Category Archives: James Bond

American writer Benjamin Welton share his take on the references Fleming may have drawn from for his macabre, ghostly novel, You Only Live Twice.

You Only Live Twice is everything you could ever want in a Bond novel. It has great action, stirling dialogue, and, for 1964, an exotic setting. But unlike other 007 novels, it has something else – Gothic horror. Set in the land of ghosts, monsters (yōkai), and demons (oni), You Only Live Twice is ultimately a revenge tale about Bond avenging his late wife Tracy’s death at the hands of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In order to imbue the novel with a fairy tale-like quality, Fleming brilliantly chose to make Blofeld even more monstrous for You Only Live Twice, which is his swan song. In particular, Fleming used two sources – Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan and Bram Stoker’s Dracula – to not only mark You Only Live Twice as more outré than its predecessors, but to also turn the brilliant criminal mastermind Blofeld into a modern-day vampire, thus making Bond’s conquest all the more important. In short, You Only Live Twice is a haunting Götterdämmerung that facilitates Bond’s short-lived renewal.

To be fair, weirdness has always permeated the Bond novels. From the Dr. Fu Manchu-like and hideously disfigured Dr. Julius No, to the very real possibility that Le Chiffre in Casino Royale was based on famous British occultist Aleister Crowley, Fleming’s Bond novels regularly flirt with elements of horror and the fantastique, but tend to keep them at arm’s length. In You Only Live Twice, however, speculative fiction comes to the forefront. Partially this is a product of the alienating effect of Japanese culture. The first half of You Only Live Twice is more or less a tit-for-tat exchange between Bond and Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese Secret Service. Scenes such as when Bond and Tiger play an unusually significant game of Rock, Paper, Scissors (or, as it’s called in the novel, Scissors Cut Paper, Paper Wraps Stone, Stone Blunts Scissors) are indicative of Fleming’s attempt to display the dissimilarities between the Orient and Occident. Less childish examples include soliloquies including this when Tiger savages American culture:

‘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…’

But of all the arguments between Tiger and Bond in the lead up to the novel’s climax, none is more central to the novel’s plot than the Japanese viewpoint on suicide. For Bond, Tiger’s veneration of suicides as honorable people who erased the shame they earned in life with the ultimate sacrifice is disturbing if not disgusting. Furthermore, it is this opinion that allows Blofeld to argue that his suicide garden performs a great benefit to the Japanese nation as a whole. As he puts it to Bond directly:

‘I have not only provided the common man with a solution to the problem of whether to be or not to be, I have also provided the Japanese Government…with a tidy, out-of-the-way charnel house which relieves them of a constant flow of messy occurrences involving the trains, the trams, the volcanoes and other unattractively public means of killing yourself. You must admit that, far from being a crime, this is a public service unique in the history of the world.’

This then is the heart of Blofeld’s vampiric nature in You Only Live Twice. In order to evade capture, Blofeld, like Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek writer who ended his life as one of the pre-eminent translators of Japanese ghost stories, has moved to Japan under the disguise of the eccentric Swiss botanist Doctor Guntram Shatterhand. After buying a semi-ruined castle on the southern island of Kyushu, Blofeld meticulously stocks his grounds with an entire army of poisonous plants, piranhas, and guardsmen who were all former members of the Black Dragon Society, a real organisation from Japanese history that included militarists, anarchists, criminals, and ultranationalist terrorists. He has made nothing less than a formidable ‘Castle of Death,’ which acts as a magnet for those seeking suicide. As Tiger Tanaka puts it, Blofeld ‘collects death.’

Blofeld adds a theatricality to his villainy by parading around his own grounds in samurai armor and sporting a drooping black moustache that is not unlike Count Dracula’s ‘great white moustache’ in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Even Bond himself comments on Blofeld’s ‘Disneyland of Death’ (Irma Bunt’s phrase) by calling it ‘a brilliant attempt to make a stage setting for Dracula.’

Unlike Dracula however, Blofeld cannot directly feed on his victims. Instead, he draws them to his haunted edifice and gives them the tools for suicide. He is, in other words, slightly enfeebled and not the Nietzschean ‘Overman’ that he believes himself to be. This fact is fundamentally proven when Bond kills Blofeld during what can only be described as an underwhelming final battle. Like the Texan Quincey Morris who kills the ancient Dracula with a Bowie knife, Bond manages to strangle Blofeld after a short duel between katana and stave.

What follows this final battle is a dreamlike, almost surreal exit engineered by Bond. Using a balloon, Bond tries to flee the ‘Castle of Death’ through the air, but is shot in the head by one of Blofeld’s accomplices. Bond manages to survive, but is publicly and officially declared dead in the British press. Until the word ‘Vladivostok’ triggers something in Bond’s deep memory, thus inspiring him to renew his former life as Great Britain’s greatest secret agent, he lives the life of a simple fisherman with the former Hollywood actress-turned-pearl diver Kissy Suzuki. Again, You Only Live Twice commingles the horror of Blofeld’s vampire castle with the enchanted rural splendour of Japan’s southern islands. Like the old ghost stories translated by Hearn, whose name appears frequently in the novel, the terrifying and the traditional, as well as the mysterious and the bucolic converge in what is often Fleming’s most underrated novel.

Find out more about Benjamin Welton here.

