath-days a week at the public baths are great occasions. I can now well understand why. At the desk on the first floor of the large, rather drab, building, I paid fifteen shillings and was then taken in hand by the prettiest Japanese girl I was to see during the whole of my stay. Her name was Kissy and she was twenty-one. She had the face of a smaller, rather neater, Brigitte Bardot, with black hair in a B.B. cut. She wore nothing but the shortest and tightest of white shorts and a white brassiere.

She led me by the hand down a corridor to a small room divided in two. The ante-room contained a dressing-table laden with various oils, powders, and unguents and a chair for my clothes, which she prettily asked me to remove. It was obviously no good being demure about this, so I obeyed her, and she took my suit and brushed it and hung it up on a hanger. She then led me by the hand into the interior half of the room, where there was a large wooden box with a hole in the top - a one-man Turkish bath - into which she placed me. She then closed the top and, after some pleasant but rather stilted conversation, coquetted with her hair-do in a looking glass. After a quarter of an hour in a the very hot box, she raised the lid and helped me down on to the spotless tiled floor, and bade me sit besided a sunken blue-tiled bath on a small stool, when she proceeded to give me an energetic shampoo and scrubbed me with soap and a loofah from top to toe. Well, almost, that is. She avoided the central zone and hand me the loofah with a dimpling, "You do body." She then poured wooden pitchers of water over me to clean off the soap and guided me down the two steps in the deep, oval bath, the very hot water in which comes from natural hot springs.

Ten minutes of this and then, when she had towelled me down, I was bidden to lie on a high massage table where she proceeded to massage me thoroughly and expertly - none of that effleurage, but the really deep massage for which the Japanese are famous. I may say that any crude Western thoughts I might have entertained during these processes were thouroughly washed from my mind by the general heat and exertions I was put through, but that is not to say that I was not vastly stimulated and intrigued by the whole performance. Thinking that she might find my reserve rather ungallant, I asked her if she didn't occasionally have "bad men" who suggested "bad things" to her. The message, not perhaps unexpected, got through. She answered with a bewitching but quite neutral politeness that such people went to other places, places on the Ginza. The Onsen was only for "gentremen." There was no hint of a rebuke in her attitude.

Ian Fleming in Tokyo

More from Thrilling Cities. Fleming discusses the physical characteristics of the Japanese...

The first thing that struck me was how gay and purposeful the young Japanese are and how healthy a rice diet must be. They move at an astonishing speed compared with the easy stroll you will normally see in the comparable Piccadilly or Champs-Elysees crowds. And how bright all theire eyes are, wiht the sort of intelligent brightness you see in small animals! Very few of the men wear hats and would look rather foolish if they did so, and yet you never see a man with a hair out of place or wiht curly or unruly hairs. It is all a sea of black shiny heads upon which, Gulliver-like, the Westerner looks down. They are rude and rough to each other on the streets, in sharp contrast with their good manners when at rest. They bump and jostle without apology and apparently without offence. The eyes of the women are not almond-shaped. It is the tautness of the Mongolian fold of the upper eyelid that appears to slant the eye, and I learnt later, from Tiger Saito, that facial surgery to remove the Mongolian fold and widen the eye is immensely popular all over the country. The girls are aping the West in countless other fashions. Long legs have become desirable, and those hideous wooden clogs have been exchanged for stiletto heels. The Eastern hair-dos, which I find enchanting, are going out in favour of of permanent waves and other fuzzy fashions. Traditional dress - the kimono and the obi, the brightly coloured, silken sash worn about the waist - is disappearing fast and is now worn, so far as the towns are concerned, only in the family circle, together with the giant cake of hair and monstrous hair-pins in the Madame Butterfly fashion.

Ian Fleming in Hong Kong

More from Thrilling Cities. Fleming discusses the tongs and the triads...

On our way back to Hong Kong, recalling Dr. Lobo’s mention of the tongs, now known as triads, and musing over their possible connection with the smuggling of gold and opium which are more or less interconnected, I asked Dick Hughes, who knows the answer to everything in the Far East, what the triads really amounted to, and this is the gist of what he told me.

