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Is this where they got the idea for that B&W intro to Casino Royale? Feeling a little of the same vibe.
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Jan 29, 2020 04:01
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That's a good catch, it does have that feeling. But writing yourself into a story to have yourself killed by your own creation is. Hmm.
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Jan 29, 2020 04:18
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I want to say Herge came close to doing it.
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Jan 29, 2020 04:23
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Something something death of the author.
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Jan 29, 2020 05:21
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Somebody Awful posted:Is this where they got the idea for that B&W intro to Casino Royale? Feeling a little of the same vibe. There's definitely something taken from it. Twice now when we've seen Bond from an outside perspective, he's immediately intimidating and slightly scary. He may make friends and lovers easily when he wants, but his natural act is inherently unsettling. It's notable that the only person I recall not having that perspective is Gala Brand in Moonraker: she actually reacts with annoyance and disgust at him, immediately recognizing him as an interloper in her operation.
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Jan 29, 2020 05:29
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Ha, she owned
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Jan 29, 2020 06:51
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quote:Up in that big double bedroom in the Tiefenbrunner, with the wads of buff and grey paper spread out on the spare bed, he hadn’t been looking for anything special, just taking samples here and there and concentrating on the ones marked in red KOMMANDOSACHE, HOECHST VERTRAULICH. There weren’t many of these, and they were mostly confidential reports on German top brass, intercepts of broken Allied cyphers and the whereabouts of secret dumps. Since these were the main targets of ‘A’ Force, Major Smythe had scanned them with particular excitement – food, explosives, guns, espionage records, files of Gestapo personnel – a tremendous haul! And then, at the bottom of the packet, there had been the single envelope sealed with red wax and the notation ONLY TO BE OPENED IN FINAL EMERGENCY. The envelope contained one single sheet of paper. It was unsigned and the few words were written in red ink. The heading said VALUTA, and beneath was written WILDE KAISER. FRANZISKANER HALT. 100M. OESTLICH STEINHÜGEL. WAFFENKISTE. ZWEI BAR 24 KT and then a list of measurements in centimetres. Major Smythe held his hands apart as if telling a story about a fish he had caught. Each bar would be nearly as big as a couple of bricks. And one single English sovereign of only eighteen-carat was selling nowadays for two to three pounds! This was a bloody fortune! Forty, fifty thousand pounds’ worth! Maybe even a hundred! He had no idea, but, quite coolly and speedily, in case anyone should come in, he put a match to the paper and the envelope, ground the ashes to powder and swilled them down the lavatory. Then he took out his large-scale Austrian Ordnance map of the area and in a moment had his finger on the Franziskaner Halt. It was marked as an uninhabited mountaineers’ refuge on a saddle just below the highest of the easterly peaks of the Kaiser mountains, that awe-inspiring range of giant stone teeth that give Kitzbühel its threatening northern horizon. And the cairn of stones would be about there, his fingernail pointed, and the whole bloody lot was only ten miles and perhaps a five hours’ climb away!  As was covered once before in Thunderball, the Germans engaged in widespread looting of occupied countries. This even extended to stealing the jewelry and eyeglasses from corpses, such as concentration camp victims. They also stole what's believed to be well over a billion dollars in gold, both from national vaults and private institutions and individuals. The exact amount is unknown and nobody knows where most of it is, which has led to occasional hoards or individual gold bars being found. "Nazi gold" has been a common MacGuffin in fiction practically since the war ended; the film adaptation of Goldfinger used a bar of it as the wager for the golf game. quote:The beginning had been as this fellow Bond had described. He had gone to Oberhauser’s chalet at four in the morning, had arrested him and had told his weeping, protesting family that he, Smythe, was taking him to an interrogation camp in Munich. If the guide’s record was clean, he would be back home within a week. If the family kicked up a fuss it would only make trouble for Oberhauser. Smythe had refused to give his name and had had the forethought to shroud the numbers on his jeep. In twenty-four hours, ‘A’ Force would be on its way and, by the time military government got to Kitzbühel, the incident would already be buried under the morass of the occupation tangle. With the promise made that Smythe will sign off on documents confirming Oberhauser's innocence, they head off on their hike. Oberhauser begins leading them to Franziskaner Halt, one of the many mountain huts built to provide shelter. quote:‘Is it indeed?’ said Major Smythe. The day is so hot that they end up shirtless by the time they reach the rock face above the tree line. They'll need to make a climb up to the hut. quote:Once, Oberhauser’s hand, testing for a grip, dislodged a great slab of rock, loosened by years of snow and frost, and sent it crashing down the mountain. Major Smythe suddenly thought about noise. ‘Many people around here?’ he asked as they watched the boulder hurtle down into the tree line. Fleming is using the same narrative style that he has in the past. He's not keeping Oberhauser's fate or Smythe's crimes a mystery, at least not to anyone who can read. He's letting the tension build up by leaving it open as to when everything happens. quote:It was cold up there at ten thousand feet or more, and Oberhauser had got into the hut and was busy preparing a fire. Major Smythe controlled his horror at the sight. ‘Oberhauser,’ he said cheerfully, ‘come out and show me some of the sights. Wonderful view up here.’ Biltong is the South African form of jerky. You'd be surprised to hear that word used in a Western, so maybe Smythe is letting his colonial Englishman side show. quote:Oberhauser bobbed into the hut and out again. The Major fell in just behind him as he talked, pointing out this or that distant church spire or mountain peak. Under the cairn, Smythe finds an old gray Wehrmacht ammo box. It weighs close to a hundred pounds and he barely manages to haul it back to the hut, where he starts eating Oberhauser's sausage. Visions of his future life as a rich man dance in his head. quote:Oberhauser’s sausage was a real mountaineer’s meal – tough, well fatted and strongly garlicked. Bits of it stuck uncomfortably between Major Smythe’s teeth. He dug them out with a sliver of matchstick and spat them on the ground. Then his intelligence-wise mind came into operation and he meticulously searched among the stones and grass, picked up the scraps and swallowed them. From now on he was a criminal – as much a criminal as if he had robbed a bank and shot the guard. He was a cop turned robber. He must remember that! It would be death if he didn’t – death instead of Cartier’s. All he had to do was to take infinite pains. He would take those pains, and by God they would be infinite! Then, for ever after, he would be rich and happy. After taking ridiculously minute trouble to eradicate any sign of entry into the hut, he dragged the ammunition box to the edge of the last rock face and, aiming it away from the glacier, tipped it, with a prayer, into space. The fall has indeed busted the box open, revealing paper-wrapped bars of gold with Nazi mint marks. He hammers the bent lid shut with a rock, ties his revolver lanyard to the handle, and begins the backbreaking work of dragging it all the way down the mountain. Finally he reaches the last mile, where the terrain is too rough to do anything but carry the gold. quote:When he got to the bottom and the time had come he sat and rested on a mossy bank under the firs. Then he spread out his bush shirt and heaved the two bars out of the box and on to its centre, tying the tails of the shirt as firmly as he could to where the sleeves sprang from the shoulders. After digging a shallow hole in the bank and burying the empty box, he knotted the two cuffs of the sleeves firmly together, knelt down and slipped his head through the rough sling, got his hands on either side of the knot to protect his neck, and staggered to his feet, crouching far forward so as not to be pulled over on his back. Then, crushed under half his own weight, his back on fire under the contact with his burden, and his breath rasping through his constricted lungs, coolie-like, he shuffled slowly off down the little path through the trees. This reminds me way too much of that time I was working Halloween Horror Nights and we had to try and carry a giant cooler full of ice all the way back to our break area. It was about as heavy as this gold. quote:But not his problems. Gold is difficult stuff to smuggle, certainly in the quantity available to Major Smythe, and it was now essential to get his two bars across the Channel and into a new hiding place. So he put off his demobilization and clung to the privileges of his temporary rank, particularly to his Military Intelligence passes, and soon got himself sent back to Germany as a British representative at the Combined Interrogation Centre in Munich. There he did a scratch job for six months during which he collected his gold and stowed it away in a battered suitcase in his quarters. Then on two week-end leaves he flew to England, each time carrying one of the bars in a bulky briefcase. The walk across the tarmac at Munich and Northolt and the handling of his case as if it contained only papers required two benzedrine tablets and a will of iron; but at last he had his fortune safe in the basement of an aunt’s flat in Kensington and could get on with the next phase of his plans at leisure. He resigned from the Royal Marines, got himself demobilized and married one of the many girls he had slept with at MOB Force Headquarters, a charming blonde Wren called Mary Parnell from a solid middle-class family. He got passages for them both in one of the early banana boats sailing from Avonmouth to Kingston, Jamaica, which they both agreed would be a paradise of sunshine, good food and cheap drink and a glorious haven from the gloom, restrictions and Labour Government of post-war England. Before they sailed, Major Smythe showed Mary the gold bars, from which he had chiselled away the mint marks of the Reichsbank. ‘I’ve been clever, darling,’ he said. ‘I just don’t trust the pound these days, so I’ve sold out all my securities and swapped the lot for gold. There’ll be over twenty thousand pounds’ worth there if I play it right. That should give us a fair slice of the good life, just cutting off a chunk now and then and selling it.’ Fleming is using his gold research from Goldfinger again. Smithers pointed out then that illegal gold trading is so hard to stop because it's trivial to remove mint marks from bullion. As long as you find the right place to sell where they won't ask too many questions. quote:Mary Parnell was not familiar with the ramifications of the currency laws. She knelt down and ran her hands lovingly over the gleaming bars. Then she got up and threw her arms round Major Smythe’s neck and kissed him. ‘You’re a wonderful, wonderful man,’ she said, almost in tears. ‘Frightfully clever and handsome and brave and now you’re rich as well. I’m the luckiest girl in the world.’ The Smythes quickly became part of the Government House society we've become so familiar with, with Smythe gaining a membership to Prince's Club near Kingston. After a whole year of hunting around for a way to sell the gold, he came across the Foo Brothers, a pair of Chinese import/export merchants who served as the unofficial leaders of Jamaica's Chinese community. quote:‘You see, Major,’ said the older and blander of the brothers behind the big, empty, mahogany desk, ‘in the bullion market the mint marks of all respectable national banks and responsible dealers are accepted without question. Such marks guarantee the fineness of the gold. But of course there are other banks and dealers whose methods of refining,’ his benign smile widened a fraction, ‘are perhaps not quite, shall we say, so accurate.’  The Myrtle Bank Hotel was built as a shipyard building in the mid-19th century before its owner, James Gall of Scotland, converted it into a boarding house and recreation center by 1875. The original building was torn down and replaced by a modern hotel in 1891, which was destroyed in an earthquake in 1907. The new building that Smythe is at dates to 1918 and is owned by the infamous United Fruit Company. Fleming had stayed at the hotel during his first assignment to Jamaica in 1942, where he made the decision to return after the war and buy a plot of land. The hotel burned down in the 1960s and was not rebuilt. quote:The setting was the same – the two smiling brothers, the two bars of gold, the briefcase, but now there was a piece of paper and a gold Parker pen in front of the elder brother. The fee is high, but that's the price of crime. Smythe accepts and begins returning every quarter with two more bars to hand over in exchange for cash. He ends up with a net of £2000 a year (roughly $90,000 in modern money), with the Foos helping keep the amount appropriate on his income tax returns. quote:And so the lazy, sunshiny days passed by and stretched out into years. The Smythes both put on weight and Major Smythe had the first of his two coronaries and was told by his doctor to cut down on his alcohol and cigarettes and take life more easily. He was also to avoid fats and fried food. At first Mary Smythe tried to be firm with him; then, when he took to secret drinking and to a life of petty lies and evasions, she tried to back-pedal on her attempts to control his self-indulgence. But she was too late. She had already become the symbol of the janitor to Major Smythe and he took to avoiding her. She berated him with not loving her any more and, when the resultant bickering became too much for her simple nature, she became a sleeping-pill addict. Then, after one flaming, drunken row, she took an overdose ‘just to show him’. It was too much of an overdose and it killed her. The suicide was hushed up, but the resultant cloud did Major Smythe no good socially and he returned to the North Shore which, although only some three miles across the island from the capital, is, even in the small society of Jamaica, a different world. And there he had settled in Wavelets and, after his second coronary, was in the process of drinking himself to death when this man called Bond arrived on the scene with an alternative death warrant in his pocket. Well that certainly came out of loving nowhere! quote:Major Smythe looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after twelve o’clock. He got up and poured himself another stiff brandy and ginger ale and went out on to the lawn. James Bond was sitting under the sea-almonds, gazing out to sea. He didn’t look up when Major Smythe pulled up another aluminium garden chair and put his drink on the grass beside him. When Major Smythe had finished telling his story, Bond said unemotionally, ‘Yes, that’s more or less the way I figured it.’ People seem to have an uncanny ability for getting James Bond very, very mad at them. quote:‘Oh, I see.’ Major Smythe looked away. ‘I’m sorry.’ And now we return to the reef, where Major Smythe is hunting for a scorpion fish for his Octopussy. He's immediately recognized Bond's visit for what it is: the equivalent of leaving a guilty man alone with a gun. There would be no other reason for him to give Smythe a week's head start. He starts fantasizing about making a scene in the court, playing up a fictional fight with an escaping prisoner and falling prey to the temptation after finding the gold. The thought cheers him up enough that he decides he can return to his familiar routine and continues his swim. quote:Almost at once he saw the two spiny antennae of a lobster, or rather of its cousin, the West Indian langouste, weaving inquisitively towards him, towards the turbulence he was creating, from a deep fissure under a friend of the family-head. From the thickness of the antennae it would be a big one, three or four pounds! Normally, Major Smythe would have put his feet down and delicately stirred up the sand in front of the lair to bring the lobster farther out, for they are an inquisitive family. Then he would have speared it through the head and taken it back for lunch. But today there was only one prey in his mind, one shape to concentrate on – the shaggy, irregular silhouette of a scorpion fish. And ten minutes later, he saw a clump of seaweedy rock on the white sand that just wasn’t a clump of seaweedy rock. He put his feet softly down and watched the poison spines erect themselves along the back of the thing. It was a good-sized one, perhaps three-quarters of a pound. He got his three-pronged spear ready and inched forward. Now the red angry eyes of the fish were wide open and watching him. He would have to make a single quick lunge from as nearly the vertical as possible, otherwise, he knew from experience, the barbed prongs, needle sharp though they were, would almost certainly bounce off the horny head of the beast. He swung his feet up off the ground and paddled forward very slowly, using his free hand as a fin. Now! He lunged forwards and downwards. But the scorpion fish had felt the tiny approaching shock-wave of the spear. There was a flurry of sand and it had shot up in a vertical take-off and whirred, in almost bird-like flight, under Major Smythe’s belly. Smythe catches and spears the fish, narrowly avoiding any exertion that could cause a heart attack. He returns to the beach with his quarry and rests....for about five minutes, when he notices a numbness in his torso. He looks down to find a pale patch of skin and three tiny, bleeding holes. quote:He sat very still, looking down at his body and remembering what it said about scorpion fish stings in the book he had borrowed from the Institute and had never returned – Dangerous Marine Animals, an American publication. He delicately touched and then prodded the white area round the punctures. Yes, the skin had gone totally numb and now a pulse of pain began to throb beneath it. Very soon this would become a shooting pain. Then the pain would begin to lance all over his body and become so intense that he would throw himself on the sand, screaming and thrashing about, to rid himself of it. He would vomit and foam at the mouth and then delirium and convulsions would take over until he lost consciousness. Then, inevitably in his case, there would ensue cardiac failure and death. According to the book the whole cycle would be complete in about a quarter of an hour – that was all he had left – fifteen minutes of hideous agony! There were cures, of course – procaine, antibiotics and anti-histamines – if his weak heart would stand them. But they had to be near at hand and, even if he could climb the steps up to the house and supposing Jimmy Greaves had these modern drugs, the doctor couldn’t possibly get to Wavelets in under an hour. Not a word. quote:Major Smythe mouthed the jingle to himself as he crouched on all fours, found his mask and somehow forced it over his face. Then he got hold of his spear, tipped with the still flapping fish, and, clutching his stomach with his free hand, crawled and slithered down the sand and into the water.  In the film Octopussy, the name is used as the alias for an international criminal played by Maud Adams. Her real name is Octavia Charlotte Smythe, and in this continuity she's the daughter of Major Smythe. He was a traitor whom Bond exposed, but allowed him the opportunity to kill himself with his pet blue-ringed octopus that she now wears as her symbol. quote:The body was found by two young Jamaicans spinning for needle fish from a canoe. They speared the octopus with Major Smythe’s spear, killed it in the traditional fashion by turning it inside out and biting its head off, and brought the three corpses home. They turned Major Smythe’s body over to the police and had the scorpion fish and the ‘sea-cat’ for supper. The local correspondent of the Daily Gleaner reported that Major Smythe had been killed by an octopus, but the paper translated this into ‘found drowned’ so as not to frighten the tourists.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:15
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Although Fleming has some really weird but very strong opinions about what sea life is scary, you can tell he was a decent naturalist who spent a bunch of time in the water. His prose about swimming in the Caribbean is very solid. Spiny lobsters are indeed inquisitive - if you swim by they’ll poke out a bit to see what’s up. They’re consequently very upset when you grab them, but come on, what did you think I was going to do when I swam over to stare at you?