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In 1979, Glidrose Publications (now Ian Fleming Publications) decided it was high time for a new James Bond novel. They had invited Kingsley Amis to write Colonel Sun back in the late 1960s, and after a decade’s rest they wanted Bond to embark on some new missions. Here we take a look at the man who brought 007 back to book shops – John Gardner.

During his forty years as an author, John Gardner wrote over fifty novels including sixteen books which continued the James Bond series. Before finding his calling as an author, Gardner lived a wildly varied life in which he fought as a Royal Marine Officer in World War Two, performed as a stage magician, worked as a journalist, and for a brief period he was even a priest.

After leaving the Royal Marines in 1945, Gardner enrolled at Cambridge University and studied Theology which led to his stint in the Church, but after a short while he realised that it was not the life he wanted, and became a drama critic and arts reviewer. This new profession allowed Gardner to re-engage with a childhood interest in poetry and develop his love for Shakespeare. During these years Gardner recognised that he was an alcoholic. As part of his treatment for addiction Gardner wrote a long memoir for his doctor which became his first book, Spin the Bottle, published in 1964.

Following this first non-fiction book, Gardner believed he now had to “write the great British novel”, and proceeded to author a “pretentious piece of rubbish about how governments went around legally killing people”. Off the back of this project Gardner’s agent encouraged him to write a comedy instead of a drama and he went on to create the ‘Boysie Oakes’ series starring a cowardly and inept secret agent who was hired by mistake; a world away from the slick and professional James Bond. The Liquidator, the first book of the series, became a best-seller and was adapted into a film. Gardner wrote eight ‘Boysie Oakes’ novels in total, and it proved to be a very popular series.

In the mid-1970s Gardner wrote The Moriarty Journals. The two books, The Return of Moriarty and The Revenge of Moriarty, revealed ‘the truth’ about Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis. Gardner was extremely proud of them, and they were particularly popular in the United States where they received backing by Sherlock Holmes societies, most famously by the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’. Just before Gardner’s death in 2007, he completed the third and final instalment of the Moriarty trilogy which was published posthumously in November 2008.

With this successful background in espionage novels and in continuing a pre-existing series, Gardner was brought to the attention of Glidrose Publications Limited and he was approached in the early 1980s to continue the Bond novels. Gardner admitted that his initial response was along the lines of ‘thank you but no thank you’, and he actually wrote a letter declining the offer on the basis that the fantasy world of Bond was not for him. However, the letter was never sent.

Gardner was persuaded by his agent to fly from Ireland to London to meet with members of the Glidrose Board. Gardner wanted to modernise Bond and bring Fleming’s hero into the 1980s by equipping him with more modern thinking and updated intelligence methods. Gardner said, “Most of all I wanted him to have operational know-how: the reality of correct tradecraft and modern gee-whiz technology”. Glidrose  agreed, and so Gardner became the new Bond novelist.  Originally signed-up to write just three Bond continuation novels, Gardner went on to write fourteen and took James Bond through the eighties and well into the nineties.  He said, “while the job remained a challenge, it was far from easy, but once I got the bit in between my teeth I wasn’t going to let go- and I didn’t.”

The technology that Bond utilises during his escapades was of great interest to Gardner, and he wanted to equip his hero with the most cutting-edge gadgets. Gardner made it his mission to handle and test every item of technology or weaponry that he gave to 007 to use. Furthermore, he only sent his hero to locations he himself had visited.  Gardner already had extensive knowledge concerning weapons from his time in the Royal Marines, and said that “real experience is a very useful tool that lends itself to the writer of these kinds of books”. Gardner described how he had Bond use a telescopic baton in Death is Forever, a weapon that had not be heard of before the novel, but since then it has been used by police forces worldwide.

Margalit Fox, who wrote Gardner’s obituary in the New York Times, stated that

“In Mr. Gardner’s hands, Bond is every inch a late-20th-century man. He smokes low-tar cigarettes… and, in an authorial choice that anguished 007 purists, drives a fuel-efficient Saab instead of his Bentley Mark II Continental”.

Gardner defended this decision by saying a 1980s Bond needed a 1980s car. By being specific with the technology and locations in his novels, Gardner grounded them in the present day and thus achieved his aim of updating Bond for context modern audience. He said, “To allow Bond to have remained static in a changing world… would, I still believe, have been death”.

Whilst writing the Bond books Gardner also wrote another espionage series, The Herbie Kruger Series. Kruger was the antithesis of Bond in many ways; unattractive, poorly dressed and of German origin, but nonetheless a skilful and impressive spy. Maestro, the penultimate book of the series, was awarded the honour of the New York Times ‘Book of the Year’ in 1993. After fighting two battles with cancer and following the death of his wife in 1997, Gardner took a break from writing. When he returned to writing in 2001 he began a series about Suzie Mountford, a female Detective Sergeant working in London during World War Two. The first book was entitled Bottled Spider, and four books followed.

Gardner said that his time writing the Bond novels was “a splendid experience” and that he was “proud that [his] contribution to the Bond saga played such a great part in its development.” Throughout Gardner’s career he remained interested in the world of espionage and investigation, most likely influenced by his time in World War Two. It is fascinating to trace how his writing progressed from Boysie Oakes, a spoof of early Bond, to continuing the Bond franchise, and beyond.