There are scores of triads, or secret Chinese blood societies, in Hong Kong, mostly concentrated in the Kowloon district, and there members, ranging from pimps and shoe-shine boys to businessmen and teachers, run into tens of thousands. Originally the aims of the triads were laudable and patriotic. Members were rigorously tested, sworn to unselfish brotherhood, and dedicated to moral and religious principles. But the process of degeneration has been profound. Politics, then squeeze and conspiracy, and finally crime, rackets, extortion, blackmail, and smuggling have debased the high ideals of the early tongs, just as the semi-religious Society of Harmonious Fists (I Ho Chuan) of A.D. 1700 became the horrendous Boxers of 1900.

The triads are not banned in Macao, and Dick hazarded the suggestion that Dr. Lobo and other members of the syndicate were probably forced to pay them protection money. (No doubt Mr. Foo failed to pay up and was punished with bombs in the lavatories of his Central Hotel). But they are illegal in Hong Kong, where they flourish underground with secret signs and passwords and iron rules of punishment and vengeance. The old membership identifications, a cash coin or a cotton badge, have gone, but nowadays one member can distinguish another by the manner, perhaps, in which he lights a cigarette or sets the tea-cups before a visitor.

The largest and most powerful of the Hong Kong triads today is formidable “14 K,” so called because the ancient Canton address was Number 14 in Po-wah Road, with the “K” added later for “karat” of gold in memory of a bloody pitched battle over “protection” against a rival triad whose members likened their strength to local but softer gold. “14 K” dates from the seventeenth century, but was rejuvenated and developed by General Kot Sui Wong as a secret agency of the Kuomintang. He was deported from Hong Kong to Formosa in 1950, but returned incognito to the colony and, before he died in 1953, re-activated all eighteen groups of the redoubtable “14 K,” which now has an estimated membership of eighty thousand divided into mellifluously named sub-branches.

Ian Fleming in Macao

In 1959 Fleming took a trip around the world visiting key cities and reporting about them to the Sunday Times. A compilation of these articles was published in book form in 1964 under the title of Thrilling Cities, the same year as his death. Cities traveled included: Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, L.A., Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples, and Monte Carlo. In lieu of my own budget, I plan on posting on Fleming's trip vicariously, starting with Macao. The following is Fleming's trip to the Central Hotel, which he describes as a nine-story skyscraper which isn't exactly a hotel. It is devoted to human vices. And the "higher up the building, the largest in Macau, the more beautiful and expensive are the girls, the higher the stakes at the gambling tables, and the better the music." In the excerpt, Fleming has just described the rules and ambiance of playing fan-tan at this din of sin.

Having educated ourselves in these matters [gambling], Dick Hughes and I repaired to our sixth-floor dance hall to see how Mr. Foo was handling the second human vice. The place had a central, well-lit dance floor and a well-disciplined eight-piece “combo” playing good but conventional jazz. In the shadows round the walls sat some twenty or thirty “hostesses.” Dick Hughes and I arranged ourselves at a comfortable banquette in the sparsely frequented room and ordered gins and tonics and two hostesses. Mine was called Garbo, “same like film star,” she explained. She wore a pale-green embroidered cheongsam and a “Mamie Eisenhower” bang rather low on the forehead. She had the usual immaculate ivory skin and the conventional “almond” eyes, which were bright with intelligence and a desire to please. Rather startlingly, she appeared to have black lipstick, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, this turned crimson. Dick’s girl was a trifle older, perhaps thirty-five, wore a beige cheongsam, and was more forward and vivacious than Garbo. They asked for lemonades, and for a while we made the usual rattling, gay, and highly artificial night-club conversation. When, in my case, the springs threatened to run dry, I fell back on the hoary gambit of reading my partner’s hand.

Through experience in this science, dating back to my teens, I have acquired a crude expertise in palmistry, and with my first pronouncement that Garbo had three children, I hit a lucky jackpot. The two girls chattered excitedly and, realizing with awe that her hand was being held by a great soothsayer from the West, perspiration rose in Garbo’s palm and she was hard put to it to keep this dew at bay with a paper napkin. In the reverent hush that ensued, looking alternately into the dewy palm and the reverent almond eyes, I solemnly warned her that her heart was not ruled by her head, that she had artistic leanings which had not yet come to fruition, that she would have a serious illness when she was about fifty, and finally, provocatively, that she was inclined to be under-sexed. This last pronouncement was greeted with much hilarious protestation which drew two more girls to our table and involved me in a further hour of miscellaneous prognostication and consumption of gins and tonics.