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Jan 30, 2020 13:35
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The Property of a Ladyquote:It was, exceptionally, a hot day in early June. James Bond put down the dark grey chalk pencil that was the marker for the dockets routed to the double O Section and took off his coat. He didn’t bother to hang it over the back of his chair, let alone take the trouble to get up and drape the coat over the hanger Mary Goodnight had suspended, at her own cost (drat women!), behind the Office of Works’ green door of his connecting office. He dropped the coat on the floor. There was no reason to keep the coat immaculate, the creases tidy. There was no sign of any work to be done. All over the world there was quiet. The In and Out signals had, for weeks, been routine. The daily top secret SITREP, even the newspapers, yawned vacuously – in the latter case scratchings at domestic scandals for readership, for bad news, the only news that makes such sheets readable, whether top secret or on sale for pennies. This is not the first time that poison gun will appear in the series! quote:The harsh burr of the red telephone sprayed into the room so suddenly that James Bond, his mind elsewhere, reached his hand automatically towards his left arm-pit in self-defence. The edges of his mouth turned down as he recognized the reflex. On the second burr he picked up the receiver. That could end badly one day! quote:‘Sir?’ Moneypenny has no notable expression or reaction when Bond shows up, which he inwardly groans at. Her disinterest usually means a boring routine job. When he enters M's office, there's a man named Dr. Fanshawe waiting for him. M introduces Bond as being in the "Research Department." quote:He got up and held out his hand. Dr Fanshawe rose, briefly touched Bond’s hand and sat quickly down as if he had touched paws with a Gila monster. Bond was an early proponent of "gaydar." quote:M. said, ‘Dr Fanshawe is a noted authority on antique jewellery. He is also, though this is confidential, adviser to H.M. Customs and to the C.I.D. on such things. He has in fact been referred to me by our friends at M.I.5. It is in connection with our Miss Freudenstein.’ We finally found a secret agent even lamer than Bond. quote:M. turned to Dr Fanshawe. ‘Perhaps, Doctor, you would care to tell Commander Bond what it is all about.’  Peter Carl Fabergé was a Russian jeweller of Baltic German and Danish descent. His father, Gustav Fabergé, had established a jewelry shop in St. Petersburg. Peter took the customary "Grand Tour" of Europe after coming of age, seeing the world and receiving tuition in his craft, and inherited the shop when his father retired and the old workmaster died in 1882. Fabergé and his brother Agathon quickly became known for the exceptional quality and beauty of their jewelry, which impressed Tsar Alexander III enough to gain the attention of the Imperial court.  What Fabergé became most known for were the Fabergé Eggs, which began as an Easter egg gift for Maria Feodorovna in 1885. She loved the egg so much that it became an annual tradition, with not even the Tsar knowing what next year's egg would be. They became more and more elaborate, holding surprises like miniatures and portraits inside. The final piece, the Constellation egg, was still unfinished in 1918 when the shop was seized by the Bolsheviks and the House of Fabergé disbanded. It's unknown exactly how many eggs were made, as he also produced them for other clients, but the currently accepted estimate is 69 existed and 57 are known to still exist today (52 for the Russian court, with 46 surviving). Fabergé himself abandoned Russia in shock and depression and died two years later, while his sons Alexander and Eugène reopened the business in Paris in 1924. The new firm, Fabergé & Cie, continued operations until 2001 when the store closed. The Fabergé brand that currently exists is a completely unrelated one that started as an illegally registered cosmetics company by Armand Hammer; the real Fabergé & Cie settled out of court after World War II to license the name to them and is now owned by Pallinghurst Resources LLP, who registered the company in the Cayman Islands (because why be anything but stereotypically evil when you're rich?) and has taken advantage of the old Russian jeweler's name to introduce luxury goods to its portfolio. quote:‘That was indeed one of his specialities. He made many other exquisite pieces of what we may broadly describe as objects of vertu. Today, in the sale rooms, the best examples fetch truly fabulous prices – £50,000 and more. And recently there entered this country the most amazing specimen of all – the so-called Emerald Sphere, a work of supreme art hitherto known only from a sketch by the great man himself. This treasure arrived by registered post from Paris and it was addressed to this woman of whom you know, Miss Maria Freudenstein.’  The Emerald Sphere is fictional, but the film adaptation of Octopussy used a replica of the Imperial Coronation egg as a plot device. In 1979, several years before the film, the egg was sold along with the Lillies of the Valley egg for $2.16 million to Malcolm Forbes. It's currently owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who bought 9 of the eggs for about $100 million in 2004 (including the Hen, the original egg) and is now under sanctions by the United States. He was even caught and questioned by Robert Mueller's special counsel team at the airport! The eggs themselves remain in the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg, which should make it more difficult if he wants to cut and run with them. quote:‘Nice little present. Might I ask how you learned of it, Doctor?’ The declared value of the package is over $2.7 million today. That's a hell of a payment. quote:M. broke in, ‘Thank you, Doctor. Just one or two final questions and I won’t detain you any further. You have examined this emerald ball thing and you pronounce it genuine?’  Wartski is the real family of antiques dealers who specialize in Russian works, Fabergé included. Abraham Kenneth Snowman, CBE FSA, was one of the men in the family business and was a personal friend of Ian Fleming's who got written into the story. quote:‘What about the provenance? What do the experts say about that?’ The Kremlin still owns a few eggs, such as the Memory of Azov egg from 1891. While the entire collection was seized during the Russian Revolution, many of them were sold off in the following decades. quote:M. drew on his pipe. His eyes through the smoke were bland, scarcely interested, ‘So that, in theory, there is no reason why this emerald ball should not have been unearthed from the Kremlin, furnished with a faked history to establish ownership, and transferred abroad as a reward to some friend of Russia for services rendered?’  In 1812 (later modified in 1814), Francisco Goya painted a portrait of the Duke of Wellington. It was auctioned in 1961 to Charles Bierer Wrightsman, an American oil executive, but the British government didn't want the painting to leave Britain and promptly bought it back to put in the National Gallery. The painting made it 19 days before it was stolen. At the time this story was written, the painting's whereabouts and the identity of the thief were still unknown; the film adaptation of Dr. No had the painting in No's dining room. The only lead they had was a bizarre letter delivered to Reuters demanding £140,000 be donated to pay for TV licenses for the poor and amnesty for the thief in return for the painting. In 1965, a 61-year-old disabled British pensioner named Kempton Bunton confessed to the theft and returned the painting in a missing luggage office at the Birmingham New Street railway station. Like all old retirees, he was unreasonably angry at something trivial: having to pay for a TV license on his pension. He learned that the security systems at the museum were disabled in the early morning for cleaning and simply had his son John loosen a restroom window, walk in, and take the frame off the wall. Because he returned the painting, he was convicted only of stealing the frame (which he did not return) and was sentenced to 3 months in jail. John confessed in 1969 but was not prosecuted. quote:M. said placatingly, ‘Forgive me, Dr Fanshawe. I expressed myself clumsily. I have never had the leisure to interest myself in works of art nor, on a naval officer’s pay, the money to acquire any. I was just registering my dismay at the runaway prices being fetched at auction these days.’ With Fanshawe gone, M pulls out their top secret file on Maria Freudenstein. Her mother was a French Resistance member during the war and she had a job as a Naval Attaché interpreter in the British embassy, but was compromised through sexual blackmail by some NKVD agents who knew her mother and turned her into a double-agent for them. After getting her British citizenship and getting recommended to the Secret Service, she made the fatal mistake of abruptly asking for a year's leave before beginning her job. She was quickly spotted in Leningrad to attend her spycraft school, so they thought up the Purple Cipher plot to keep the Soviets distracted. She never received any suspicious payments for her work, so it looks like the Soviets are using the auction as a lump sum payment. Bond asks about who Freudenstein's controller could be, but they've never identified him because her job is so basic that it doesn't require any reporting back. Bond suddenly gets the idea that he might be present at the auction. quote:‘What the devil are you talking about, 007? Explain yourself.’ chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 16:44
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Huh, it's kind of cool that this plot is just dicking over some Soviet handler, like it's useful but hilariously petty at the same time. Especially with the Fabregé eggs, those things are so tacky, enough that they probably got the Romanovs shot for crimes against fashion.
