George Cochrane: The Book that Saved Bond
George Cochrane
The Book that Saved Bond
The wisdom of always having a book to hand is nowhere better demonstrated than in the fifth James Bond novel, From Russia, with Love (1957). Bond has just been to Istanbul to extract the supposed Soviet defector Tatiana Romanova. Returning to Britain by the Orient Express, they are joined in their compartment by fellow MI6 operative Captain Nash. Bond settles down with a novel partially set in Istanbul, Eric Ambler’s classic spy thriller The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), but after a few pages falls asleep. On waking, he goes to check the time when Nash, whose real name is Donovan Grant, chief executioner of Soviet counterintelligence and the man sent to kill Bond, shoots his watch.
Bond asks and receives Grant’s permission to have a last cigarette before he dies. He takes one from the metal cigarette case in his pocket, then slips the case between the pages of the Ambler novel. He knows from the fate of his watch that Grant is a good shot, that when the man promises to put ‘just one bullet through the heart. Nothing more’, he will be as good as his word. So when the moment comes, Bond brings the book to his chest and trusts in Grant’s aim. The bullet knocks Bond to the floor. He plays dead, then thrusts a knife into Grant’s leg. A scuffle ensues. Bond triumphs.
In no other Bond novel does a book feature so prominently. Occasionally Bond reads something for work, like the book of card tricks he consults in Moonraker (1955) ahead of his game with Sir Hugo Drax. But the books he reads for pleasure are rarely more than namechecked, their usual reason for inclusion seeming to be Ian Fleming’s desire to thank their authors (as when Bond reads John F Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, the president having named From Russia, with Love one of his ten favourite books) or honour his friends (as when Bond buys ‘the latest Raymond Chandler’). So what makes The Mask of Dimitrios special?
Born exactly thirteen months apart – Fleming on 28 May 1908, Ambler on 28 June 1909 – the authors met in the late 1940s, just before Fleming took over the lease of the Kent beach house Ambler rented from their mutual friend Noël Coward. From then until Ambler’s departure for Hollywood in 1958 they lunched regularly together at Scott’s seafood restaurant in Mayfair. In that time Fleming went from Sunday Times journalist to the most famous novelist in the world, a development that Ambler, a prominent if never world-famous novelist since the mid-1930s, seemed not to resent. (When Fleming’s foreign sales were flatlining, for example, it was Ambler who set him up with the agent who transformed them.)
As for Ambler’s impact on From Russia, with Love, we know The Mask of Dimitrios’s role in the novel to be at least partly autobiographical, Fleming having travelled to Istanbul in the book’s company in September 1955. We also know, from Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, that Fleming ‘picked [Ambler’s] brains’ about Istanbul over one of their lunches, this despite the fact that Ambler had never actually visited the city.
Gratitude for one or even several of Ambler’s kindnesses, however, does not account for so extraordinary a tribute as his novel saving Bond’s life. That, I think, is a reflection of Ambler’s status as Fleming’s favourite contemporary novelist, a fact made clear by Nicholas Shakespeare’s more recent Fleming biography. When editing the first Bond novel, for instance, Fleming wrote of his desire to get his manuscript ‘a bit closer to Eric Ambler’; towards the end of his life his wish was ‘to leave behind me one classic in this genre – a mixture of Tolstoy, Simenon, Ambler and Koestler, with a pinch of ground Fleming’.
Getting closer to Ambler meant trying to suppress the influence of the spy writers Fleming had grown up reading, namely H C ‘Sapper’ McNeile, whose popular Bulldog Drummond character represented the kind of hero – dauntless, dunderheaded and indestructible – that Ambler abjured. In Ambler’s novels, the heroes were no more remarkable than his readers, just ordinary men caught up in extraordinary (though always plausible) circumstances. As for his villains, these were usually businessmen in suits with shareholders to satisfy. Realism was what Ambler was after. As Europe hurtled towards war, so did the Europe of his novels. These were engaged and engaging books, as serious as they were exciting, as sophisticated as they were direct.
Only half of those adjectives could be applied to Fleming’s novels. When Grant draws his gun, he warns 007 that ‘no Bulldog Drummond stuff’ll get you out of this one’. Bond’s escape is nonetheless precisely the kind of improbable getaway we might expect of Sapper’s hero. This is perhaps why Fleming took such a dim view of his own novels – a view that extended to their film adaptations. ‘Dreadful,’ he is supposed to have said after a screening of Dr No.
Yet where would the Bond novels be without the films? When Fleming was first courting Hollywood, he asked Ambler to sound out Alfred Hitchcock’s interest, Hitch being a close friend and collaborator of Ambler’s second wife, Joan Harrison. Although the director was not interested, others were, and the Bond films are of course now some of the most successful in history, keeping popular Fleming’s preposterous and sometimes offensive source novels. The enduringly brilliant Ambler, by contrast, has been very badly served by cinema, a combination of rights issues and poor serialisation potential (only one of his novels received a direct sequel) keeping his work all but entirely off the big screen since 1964’s Topkapi.
But it hasn’t ultimately mattered. Although out of print at the time of his death in 1998, Ambler’s novels have made a strong resurgence in recent years, with their urgent examination of unchecked capitalism and far-right politics speaking powerfully to our moment. The film industry will surely catch on.
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