The Hook at Notes of Interests lets me monologue

about James Bond, that is... Check out the interview on his site.

What I have learned from the Bond books

As you all may have realized, my reading for the past couple of months has been almost exclusively Bond novels. I started with Casino Royale and recently finished with Octopussy/The Living Daylights. I’d read a little Fleming prior to this, but not enough to really get a good idea of what the book Bond was like. Now I know. As much as I wanted to create several posts on Bond: a list of every drink and meal he eats in the novels, a reading list of book titles mentioned throughout the series, a description of all the Bond women - I did not keep adequate notes. So this is a brief list of what I learned:

Bond relies less on gadgets and more on his wits and physical endurance. For the most part, I knew this going into the books – but I didn’t realize how much it changes the action. Throughout the entire series I can only name a handful of gadgets, usually very low tech: the attaché case (in From Russia with Love - mostly the same as the movie), steel toed shoes with knives hidden in the heels (mentioned in a couple of books, most prominently used in Goldfinger), hidden compartments on the Aston Martin (again, Goldfinger. But alas, no machine guns or other perks). And that’s basically it unless you want to include the Geiger counter in Dr. No.

Bond prefers single breasted suits, wears steel toed loafers and prefers an under the shoulder holster, first for his Berretta with a skeleton grip, then for his Walther PPK.

Bond usually needs at least a month of recuperation after each adventure to heal from the injuries he has sustained.

Bond has a scar on his cheek, a comma of hair on his forehead and cruel lips. He’s not particularly good looking, but does manage to strike a handsome figure and usually gets the girl (I said usually, not always).

Bond is a sympathetic womanizer. He tends to stick with one girl per book and he actually is very devoted to that girl. He is also something of a kissing bandit. Often, in the middle of danger, before he’s shagged the gal, he’ll abruptly kiss the girl full on the lips.

Bond gets his heart broken a few times.

The novels are much more in line with the hardboiled detective genre than the playboy spy genre of the movies.

Bond rarely drinks martinis. He’s a bourbon man. And he can drink a stiff bourbon and branch at virtually any time of the day. When I was reading the books, I tried to emulate his drinking habits, but I soon had to give that up. Bond can be drugged by the enemy for 3 straight days and left in a confined space, and when he comes to, the first thing he wants is a whisky and then a shower (Goldfinger). His drinking does vary, however. He’s had his share of vodka on ice, champagne and whatever the local specialty is. When in the Athens airport, he’ll drink ouzo. When in Japan, he’ll drink sake. So on and so forth.

Bond does not like to be dirty. He takes lots of showers. Four in one day in Live & Let Die. He also takes ice cold showers.

Bond does not have uppity tastes. While they are particular, they tend to be simple and often plebian.

As in the films, Bond loves to gamble. Because it is fiction, he usually wins. When it’s for queen and country…or for M, he will cheat. He’s the best card player in MI6.

MI6 maintains about 3000 employees and is a relatively small outfit.

There are two other double 0s.

Bond enjoys the low rumble of an older car. He drives older Bentleys that are painted dull gunmetal gray and have rough suspension. At first, it’s an early 30’s model, then an early 50’s model, then a customized job. All the other cars tend to be from the motor pool or rentals.

Bond does not like killing. Especially in cold blood. He frets about this all the time.

Bond is always thinking and calculating. If you have a gun on him, he’s gauging the distance between you and him and figuring out what tools are immediately available to disable you.

Bond also thinks more long term. When he’s up in the ski resort in OHMSS, he knows he will likely have to ski down the mountain in a hasty escape, so he starts exercising at night to get into condition to make the demanding run.

Bond has many friends that are outright outlaws or somehow between the law or otherwise amoral – this includes smugglers and crime bosses and his father-in-law.

Felix Leiter is one person.

Bond is very loyal to M. He fears, likes and respects him...and curses him on several occassions.

M likes Bond, though Bond is from a different generation. M does not care for Bond’s womanizing.