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Jan 30, 2020 18:03
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This was the story that Fleming wrote on commission for Sotheby's, which he thought was so bad that he refused payment. It's rather dull as a plot, but it's a treasure trove of information for us as modern readers.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:06
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quote:if Maria Freudenstein also picked up a certain amount of canteen gossip at Headquarters, that was a necessary risk, and she was not attractive enough to form liaisons which could be a security risk. She's not hot. I trust her. chitoryu12 posted:the film adaptation of Dr. No had the painting in No's dining room. My mum saw that when it first came out, and says the whole audience cracked up laughing at Connery's double-take when he saw it.
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Jan 30, 2020 22:01
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quote:Wartski has a modest, ultra-modern frontage at 138 Regent Street. The window, with a restrained show of modern and antique jewellery, gave no hint that these were the greatest Fabergé-dealers in the world. The interior – grey carpet, walls panelled in sycamore, a few unpretentious vitrines – held none of the excitement of Cartier’s, Boucheron or Van Cleef, but the group of framed Royal Warrants from Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, the Queen, King Paul of Greece and the unlikely King Frederick IX of Denmark, suggested that this was no ordinary jeweller. James Bond asked for Mr Kenneth Snowman. A good-looking, very well-dressed man of about forty rose from a group of men sitting with their heads together at the back of the room and came forward. 138 Regent Street is currently home to a Tommy Hilfiger store. They're currently at 60 St. James Street. quote:Bond said quietly, ‘I’m from the C.I.D. Can we have a talk? Perhaps you’d like to check my credentials first. My name’s James Bond. But you’ll have to go direct to Sir Ronald Vallance or his P.A. I’m not directly on the strength at Scotland Yard. Sort of liaison job.’ Fleming didn't just give his buddy Snowman a cameo. He's made him a major supporting character of this story who gets showered with compliments! quote:‘Have a seat. Cigarette?’ Snowman promises his discretion and Bond clues him in that he's actually from the Ministry of Defense and they're using this auction to identify a Soviet agent. He needs Snowman to accompany him and help identify the buyer. quote:Mr Kenneth Snowman’s eyes glinted with enthusiasm. ‘Of course. Delighted to help in any way. But,’ he looked doubtful, ‘you know it’s not necessarily going to be all that easy. Peter Wilson, the head of Sotheby’s, who’ll be taking the sale, would be the only person who could tell us for sure – that is, if the bidder wants to stay secret. There are dozens of ways of bidding without making any movement at all. But if the bidder fixes his method, his code so to speak, with Peter Wilson before the sale, Peter wouldn’t think of letting anyone in on the code. It would give the bidder’s game away to reveal his limit. And that’s a close secret, as you can imagine, in the rooms. And a thousand times not if you come with me. I shall probably be setting the pace. I already know how far I’m going to go – for a client by the way – but it would make my job vastly easier if I could tell how far the underbidder’s going to go. As it is, what you’ve told me has been a great help. I shall warn my man to put his sights even higher. If this chap of yours has got a strong nerve, he may push me very hard indeed. And there will be others in the field of course. It sounds as if this is going to be quite a night. They’re putting it on television and asking all the millionaires and dukes and duchesses for the sort of gala performance Sotheby’s do rather well. Wonderful publicity of course. By jove, if they knew there was cloak-and-dagger stuff mixed up with the sale, there’d be a riot! Now then, is there anything else to go into? Just spot this man and that’s all?’  Peter Wilson, CBE, was the chairman of Sotheby's from 1958 until 1980. He was the first of the charismatic auctioneers to turn what was previously a stuffy Victorian process into a jet-setting world of wealthy celebrities and executives bidding on artwork and rare antiques. He introduced features like currency converter boards and satellite links during auctions, public pre-sale estimates, telephone bidding, and the concept of an auction as an evening event with champagne and shrimp cocktails for millionaires. During a New York auction of valuables recovered from the sunken 1715 Spanish treasure fleet, he had children do the bidding in a recreation of a captain's cabin with a parrot. He was also the exact kind of man that Ian Fleming would be involved with. He was yet another World War II intelligence agent, with a flamboyant and ambiguously bisexual flair to everything he did. He was known for hiring clever young men of unusual backgrounds that he thought would aid them; he hired David Nash because he was a gravedigger and an electrician at a mental hospital. While Sotheby's is now big enough that it can no longer be run in his informal devil-may-care style, he transformed not only Sotheby's but the entire world of auctioning. quote:‘That’s all. How much do you think this thing will go for?’ Snowman takes Bond to view some Fabergé eggs they have available so he can familiarize himself. After he leaves, it's another day of doing setup in the offices around Whitehall to get everything ready. quote:Through the next day, Bond’s excitement mounted. He found an excuse to go into the Communications Section and wander into the little room where Miss Maria Freudenstein and two assistants were working the cipher machines that handled the Purple Cipher dispatches. He picked up an en clair file – he had freedom of access to most material at headquarters – and ran his eye down the carefully edited paragraphs that, in half an hour or so, would be spiked, unread, by some junior C.I.A. clerk in Washington and, in Moscow, be handed, with reverence, to a top-ranking officer of the K.G.B. He joked with the two junior girls, but Maria Freudenstein only looked up from her machine to give him a polite smile and Bond’s skin crawled minutely at this proximity to treachery and at the black and deadly secret locked up beneath the frilly white blouse. She was an unattractive girl with a pale, rather pimply skin, black hair and a vaguely unwashed appearance. Such a girl would be unloved, make few friends, have chips on her shoulder – more particularly in view of her illegitimacy – and a grouse against society. Perhaps her only pleasure in life was the triumphant secret she harboured in that flattish bosom – the knowledge that she was cleverer than all those around her, that she was, every day, hitting back against the world – the world that despised, or just ignored her, because of her plainness – with all her might. One day they’d be sorry! It was a common neurotic pattern – the revenge of the ugly duckling on society. I would be offended by this, but we recently hired a girl with unusually sweaty hands who gets all her paperwork damp so I feel sympathy. quote:Bond wandered off down the corridor to his own office. By tonight that girl would have made a fortune, been paid her thirty pieces of silver a thousandfold. Perhaps the money would change her character, bring her happiness. She would be able to afford the best beauty specialists, the best clothes, a pretty flat. But M. had said he was now going to hot up the Purple Cipher Operation, try a more dangerous level of deception. This would be dicey work. One false step, one incautious lie, an ascertainable falsehood in a message, and K.G.B. would smell a rat. One more, and they would know they were being hoaxed and probably had been ignominiously hoaxed for three years. Such a shameful revelation would bring quick revenge. It would be assumed that Maria Freudenstein had been acting as a double agent, working for the British as well as the Russians. She would inevitably and quickly be liquidated – perhaps with a cyanide pistol Bond had been reading about only the day before. Even on one of his boring assignments, the dude is loving cold. quote:There was a line