James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan

dialogue (‘I have always been in step with the thought of you, but you didn’t come, and I have spent my life listening to a different drummer’) with descriptive prose that is exquisite (‘The great six-lane highway stretched on through a forest of multi-coloured signs and frontages until it lost itself downtown in a dancing lake of heatwaves … A glittering gunfire of light splinters shot at Bond’s eyes from the windscreens of oncoming cars and from their blaze of chrome styling …’)

      The proactive 007 of Diamonds are Forever is a figure less dependent than previously on coincidences and the good work of others. Despite this, as well as the acute portrayal of the glitz and greed of Vegas and the way plot strands are wrapped up ingeniously and even a little poetically, this Bond book never seems to shake itself out of a low-key state.

      Fleming himself had decided that it was a last gasp. He told Raymond Chandler, ‘I have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve.’ His difficulty in devising plots – something which he would lament again and again – was at the time compounded by the fact that Bond seemed to have bumped up against the ceiling of his commercial potential. None of the books had become bestsellers in the UK, those issued in the States had flopped and the intermittent interest from Hollywood never seemed to translate into green-lit projects.

      From Russia with Love, the fifth Bond novel, published on 8 April 1957, is the first Bond book to deviate in significant ways from the established template.

      Bond does not appear at all in the first third of the book. Instead, we are introduced to Donovan Grant, a psychotic defector, Colonel Rosa Klebb – charmless and insanely loyal head of SMERSH executions – and Corporal Tatiana Romanova, a young, beautiful and malleably loyal employee of Soviet intelligence. The last of these is chosen for the task of providing a honey trap for ‘Angliski Spion’ Bond, on whom SMERSH have a ‘bulky file’. After Klebb briefs Tatiana, she then tries to, as it were, debrief her. The corporal flees from the sexual overtures of a woman Fleming describes as looking like ‘the oldest and ugliest whore in the world’.

      Bond finally makes an appearance at around the one-hundred-page mark in the form of his traditional adventure-heralding summons to the office of M. Bond is rather taken aback when informed by his boss that Tatiana has made contact with the Secret Service’s station in Istanbul and has offered to bring to the West a much-coveted code cracker called the Spektor – on the condition that she be retrieved by Bond, with whom she has fallen in love from the details on him in his file.

      The Service’s Q Branch supplies 007 an attaché case, in the lining of which is hidden .25 ammunition, throwing-knives, fifty gold sovereigns and a cyanide pill. His sponge bag contains a tube of shaving cream that unscrews to reveal the silencer for his Beretta. This is the low-key beginning of the gadgetry that the Bond films would ultimately take into the realms of science fiction.

      Upon their first meeting, the supposedly loyal Tatiana develops such a crush on Bond that she determines to defect for real. The exchanges between the pair are symptomatic of Fleming’s perennial Achilles heel: being unable to portray romance as anything but gushing cliché.

      At Tatiana’s insistence, the two of them take the Spektor machine to the West via the Orient Express, an anachronistic decision in the jet age but clearly engineered by Fleming so as to provide lashings of luxury travel porn. Ostensible backup arrives in the form of fellow service agent Norman Nash. It is Donovan Grant, able to pass himself off as friendly via some intercepted code phrases. Later Bond is woken in the train compartment by Grant and merrily told, ‘No Bulldog Drummond stuff’ll get you out of this one’ – an echo of a similarly postmodern taunt by Le Chiffre in Casino Royale that this ‘is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed’. In point of fact, Bond does pull off something Sapper’s hero would likely do: insert a silver cigarette case between the pages of a book that he holds over his heart as his deadshot enemy lets rip with his gun. Bond plays possum before fatally making use of one of his concealed knives.

      Prior to his death, Grant hadn’t been able to resist boasting of his forthcoming meeting with Rosa Klebb, at which he expects to collect the Order of Lenin. In fact, it is Bond who makes the meeting in Room 204 of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where, for the first time in any of the books, he says, ‘My name is Bond, James Bond.’ Klebb transpires to be a fiery fighter: even as she is taken into custody, she produces a poison-tipped blade from the toe of a shoe, which she propels into Bond’s right calf. The book ends with 007 crashing to the floor.

      The author bewilders us by having Bond reflect that he ‘had never killed in cold blood’ when it was explained way back in the first book that that is exactly how his double-O number was acquired. This, though, may not be sloppiness but one of the first signs of a penchant Fleming would increasingly display for revising his hero’s universe in response to criticism. On this occasion, it might be the case that he was reacting to complaints of the brutality in Bond books. However, the latter cause is hardly helped by the pro-rape and wife-beating philosophising of Turkish supporting character Darko Kerim, a vicious catfight between two gypsies and Tatiana’s imploring of Bond, ‘You will beat me if I eat too much?’

      Curiously structured though the book may be, the switching of the spotlight in From Russia with Love onto things that would be unseen or background in a normal Bond book ultimately comes across as an interesting sideways view of a familiar character.

      Although Bond’s continued existence is in peril at the end of From Russia with Love, there is paradoxical evidence that Fleming was using the book as his tilt at being taken seriously as a writer. In correspondence with Raymond Chandler leading up to its writing, Fleming said he would endeavour to ‘order my life so as to put more feeling into my typewriter’. In a letter to Michael Howard of Cape, he said, ‘… my main satisfaction … with the book is that a Formula which was getting stale has been broken … one simply can’t go on writing the simple bang-bang, kiss-kiss type of book.’