I thoroughly respect M's worldview, more than Bond's, thought Bond's worldview is similar. However, Bond is not quite a mature as M (see conversation with Mathis in Casino Royale about good guys and bad guys).

Bond’s friend in France is Mathis. His friend in the U.S. is Felix. His friend in Japan is Tanaka.

Mary Goodnight is not a hopeless idiot.

M in the book could very well be Bernard Lee (brilliant casting)

Jamaica is a central spot in Bond's world: Live & Let Die, Dr. No, Man With the Golden Gun all take place there. Also, the double murder in "A View to a Kill" from For Your Eyes Only takes place there.

Tracy is the ultimate Bond girl. Bond chose wisely to marry her.

Solitaire is the runner up.

Tiffany Case was a little neurotic for my tastes.

The Spy Who Loved Me, followed closely, would make an excellent film.

James Bond on Kissy Suzuki

from You Only Live Twice.

[James Bond is preparing to infiltrate the mysterious Death Collector's castle, with its garden of death. He's been deposited at a nearby island which will be his base. He is staying at village of Japanese shell divers. He is staying with the young Kissy Suzuki and her aging parents]

The sweat began to pour down Bond’s face and chest into his bathing pants. Kissy undid the kerchief round her hair and leant forward and mopped at him gently. Bond smiled into her almond eyes and had his first close-up of her snub nose and petalled mouth. She wore no make-up and did not need to, for she had that rosy-tinted skin on a golden background – the colours of a golden peach – that is quite common in Japan. Her hair, released from the kerchief, was black with dark-brown high-lights. It was heavily waved, but with a soft fringe that ended an inch or so above the straight, fine eyebrows that showed no signs of having been plucked. Her teeth were even and showed no more prominently between the lips than with a European girl, so that she avoided the toothiness that is a weak point in the Japanese face. Her arms and legs were longer and less masculine than is usual with Japanese girls and, the day before, Bond had seen that her stomach was almost flat – a beautiful figure, equal to that of any of the star chorus girls he had seen in the cabarets of Tokyo. But her hands and feet were rough and scarred with work, and her finger-nails and toe-nails, although they were cut very short, were broken. Bond found this rather endearing. Ama means ‘sea-girl’ or ‘sea-man’, and Kissy wore the marks of competing with the creatures of the ocean with obvious indifference, and her skin, which might have suffered from constant contact with salt water, in fact glowed with a golden sheen of health and vitality. But it was the charm and directness of her eyes and smile as well as her complete naturalness – for instance, when she mopped at Bond’s face and chest – that endeared her so utterly to Bond. At that moment, he thought there would be nothing more wonderful than to spend the rest of his life rowing her out towards the horizon during the day and coming back with her to the small, clean house in the dusk.

He shrugged the whimsy aside. Only another two days to the full moon and he would have to get back to reality, to the dark, dirty life he had chosen for himself.

.

James Bond gun barrel sequences, from various perspectives

First: a compilation of all the sequences together. I wish the quality was a little better, but it's fascinating nonetheless -


Second: How to make your own gun barrel sequence -


Third: A Pierce Brosnan gun barrel sequence to the Andy Griffith theme -


There's several variations on the last part, with different themes songs, but they start losing the charm around the fourth one.

007 in '007: Dr. No

After months of negotiations and legal work, I have managed to convince Ross at the Rued Morgue to let me submit the Dr. No installment of his 007 in '007 series. I hope it proves a worthy cadaver for his morgue.

James Bond's poetry lesson

[Tiger Tanaka has been grooming Bondo-san for a difficult mission.]

from You Only Live Twice

Meanwhile, Tiger and Bond sat in the first class dining-room and consumed ‘Hamlets’ – ham omelets – and saké. Tiger was in a lecturing mood. He was determined to correct Bond’s boorish ignorance of Japanese culture. ‘Bondo-san, I wonder if I will ever get you to appreciate the nuances of the Japanese tanka, or of the haiku, which are the classical forms of Japanese verse. Have you ever heard of Bashō, for instance?’

‘No,’ said Bond with polite interest. ‘Who’s he?’

‘Just so,’ said Tiger bitterly. ‘And yet you would think me grossly uneducated if I had never heard of Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe. And yet Bashō, who lived in the seventeenth century, is the equal of any of them.’

‘What did he write?’