of cars and taxis blocking George Street behind Sotheby’s. Bond paid off his taxi and joined the crowd filtering under the awning and up the steps. He was handed a catalogue by the uniformed commissionaire who inspected his ticket, and went up the broad stairs with the fashionable, excited crowd and along a gallery and into the main auction room that was already thronged. He found his seat next to Mr Snowman, who was writing figures on a pad on his knee, and looked round him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlV9weoU16E The film makes things with the egg a little more complicated. It begins with 009, dressed as a clown, crashing into a party and falling dead with a knife in his back, holding a replica of the Imperial Coronation egg. When Bond finds that exiled Afghan prince Kamal Khan is planning to buy it at Sotheby's, he switches the real one for the fake. As his investigation takes him to Khan's palace in India, it's revealed that he's involved in a scheme with rogue Soviet General Orlov to steal Soviet treasures (replacing them with fakes) and using Octopussy's criminal circus troupe to smuggle them. When Bond infiltrates the circus, however, he discovers that Orlov has replaced the treasure with a nuclear bomb that he plans to detonate "accidentally" at a US Air Force base, leading Europe to engage in disarmament that will open them for a Soviet invasion. It's not the best plot, I will admit. quote:‘Fifteen thousand pounds. And sixteen,’ a pause. A glance at someone in the front row. ‘Against you, sir.’ The flick of a catalogue being raised. ‘Seventeen thousand pounds I am bid. Eighteen. Nineteen. I am bid twenty thousand pounds.’ And so the quiet voice went, calmly, unhurriedly on while down among the audience the equally impassive bidders signalled their responses to the litany. The diamond necklace goes for 25,000, with Bond disappointed at the lack of dramatic gavel banging. The last of the opening lots, Lot 41, goes up next. quote:A PAIR OF FINE AND IMPORTANT RUBY AND DIAMOND BRACELETS, the front of each in the form of an elliptical cluster composed of one larger and two smaller rubies within a border of cushion-shaped diamonds, the sides and back formed of simpler clusters alternating with diamond openwork scroll motifs springing from single-stone ruby centres millegriffe-set in gold, running between chains of rubies and diamonds linked alternately, the clasp also in the form of an elliptical cluster. That would be Maria Fitzherbert, the lover of King George IV before he became king. He was 6 years younger than her, but they were rapidly infatuated when he was Prince of Wales and they secretly married in 1785; because King George III and the Privy Council had not consented to the marriage, it was illegal and thus George did not end up being removed from the line of succession as he legally would have been had the marriage been approved. Their relationship ended when he had to marry Dutchess Caroline of Brunswick for political reasons and their letters to each other quickly became acrimonious, but it's been suggested that he was merely putting on pretenses of disliking her to maintain his reputation. She was very hurt when he never replied to her "get well soon" letter, but he only didn't because he had put it under his pillow as he was dying. When he died, he was buried with his half of their eye miniature necklace. quote:While the bidding progressed, Bond slipped out of his seat and went down the aisle to the back of the room where the overflow audience spread out into the New Gallery and the Entrance Hall to watch the sale on closed-circuit television. He casually inspected the crowd, seeking any face he could recognize from the 200 members of the Soviet embassy staff whose photographs, clandestinely obtained, he had been studying during the past days. But amidst an audience that defied classification – a mixture of dealers, amateur collectors and what could be broadly classified as rich pleasure-seekers – was not a feature, let alone a face, that he could recognize except from the gossip columns. One or two sallow faces might have been Russian, but equally they might have belonged to half a dozen European races. There was a scattering of dark glasses, but dark glasses are no longer a disguise. Bond went back to his seat. Presumably the man would have to divulge himself when the bidding began. Snowman apologies to Bond and says that because it's bad form to look behind you at the crowd to see other bidders, he won't likely be able to help Bond scan the crowd unless the guy is right in front of him. He tells Bond to look for even tiny movements among the crowd; most people at these auctions use a subtle motion pre-arranged with Wilson to bid instead of doing something obvious like raising their catalogue in the air. Snowman plans to push the bidding as far as he can, which will hopefully reduce the number of bidders and make it easier to spot their man. quote:A sudden hush fell as a tall pedestal draped in black velvet was brought in with ceremony and positioned in front of the auctioneer’s rostrum. Then a handsome oval case of what looked like white velvet was placed on top of the pedestal and, with reverence, an elderly porter in grey uniform with wine red sleeves, collar and back belt, unlocked it and lifted out Lot 42, placed it on the black velvet and removed the case. The cricket ball of polished emerald on its exquisite base glowed with a supernatural green fire and the jewels on its surface and on the opalescent meridian winked their various colours. There was a gasp of admiration from the audience and even the clerks and experts behind the rostrum and sitting at the tall counting-house desk beside the auctioneer, accustomed to the Crown jewels of Europe parading before their eyes, leaned forward to get a better look. Hoo boy. Fleming just designed himself a Fabergé egg. This is like trying to understand a Dwarf Fortress legendary artifact. quote:After a brief and searching glance round the room, Mr Wilson banged his hammer softly. ‘Lot 42 – an object of vertu by Carl Fabergé.’ A pause. ‘Twenty thousand pounds I am bid.’ Bond slides into a group of reporters on the side of the room. He notes that Wilson is looking at the far back-right corner of the room when he takes a bid from whoever's competing with Snowman, but he hasn't figured out who it is. As the price raises, it looks like Snowman is about to have to stop. quote:And now there was the tiniest movement. At the back of the room, a chunky-looking man in a dark suit reached up and unobtrusively took off his dark glasses. It was a smooth, nondescript face – the sort of face that might belong to a bank manager, a member of Lloyd’s, or a doctor. This must have been the prearranged code with the auctioneer. So long as the man wore his dark glasses he would raise in tens of thousands. When he took them off, he had quit. Bond heads to the back of the room and puts on a pair of sunglasses, getting behind the man as he slips into the crowd. He quickly recognizes him as Piotr Malinowski, the Agricultural Attaché with the embassy. quote:Outside, the man began walking swiftly towards Conduit Street. James Bond got unhurriedly into a taxi with its engine running and its flag down. He said to the driver, ‘That’s him. Take it easy.’ I can see why Fleming was unsatisfied with this story, but I like it from a different perspective. This is something that would be an interesting way to break up a larger narrative, even if it doesn't quite work perfectly on its own as a James Bond story.
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Jan 31, 2020 18:09
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Dangerous Marine Animals is a real book. There's a newer edition somewhere in the family library and it's not a pretty read.chitoryu12 posted:This is not the first time that poison gun will appear in the series! I don't remember if this has come up before, but the cyanide spray gun has a factual basis: Ukrainian nationalists Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera were assassinated with such weapons in 1957 and 1959. The assassin, a KGB agent named Bohdan Stashynsky, defected to the west in 1961, which I assume is how Fleming knew about the weapon. chitoryu12 posted:I can see why Fleming was unsatisfied with this story, but I like it from a different perspective. 