‘He was an itinerant poet. He was particularly at home with the haiku, the verse of seventeen syllables.’ Tiger assumed a contemplative expression. He intonded:

‘In the bitter radish
that bites me, I feel
the autumn wind.

‘Does that not say anything to you? Or this:

‘The butterfly is perfuming
its wings, in the scent
of the orchid.

‘You do not grasp the beauty of that image?’

‘Rather elusive compared to Shakespeare.’

‘In the fisherman’s hut
mingled with dried shrimps
crickets are chirping.’

Tiger looked at him hopefully.

‘Can’t get the hang of that one,’ said Bond apologetically.

‘You do not catch the still-life quality of these verses? The flash of insight into humanity, into nature? Now, do me a favour, Bondo-san. Write a haiku for me yourself. I am sure you could get the hang of it. After all you must have had some education?’

Bond laughed. ‘Mostly in Latin and Greek. All about Caesar and Balbus and so on. Absolutely no help in ordering a cup of coffee in Rome or Athens after I’d left school. And things like trigonometry, which I’ve totally forgotten. But give me a pen and a piece of paper and I’ll have a bash, if you’ll forgive the bad joke.’ Tiger handed them over and Bond put his head in his hands. Finally, after much crossing out and rewriting he said, ‘Tiger, how’s this? It makes just as much sense as old Bashō and it’s much more pithy.’ He read out:

‘You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face.’

Tiger clapped his hands softly. He said with real delight, ‘But that is excellent, Bondo-san. Most sincere.’ He took the pen and paper and jotted some ideograms up the page. He shook his head. ‘No, it won’t do in Japanese. You have the wrong number of syllables. But it is a most honourable attempt.’ He looked keenly at Bond. ‘You were perhaps thinking of your mission?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Bond with indifference.

Tiger Tanaka on gaijin

From You Only Live Twice

[Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service, is speaking to Bondo-san about gaijin, as a prelude to the impossible job he is fixing to ask Bondo-san to do.]

He [Tanaka] got out of his chair and sat down on the tatami and arranged himself in the lotus position. He was obviously more comfortable in this posture. He said, in a expository tone of voice, ‘Ever since the beginning of the era of Meiji, who you will know was the Emperor who fathered the modernization and Westernization of Japan from the beginning of his reign nearly a hundred years ago, there have from time to time been foreigners who have come to this country and settled here. They have for the most part been cranks and scholars, and the European-born American Lafcadio Hearn, who became a Japanese citizen, is a very typical example. In general, they have been tolerated, usually with some amusement. So, perhaps, would be a Japanese who bought a castle in the Highlands of Scotland, and who learned and spoke Gaelic with his neighbours and expressed unusual and often impertinent interest in Scottish folkways. If he went about his researches politely and peaceably, he would be dubbed an amiable eccentric. And so it has been with the Westerners who have settled and spent their lives in Japan, though occasionally, in time of war, as would no doubt be the case with our mythical Japanese in Scotland, they have been regarded as spies and suffered internment and hardship. Now, since occupation, there have been many such settlers, the great majority of whom, as you can imagine, have been American. The Oriental way of life is particularly attractive to the American who wishes to escape from a culture which, I am sure you will agree, has become, to say the least of it, more and more unattractive except to the lower grades of the human species to whom bad but plentiful food, shiny toys such as the automobile and the television, and the “quick buck”, often dishonestly earned, or earned in exchange for minimal labour or skills, are the summum bonum, if you will allow the sentimental echo from my Cambridge education.’

‘I will,’ said Bond. ‘But is this not a picture of the life that is being officially encouraged in your own country?’

Tiger Tanaka’s face darkened perceptibly. ‘For the time being,’ he said with distaste, ‘we are being subjected to what I can best describe as the “Scuola di Coca Cola”. Baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, neon lighting – these are part of our payment for defeat – a denial of our ancestors, a denial of our gods. They are a despicable way of life’ – Tiger almost spat the words – ‘but fortunately they are also expendable and temporary. They have as much importance in the history of Japan as the life of a dragonfly.’ He paused. ‘But to return to my story. Our American residents are of a sympathetic type – on a low level of course. They enjoy the subservience, which I may say is only superficial, of our women. They enjoy the remaining strict patterns of our life – the symmetry, compared with the chaos that reigns in America. They enjoy our simplicity, with its underlying hint of deep meaning, as expressed for instance in the tea ceremony, flower arrangements, NO plays – none of which of course they understand. They also enjoy, because they have no ancestors and probably no family life worth speaking of, our veneration of the old and our worship of the past. For, in their impermanent world, they recognize these as permanent things just as, in their ignorant and childish way, they admire the fictions of the Wild West and other American myths that have become known to them, not through their education, of which they have none, but through television.’

‘This is tough stuff, Tiger. I’ve got a lot of American friends who don’t equate with what you’re saying. Presumably you’re talking about the lower level G.I.s – second generation Americans who are basically Irish or Germans or Czechs or Poles who probably out to be working in the fields or coalmines of their countries of origin instead of swaggering around a conquered country under the blessed coverlet of the Stars and Stripes with too much money to spend. I daresay they occasionally marry a Japanese girl and settle down here. But surely they pull up stumps pretty quickly. Our Tommies have done the same thing in Germany. But that’s quite a different thing from the Lafcadio Hearns of the world.’

Tiger Tanaka bowed almost to the ground. ‘Forgive me, Bondo-san. Of course you are right, and I have been diverted from my story down most unworthy paths….'

James Bond on personal hygiene, travel, tourism and cuisine

from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1963

[Bond has just arrived to Royale-les-Eaux for his annual gambling tournament]

His two battered suitcases came and he unpacked leisurely and then ordered from Room Service a bottle of the Taittinger Blanc de Blanc that he had made his traditional drink at Royale. When the bottle, in its frosted silver bucket, came, he drank a quarter of it rather fast and then went into the bathroom and had an ice-cold shower and washed his hair with Pinaud Elixir, that prince among shampoos, to get the dust of the roads out of it. Then he slipped on his dark-blue tropical worsted trousers, white sea-island cotton shirt, socks and black casual shows (he abhorred shoe-laces), and went and sat by the window and looked out across the promenade to the sea and wondered where he would have dinner and what he would choose to eat.

James Bond was not a gourmet. In England he lived on grilled soles, œufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad. But when traveling abroad, generally by himself, meals were a welcome break in the day, something to look forward to, something to break the tension of fast driving, with its risks taken or avoided, the narrow squeaks, the permanent background of concern for the fitness of his machine. In fact, at this moment, after covering the long stretch from the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia in a comfortable three days (God knew there was no reason to hurry back to Headquarters!), he was fed to the teeth with the sucker-traps for gourmandizing tourists. The ‘Hostelleries’, the ‘Vieilles Auberges’, the ‘Relais Fleuris’ – he had had the lot. He had had their “Bonnes Tables’, and their ‘Fines Bouteilles’. He had had their ‘Spécialités de Chef’ – generally a rich sauce of cream and wine and a few button mushrooms concealing poor quality meat or fish. He had had the whole lip-smacking ritual of wine-manship and foodmanship and, incidentally, he had had quite enough of the Bisodol that went with it!

The French belly-religion had delivered its final kick at him the night before. Wishing to avoid Orléan, he had stopped south of this uninspiring city and had chosen a mock-Breton Auberge on the south bank of the Loire, despite its profusion of window-boxes and sham beams, ignoring the china cat pursuing the china bird across its gabled roof, because it was right on the edge of the Loire – perhaps Bond’s favourite river in the world. He had stoically accepted the hammered copper warming pans, brass cooking utensils and other antique bogosities that cluttered the walls of the entrance hall, had left his bag in his rooms and had gone for an agreeable walk along the softly running, swallow-skimmed river. The dining-room in which he was one of a small handful of tourists, had sound the alarm. Above the fire-place of electric logs and over-polished fire-irons there had hung a coloured plaster escutcheon bearing the dread device: ICY DOULCE FRANCE. All the plates, of some hideous local ware, bore the jingle, irritatingly inscrutable, ‘Jamais en Vain, Toujours en Vin’, and the surly waiter, stale with ‘fin de saison’, had served him with the fly-walk of the Pâté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place. Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.