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Feb 1, 2020 06:27
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The Living Daylightsquote:James Bond lay at the five-hundred-yard firing point of the famous Century Range at Bisley. The white peg in the grass beside him said 44 and the same number was repeated high up on the distant butt above the single six-foot-square target that, to the human eye and in the late summer dusk, looked no larger than a postage stamp. But Bond’s lens, an infra-red Sniperscope fixed above his rifle, covered the whole canvas. He could even clearly distinguish the pale-blue and beige colours into which the target was divided, and the six-inch semi-circular bull looked as big as the half moon that was already beginning to show low down in the darkening sky above the distant crest of Chobham Ridges.  The village of Bisley in Surrey is home to a huge plateau that has been used by the government for a shooting range for over a hundred years. Bond is at the National Shooting Centre, which was built in 1890 by the National Rifle Association of Great Britain for holding their annual shooting competition that used to be at Wimbledon. Fleming, not a sniper himself, actually engaged in appreciable research for this story and corresponded with Captain E.K. Le Mesurier, the NRA secretary, for information. quote:James Bond’s last shot had been an inner left – not good enough. He took another glance at the yellow-and-blue wind flags. They were streaming across range from the east rather more stiffly than when he had begun his shoot half an hour before, and he set two clicks more to the right on the wind gauge and traversed the cross-wires on the Sniperscope back to the point of aim. Then he settled himself, put his trigger finger gently inside the guard and on to the curve of the trigger, shallowed his breathing and very, very softly squeezed.  To my knowledge, Winchester never produced a .308 match rifle to these specifications. They did produce the Model 52, which is a .22 single-shot target rifle. My best guess is that Fleming knew of it and created an experimental .308 version for his book, which Q Branch has now modified with a magazine and infrared scope.  The scope is likely the M3, which was nicknamed the "sniperscope" or "snooperscope" during its use in Korea. It was an active infrared scope; while modern night vision amplifies ambient light sources, these early night vision scopes used an infrared spotlight that produced light invisible to the human eye. The image tube is able to see what the infrared rays illuminate, basically giving you a giant invisible flashlight that only you can see. The M3 Carbine was an M2 Carbine (the select-fire version of the M1) first deployed in the last days of World War II, then used in larger numbers in Korea. quote:‘Ready?’ The RO examines Bond's target and finds that he's good enough that he could be a competition shooter; he invites Bond, but he waves him off that he isn't in England quite enough for that kind of commitment. He has no idea who this Commander James Bond is, or why he was required to be there after the range closed for the night to let him start popping rounds at targets with an infrared scope. Or why he's such an incredible shot despite the NRA having no record of him as a sharpshooter. And why a sudden appointment late at night afterward? With a girl? quote:The two men walked through the handsome façade of Club Row behind the range to Bond’s car that stood opposite the bullet-pitted iron reproduction of Landseer’s famous ‘Running Deer’. ‘Nice-looking job,’ commented the Range Officer. ‘Never seen a body like that on a Continental. Have it made specially?’ Mulliners Limited of Birmingham was a coachbuilding business that made bodies for Bentley, Aston-Martin, and other luxury car manufactures until their sudden closure was announced in December 1960. A custom car body for his Bentley Continental would be quite a lot of money. quote:The Chief Range Officer watched the ruby lights vanish up King’s Avenue towards the London road. He turned on his heel and went to find Corporal Menzies on a search for information that was to prove fruitless. The corporal remained as wooden as the big mahogany box he was in the process of loading into a khaki Land Rover without military symbols. The Range Officer was a major. He tried pulling his rank without success. The Land Rover hammered away in Bond’s wake. The major walked moodily off to the offices of the National Rifle Association to try and find out what he wanted in the library under ‘Bond, J.’ Earlier that day, Bond had appeared in M's office. M is unusually severe when he comes in and barely even gives Bond a chance to sit down before he starts explaining. quote:‘Number 272. He’s a good man. You won’t have come across him. Simple reason that he’s been holed up in Novaya Zemlya since the war. Now he’s trying to get out – loaded with stuff. Atomic and rockets. And their plan for a whole new series of tests. For 1961. To put the heat on the West. Something to do with Berlin. Don’t quite get the picture but the F.O. say if it’s true it’s terrific. Makes nonsense of the Geneva Conference and all this blether about nuclear disarmament the Communist bloc are putting out. He’s got as far as East Berlin. But he’s got practically the whole of the K.G.B. on his tail – and the East German security forces of course. He’s holed up somewhere in the city and he got one message over to us – that he’d be coming across between six and seven p.m. on one of the next three nights – tomorrow, next day, or the day after. He gave the crossing point. Trouble is,’ the downward curve of M.’s lips became even more bitter, ‘the courier he used was a double. Station W.B. bowled him out yesterday. Quite by chance. Had a lucky break with one of the K.G.B. codes. The courier’ll be flown out for trial, of course. But that won’t help. The K.G.B. know that 272 will be making a run for it. They know when. They know where. They know just as much as we do and no more. Now, the code we cracked was a one-day-only setting on their machines. But we got the whole of that day’s traffic and that was good enough. They plan to shoot him on the run. At this street crossing between East and West Berlin he gave us in his message. They’re mounting quite an operation – operation “Extase” they call it. Put their best sniper on the job. All we know about him is that his code name is the Russian for “Trigger”. Station W.B. guess he’s the same man they’ve used before for sniper work. Long-range stuff across the frontier. He’s going to be guarding this crossing every night and his job is to get 272. Of course they’d obviously prefer to do a smoother job with machine-guns and what have you. But it’s quiet in Berlin at the moment and apparently the word is it’s got to stay so. Anyway,’ M. shrugged, ‘they’ve got confidence in this “Trigger” operator and that’s the way it’s going to be!’ Bond has been given one of his few missions that's a simple killing: he needs to kill "Trigger" before 272 gets shot. Neither he nor M are comfortable with assassinations, but it's what he has to do. quote:The Chief of Staff had been only a shade more sympathetic. ‘Sorry you’ve bought this one, James,’ he had said. ‘But Tanqueray was definite that he hadn’t got anyone good enough on his Station, and this isn’t the sort of job you can ask a regular soldier to do. Plenty of top marksmen in the B.A.O.R., but a live target needs another kind of nerve. Anyway, I’ve been on to Bisley and fixed a shoot for you tonight at eight fifteen when the ranges will be closed. Visibility should be about the same as you’ll be getting in Berlin around an hour earlier. The Armourer’s got the gun – a real target job, and he’s sending it down with one of his men. You’ll find your own way. Then you’re booked on a midnight B.E.A. charter flight to Berlin. Take a taxi to this address.’ He handed Bond a piece of paper. ‘Go up to the fourth floor and you’ll find Tanqueray’s Number 2 waiting for you. Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to sit it out for the next three days.’ Bond really hates family saloons. quote:The ugly six-storey building at the corner of Kochstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse was the only one standing in a waste of empty bombed space. Bond paid off his taxi and got a brief impression of waist-high weeds and half-tidied rubble walls stretching away to a big deserted crossroads lit by a central cluster of yellowish arc lamps, before he pushed the bell for the fourth floor and at once heard the click of the door-opener. The door closed itself behind him and he walked over the uncarpeted cement floor to the old-fashioned lift. The smell of cabbage, cheap cigar smoke and stale sweat reminded him of other apartment houses in Germany and Central Europe. Even the sigh and faint squeal of the slow lift were part of a hundred assignments when he had been fired off by M., like a projectile, at some distant target where a problem waited for his coming, waited to be solved by him. At least this time the reception committee was on his side. This time there was nothing to fear at the top of the stairs.   Both buildings at the corner of Kochstraße and Wilhelmstraße are pretty ugly, but I'll guess it's the gray one. The Berlin Wall would be just past the far end of the gray building. A block east is the infamous Checkpoint Charlie. quote:Number 2 of Secret Service Station W.B. was a lean, tense man in his early forties. He wore the uniform of his profession – well-cut, well-used, lightweight tweeds in a dark-green herringbone, a soft white silk shirt and an old school tie – in his case Wykehamist. At the sight of the tie, and while they exchanged conventional greetings in the small musty lobby of the apartment, Bond’s spirits, already low, sank another degree. He knew the type: backbone of the Civil Service; over-crammed and under-loved at Winchester; a good second in P.P.E. at Oxford; the war, staff jobs he would have done meticulously; perhaps an Q.B.E.; Allied Control Commission in Germany where he had been recruited into the I Branch and thence – because he was the ideal staff man and A.1 with Security and because he thought he would find life, drama, romance, the things he had never had – into the Secret Service. A sober, careful man had been needed to chaperon Bond on this ugly business. Captain Paul Sender, late of the Welsh Guards, had been the obvious choice. He had bought it. Now, like a good Wykehamist, he concealed his distaste for the job beneath careful, trite conversation as he showed Bond the layout of the apartment and the arrangements that had been made for the executioner’s preparedness and, to a modest extent, his comfort.  No. 2 is expanded upon in the film as Saunders. Because the film moves this scene to the Czechoslovakian-Austrian border, Saunders is now head of Station V in Vienna. He was played by Thomas Weatley, who was a very new actor at the time; he had attended a drama school but had a job in shipping before deciding to get into acting in the 80s. His role in The Living Daylights was only his third on screen, though it brought him a successful film and stage career. Since 1994 he has appeared in the "tribunal plays" at the Kiln Theatre, a critically acclaimed series of plays based on verbatim reconstructions of public inquiries such as ones implicating Tony Blair as a war criminal. As far as the book version, a "Wykehamist" is a graduate of Winchester College. Fleming is engaging in some of his usual ribbing of people who went to a different school than him. quote:The flat consisted of a large double bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen containing tinned food, milk, butter, eggs, tea, bacon, bread and one bottle of Dimple Haig. The only odd feature in the bedroom was that one of the double beds was angled up against the curtains covering the single broad window and was piled high with three mattresses below the bedclothes.   With the action moved to another country, the building used in the film is at Währinger Strasse 65 in Vienna. Bond is also upgraded to the best sniper rifle he could be given in 1987: the Walther WA 2000. After the terrorist attack at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, the police requested a new sniper rifle that could be quickly and extremely accurately deployed in such situations. Walther produced a miracle of overengineering in the form of a bullpup semi-automatic sniper rifle available in either .300 Win Mag, 7.62x51mm NATO, or 7.5mm Swiss. While the rifle was indeed capable of the very high accuracy needed, it was absurdly expensive (starting at over $20,000 in modern currency at the time of the film) and it had essentially zero ability to stand up to mud or rough handling. Only 176 were actually produced and all are believed to be in private hands or owned by Walther. The easiest way to see one today is to play a Hitman game, as it's famously become Agent 47's preferred rifle. quote:Captain Sender said, ‘Care to have a look at the field of fire? Then I can explain what the other side have in mind.’ Wilhelmstraße was home to many Nazi government and military buildings and was virtually destroyed at the end of World War II. The West German government began rebuilding, but the East Germans tore down every remnant of Prussian and Nazi militarism; by the time this book was written, the East German side of the street was nothing but rubble and empty lots before the wall...except for one building. quote:‘To your left, that big new ten-storey block is the Haus der Ministerien, the chief brain-centre of East Berlin. You can see the lights are still on in most of the windows. Most of those’ll stay on all night. These chaps work hard – shifts all round the clock. You probably won’t need to worry about the lighted ones. This “Trigger” chap’ll almost certainly fire from one of the dark windows. You’ll see there’s a block of four together on the corner above the intersection. They’ve stayed dark last night and tonight. They’ve got the best field of fire. From here, their range varies from three hundred to three hundred and ten yards. I’ve got all the figures and so on when you want them. You needn’t worry about much else. That street stays empty during the night – only the motorized patrols about every half an hour – light armoured car with a couple of motor cycles as escort. Last night, which I suppose is typical, between six and seven when this thing’s going to be done, there were a few people that came and went out of that side door. Civil servant types. Before that nothing out of the ordinary – usual flow of people in and out of a busy government building – except, of all things, a whole damned women’s orchestra. Made the hell of a racket in some concert hall they’ve got in there. Part of the block is the Ministry of Culture. Otherwise nothing – certainly none of the K.G.B. people we know, nor any signs of preparation for a job like this. But there wouldn’t be. They’re careful chaps, the opposition. Anyway, have a good look. Don’t forget it’s darker than it will be tomorrow around six. But you can get the general picture.’  The building "Trigger" will be in is properly called the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus. At the time of its construction in 1936, it was the biggest office building in Europe. It was one of the few buildings on this street to make it mostly unscathed by bombing and was repaired to become one of the major East German government buildings. At the time of writing, it was the offices of the Council of Ministers of East Germany. In case you're wondering how Fleming got such an accurate description of everything here, he had corresponded with Anthony Terry, a friend and fellow WW2 spy who had worked with him in the foreign correspondence offices for the Mercury Foreign News Service. While Fleming was staying at his London residence at 4 Mitre Court off Fleet Street, he wrote to Terry to provide him with geographic information. In 1962 the Berlin Wall wasn't exactly a tourist attraction. quote:Bond got the general picture and it stayed with him long after the other man was asleep and snoring softly with a gentle regular clicking sound – a Wykehamist snore, Bond reflected irritably. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 17:12
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chitoryu12 posted:To my knowledge, Winchester never produced a .308 match rifle to these specifications. They did produce the Model 52, which is a .22 single-shot target rifle. My best guess is that Fleming knew of it and created an experimental .308 version for his book, which Q Branch has now modified with a magazine and infrared scope. As usual, Fleming flubs the details: converting a purpose-built single shot match rifle to magazine feed is not exactly trivial work, and there are more expedient alternatives. I think a realistic interpretation would be a Winchester Model 70 done up in precision match fittings.
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Feb 4, 2020 01:25
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quote:He awoke at midday. The flat was empty. Bond drew the curtains to let in the grey Prussian day and, standing well back from the window, gazed out at the drabness of Berlin and listened to the tram noises and to the distant screeching of the U-Bahn as it took the big curve into the Zoo station. He gave a quick, reluctant glance at what he had examined the night before, noted that the weeds among the bomb rubble were much the same as the London ones – rose-bay willow-herb, dock and bracken – and then went into the kitchen. There was a note propped against a loaf of bread: ‘My friend [a Secret Service euphemism which in this context meant Sender’s chief] says it’s all right for you to go out. But to be back by 1700 hours. Your gear [double-talk for Bond’s rifle] has arrived and the batman will lay it out this p.m. P. Sender.’ The way Bond describes Berlin is the general idea from the West at the time. While the Weimar-era city was famous as a glitzy nightclub town, the war and division by the Berlin Wall had created the impression of a gloomy, austere, broken town full of political intrigue and murder.  The closest I can find to a "Cafe Marquardt" in Berlin is the Cafe Schloss Marquardt, which was in the Hotel Adlon a distance away from the Kurfürstendamm. This picture is from 1952. quote:The pretty young trees round the long lake had already been touched by the breath of autumn and there was occasional gold amongst the green. Bond walked hard for two hours along the leafy paths, then chose a restaurant with a glassed-in veranda above the lake and greatly enjoyed a high tea consisting of a double portion of matjes herrings smothered in cream and onion rings, and two ‘Molle mit Korn’, the Berlin equivalent of a ‘boiler-maker and his assistant’ – schnapps, doubles, washed down with draught Löwenbräu. Then, feeling more encouraged, he took the S-Bahn back into the city.   The Grunewald is a large public forest on the west side of Berlin. He's walking along the Großer Wannsee, which is actually a part of the Havel river in the southern part of the forest. His meal is pickled herring in a cream sauce. The "Korn" is a rare appearance by a sort of German whiskey! It's generally not very high proof and unaged, similar to the "moonshine" you find in jars at the liquor store but with less burn. I haven't had German Korn yet because it's not easily available here, but my experience with various unaged spirits suggests it'll be rather sweet. quote:Outside the apartment house, a nondescript young man was tinkering with the engine of a black Opel Kapitan. He didn’t take his head out from under the bonnet when Bond passed close by him and went up to the door and pressed the bell. Bond is set up in the appropriate position. While movies and video games often show snipers poking their barrel out the window, this is obviously a bad idea for staying stealthy. quote:Captain Sender, his face worried and tense with nerves, said there was no news at the Station, no change in the situation as they knew it. Did Bond want anything to eat? Or a cup of tea? Perhaps a tranquillizer – there were several kinds in the bathroom? As far as anyone can find it, this book does not exist for real. But it serves to further set Bond apart from Sender: the captain is a stick-up-his-rear end career man while Bond is a carefree drunk reading erotic literature. quote:Bond took off his coat and tie, put two sticks of chewing gum in his mouth and donned the hood. The lights were switched off by Captain Sender and Bond lay along the bed, got his eye to the eye-piece of the Sniperscope and gently lifted the bottom edge of the curtain back and over his shoulders. In order to control the flight of Germans from Soviet-occupied territory, a massive concrete wall was constructed to cut Berlin in half. Checkpoint C was the crossing point in the Berlin Wall a block away from this story's action. It was the most famous and visible of the checkpoints, as it was set in a major part of urban Berlin, and had a cafe on the corner across the street. Numerous dramatic escapes and stand-offs occurred in full view of the city, such as a man in a speeding convertible with the windshield removed driving under the barrier. But crossing was responded to violently, and by the time of his story's