It was to efface all these dyspeptic memories that Bond now sat at his window, sipped his Taittinger and weighed up the pros and cons of the local eating places and wondered what dishes it would be best to gamble on. he finally chose one of his favourite restaurants in France, a modest establishment, unpromisingly placed exactly opposite the railway station of Étaples, rang up his old friend Monsieur Bécaud for a table and, two hours later, was motoring back to the Casino with Turbot poché, sauce mousseline, and half the best roast partridge he had eaten in his life, under his belt.

Greatly encouraged, and further stimulated by half a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’53 and a glass of ten-year-old Calvados with his three cups of coffee, he went cheerfully up the thronged steps of the Casino with the absolute certitude that this was going to be a night to remember.

Inside James Bond's head

From “For Your Eyes Only”

[Bond is on an early morning ten mile hike across the U.S./Canadian border into Vermont to assassinate a Cuban crime lord.]

Is this a hill or a mountain? At what height does a hill become a mountain? Why don’t they manufacture something out of the silver bark of birch trees? It looks so useful and valuable. The best things in America are chipmunks and oyster stew. In the evening darkness doesn’t really fall, it rises. When you sit on top of a mountain and watch the sun go down behind the mountain opposite, the darkness rises up to you out of the valley. Will the birds one day lose their fear of man? It must be centuries since man has killed a small bird for food in these woods, yet they are still afraid. Who was this Ethan Allen who commanded the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont? Now, in American motels, they advertise Ethan Allen furniture as an attraction. Why? Did he make furniture? Army boots should have rubber soles like these.

James Bond on drinking while in Paris

from "From A View To A Kill"

James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet’s. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafes. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. A fin a l’ eau is fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good. A quart de champagne or a champagne a l’ orange is all right before luncheon, but in the evening on quart leads to another quart, and a bottle of indifferent champagne is a bad foundation for the night. Pernod is possible, but it should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff because its licorice taste reminded him of his childhood. No, in cafes you have to drink the least offensive of the musical-comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing, an Americano---bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel, and soda. For the soda he always stipulated Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.

Goldfinger on Smoking and Drinking

from Goldfinger.

[Bond is over at Auric's for dinner. Goldfinger is speaking:]

‘Please try the Moselle. I hope it will be to your taste. It is a Piesporter Goldtropfchen ’53. Help yourself. These people [the Korean help] are as likely to pour it into your plate as your glass.”

There was a slim bottle in an ice bucket in front of Bond. He poured some of the wine and tasted it. It was nectar and ice cold. Bond congratulated his host. Goldfinger gave a curt nod.

‘I don’t myself drink or smoke, Mr. Bond. Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smouldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils? Pah!’ Goldfinger showed a rare trace of emotion. ‘It is a vile practice. As for drinking, I am something of a chemist and I have yet to find a liquor that is free from traces of a number of poisons, some of them deadly, such as fusel oil, acetic acid, ethylacetate, acetaldehyde and furfurol. A quantity of some of these poisons taken neat would kill you. In the small amounts you find in a bottle of liquor they produce various ill effects most of which are lightly written off as “a hangover”.’ Goldfinger paused with a forkful of curried shrimp half way to his mouth. ‘Since you are a drinker, Mr. Bond, I will give you one word of good advice. Never drink so-called Napoleon brandy, particularly when it is described as “aged in the wood”. That particular potion contains more of the poisons I have mentioned than other liquor I have analysed. Old bourbon comes next,’ Goldfinger closed his animadversions with a mouthful of shrimp.

[Bond] ‘Thank you. I’ll remember. Perhaps for those reasons I have recently taken to vodka. They tell me its filtration through activated charcoal is a help.’

Bond on Pussy Galore

From Goldfinger

[Auric Goldfinger has just started his meeting with the major mob bosses in the U.S. Bond and Tilly Masterton are secretaries of the meeting. Pussy Galore has just entered the room and sat down at the table.]

Bond liked the look of her. He felt the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men. He was amused by the uncompromising attitude that said to Goldfinger and to the room, ‘All men are bastards and cheats. Don’t try any masculine hocus on me. I don’t go for it. I’m in a separate league.’ Bond thought she would be in her early thirties. She had a pale, Rupert Brooke good looks with high cheekbones and a beautiful jawline. She had the only violet eyes Bond had ever seen. They were the true deep violet of a pansy and they looked candidly out at the world from beneath straight black brows. Her hair, which was as black as Tilly Masterton’s, was worn in an untidy urchin cut. The mouth was a decisive slash of deep vermilion. Bond thought she was superb and so, he noticed, did Tilly Masterton who was gazing at Miss Galore with worshipping eyes and lips that yearned. Bond decided that all was now clear to him about Tilly Masterton.

Bond gets some new side-arms

from Dr. No.

[M's office. M has called the armourer in to change out Bond's Berretta.]

‘Well, Armourer, what do you recommend?’

Major Boothroyd put on the expert’s voice. ‘As a matter of fact, sir,’ he said modestly, ‘I’ve just been testing most of the small automatics. Five thousand rounds each at twenty-five yards. Of all of them, I’d choose the Walther PPK 7.65mm. It only came fourth after the Japanese M-14, the Russian Tokarev and the Sauer M-38. But I like its light trigger pull and the extension spur of the magazine gives a grip that should suit 007. It’s a real stopping gun. Of course it’s about a .32 calibre as compared to the Berrett’s .25, but I wouldn’t recommend anything lighter. And you can get ammunition for the Walther anywhere in the world. That gives it an edge on the Japanese and Russian guns.’

M turned to Bond. ‘Any comments?’

‘It’s a good gun, sir,’ Bond admitted. ‘Bit more bulky than the Beretta. How does the Armourer suggest I carry it?’

‘Bern Martin Triple-draw holster,’ said Major Boothroyd succinctly. ‘Best worn inside the trouser band to the left. But it’s all right below shoulder. Stiff saddle leather. Holds the gun in with a spring. Should make for a quicker draw than that,’ he gestured towards the desk [at Bond's old Berretta holster]. ‘Three-fifths of a second to hit a man at twenty feet would be about right.’

‘That’s settled then.’ M’s voice was final. ‘And what about something bigger?’

‘There’s only one gun for that, sir,’ said Major Boothroyd stolidly. ‘Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight. Revolver. .38 calibre. Hammerless, so it won’t catch in clothing. Overall length of six and a half inches and it only weighs thirteen ounces. To keep down the weight, the cylinder holds only five cartridges. But by the time they’re gone,’ Major Boothroyd allowed himself a wintry smile, ‘somebody’s been killed. Fires the .38 S & W Special. Very accurate cartridge indeed. With standard loading it has a muzzle velocity of eight hundred and sixty feet per second and muzzle energy of two hundred and sixty foot-pountds. There are various barrel lengths, three-and-a-half-inch, five-inch…’

‘All right, all right,’ M’s voice was testy. ‘Take it as read. If you say it’s the best I’ll believe you. So it’s the Walther and the Smith & Wesson. Send up one of each to 007. With the harness. And arrange for him to for him to fire them in. Starting today. He’s got to be expert in a week….”

Why is Jaws so dad-gum happy?

Because Ross of the Rued Morgue has got his Moonraker post up.

The SMERSH dossier on Bond

Although the Commies collapsed long ago, we still don't have the complete file on what they knew of Bond. This is from From Russia With Love:

First name: JAMES. Height: 183 centimeters; weight: 76 kilograms; slim build; eyes: blue; hair: black; scar down right cheek and on left shoulder; signs of plastic surgery on back of right hand (see Appendix A); all-round athlete; expert pistol shot, boxer, knife-thrower; does not use disguises. Languages: French and German. Smokes heavily (N.B.: special cigarettes with three gold bands); vices: drink, but not to excess, and women. Not thought to accept bribes.

This man is invariably armed with a .25 Beretta automatic carried in a holster under his left arm. Magazine holds eight rounds. Has been known to carry a knife strapped to his left forearm; has used steel capped shoes; knows the basic holds of judo. In general, fights with tenacity and has a high tolerance of pain (see Appendix B).

Although the appendices were not included in the novel, Appendix A would have been from Casino Royale when he ran into a SMERSH assassin (who was hunting someone else). The SMERSH agent carved the SMERSH emblem on Bond's hand. M later made Bond get a skin graft to cover it. Appendix B could have referenced the torture Bond endured in that same story, but also could've referenced his torture in Live & Let Die when Mr. Big had Bond's finger broken.