original publication in February 1962 there had already been 5 shooting deaths of escapees and several other accidental deaths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiCd5iAi7Qc What would become the most infamous of these incidents was the shooting of 18-year-old Peter Fechter on August 17, 1962. Fechter's sister had married a West German man before the wall went up and was separated from the rest of her family, and he was denied a legally sanctioned trip across the border. Fechter and his friend, Helmut Kulbeik, decided that they would defect. The plan was to leap from a carpenter's workshop window, run across the empty strip between the wall and a fence under construction, and climb the wall. In full view of the guards. In broad daylight. Fechter was promptly shot in the pelvis and fell from the wall, while Kulbeik made it over. The West German guards were unable to cross to treat him, while the East German guards (nervous after a recent shooting incident between sides) stayed and watched as he slowly, painfully, very loudly bled to death in front of hundreds of civilians. The incident was captured on camera and became a symbol of international outrage at East Germany, to the extent that the two guards who fired on them were identified and convicted of manslaughter in 1997. quote:Now there was extra traffic in the street below. The women's orchestra came trooping down the pavement towards the entrance – twenty laughing, talking girls carrying their instruments – violin and wind instrument cases, satchels with their scores, and four of them with the drums – a gay, happy little crocodile. Bond was reflecting that some people still seemed to find life fun in the Soviet Sector, when his glasses picked out and stayed on the girl carrying the ’cello. Bond’s masticating jaws stopped still and then reflectively went on with their chewing as he twisted the screw to depress the Sniperscope and keep her in its centre.  Our unnamed cellist was named Kara Milovy in the film, played by Maryam d'Abo. She had made her debut in 1980 in the trashy sci-fi horror film Xtro and had a pretty average career until her casting in The Living Daylights, which included a Playboy spread. She continued an acting and modeling career, including playing Maya Fleming in Pandora, and very nearly died of a brain hemorrhage in 2007. You might be more familiar with her cousin, Olivia d'Abo, who played Karen on The Wonder Years and is the voice of Luminara Unduli in the Star Wars animated canon (including a voice cameo in Rise of Skywalker). quote:From somewhere inside the Ministry there came the familiar sounds of an orchestra tuning up – the strings tuning their instruments to single notes on the piano, the sharp blare of individual wood-winds – then a pause and then the collective crash of melody as the whole orchestra threw itself competently, so far as Bond could judge, into the opening bars of what even to James Bond was vaguely familiar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWU1uj9WmOM quote:Bond minutely depressed the Sniperscope. Yes, there was movement inside the black cave. Now, from the interior, a thick black object, a weapon, had slid out. It moved firmly, minutely, swivelling down and sideways so as to cover the stretch of the Zimmerstrasse between the two waste-lands of rubble. Then the unseen operator in the room behind seemed satisfied and the weapon remained still, fixed obviously to a stand such as Bond had beneath his rifle. Bond should go back to weapons school if he thinks the AK is a submachine gun!  At this point in history, the Soviet Union had switched from the original AK-47 to the updated AKM, which has a lighter stamped receiver. The East Germans had received the license and tooling to produce their own guns a few years before, but a KGB agent would likely prefer their own. Soviet night vision was still an active infrared system like the M3 mounted on Bond's target rifle, and he doesn't describe it as such so presumably "Trigger" isn't using a comparable device. While Fleming probably knew little or nothing about Soviet equipment, the most likely scope for a KGB agent in a real scenario like this would be the PSO-1 developed for the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle, which would enter service the next year and would potentially be available on a prototype scale for KGB snipers. quote:Bond fiddled minutely with the traversing and elevating screws at his fingertips and got the fine lines of the ’scope exactly intersected, just behind where the butt of the enemy gun merged into the blackness behind. Get the chest – don’t bother about the head!  Bond should probably keep his cello lust down, because that's Amaryllis Fleming he's talking about! She was Ian's half-sister, born of a tryst between his mother Eve and famous Welsh painter Augustus John; as she was an illegitimate child, she was raised to believe she was adopted until she was an adult. She had a respectable career as a cellist, including serving as the arm double for Bette Davis playing cello in Connecting Rooms, until a stroke forced her to retire in 1993, at which point she became a music teacher. She died in 1999, happily unmarried, at the age of 73, seemingly unmarred by the drama of the rest of her family. quote:At his side Captain Sender said, ‘Seven o’clock. Nothing’s stirred on the other side. Bit of movement on our side, near a cellar close to the frontier; that’ll be our reception committee – two good men from the Station. Better stay with it until they close down. Let me know when they take that gun in.’ Bond takes a shower and has some whiskey on the rocks to calm his nerves. The orchestra ends and the players leave, giving Bond another opportunity to spy that blonde cellist. As much as he fantasizes about her, he obviously doesn't have much chance for anything. Sender, for his part, is the abstemious ideal of the Service and barely even notices her. quote:The next day, and the next night-watch, were duplicates, with small variations, of the first. James Bond had two more brief rendezvous, by Sniperscope, with the girl, and the rest was a killing of time and a tightening of the tension that, by the time the third and final day came, was like a fog in the small room. Sender might be the first person in history to make the mistake of stopping James Bond from drinking. quote:‘Look, my friend,’ said Bond wearily, ‘I’ve got to commit a murder tonight. Not you. Me. So be a good chap and stuff it, would you? You can tell Tanqueray anything you like when it’s over. Think I like this job? Having a Double-O number and so on? I’d be quite happy for you to get me sacked from the Double-O Section. Then I could settle down and make a snug nest of papers as an ordinary Staffer. Right?’ Bond drank down his whisky, reached for his thriller, now arriving at an appalling climax, and threw himself on the bed. At exactly 6:05, Sender spots 272 moving through the weeds. He rapidly makes ground across the rubble until he's yards away from the wall. As Bond spots the sniper moving in the window, he gives the order for the backfiring Opel to begin its distraction. 272 makes it to the wall and, unlike Peter Fechter, makes it to the top. quote:And then, in the Sniperscope, Bond saw the head of ‘Trigger’ – the purity of the profile, the golden bell of hair – all laid out along the stock of the Kalashnikov! She was dead, a sitting duck! Bond’s fingers flashed down to the screws, inched them round and, as yellow flame fluttered at the snout of the sub-machine-gun, squeezed the trigger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0uP9zm22e8 The film uses this entire short story as merely the setup for the plot. Rather than a trained KGB sniper, Kara is a patsy manipulated by her boyfriend, General Koskov, as part of his plot to fake a defection to the West and blame the head of the KGB for a series of murders to conceal his embezzlement of government funds and involvement in arms deals with the Mujahideen. quote:‘He’s over!’ shouted Captain Sender. ‘He’s over! He’s done it! My God, he’s done it!’  "Trigger" is potentially inspired by the series of famous Soviet female snipers who made a name for themselves in World War II. Over 2400 women served as snipers in the war, with about 500 surviving. The beautiful blonde up there, Roza Shanina, achieved 59 confirmed kills before being disemboweled by a shell fragment at the age of 20; she had been a talkative and joyful young woman in school, but her life was put on hold and cut short out of her patriotic desire to serve her country in a time of desperation. It's unclear if Fleming took any direct inspiration, as it would not be until after his death that the publication of her diary led to a renewed interest in her in the Soviet press, but he likely would have heard of at least the idea of her ilk. quote:Captain Sender emerged from beside his bed, brushing glass out of his hair. They crunched across the floor and through the splintered door into the kitchen. Here, because it faced away from the street, it was safe to switch on the light. Bond admits to Sender that the sniper was the female cellist. He doesn't express much surprise, considering the KGB's reputation for female agents and the excellent performance of the Russian women's team at shooting championships. Being the man he is, he tells Bond that he'll have no choice but to include Bond's interest in her and blame it for his refusal to follow orders and kill her. quote:There came the sound of a car approaching. It pulled up somewhere below. The bell rang twice. Sender said, ‘Well, let’s get going. They’ve sent an armoured car to get us out of here.’ He paused. His eyes flicked over Bond’s shoulder, avoiding Bond’s eyes. ‘Sorry about the report. Got to do my duty, y’know. You should have killed that sniper whoever it was.’ chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 4, 2020 |
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Feb 4, 2020 17:08
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Hell of a story, this one. Great atmosphere.
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Feb 4, 2020 18:23
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Yeah, I’m noticing a similarity with ‘Funeral In Berlin’ by Len Deighton. The movie version with Michael Caine has some location work in West Berlin, if you want to check it out: my dad was working in the Berlin Hilton around this time, so I have some interest in this period/place.
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Feb 4, 2020 21:13
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chitoryu12 posted:While movies and video games often show snipers poking their barrel out the window, this is obviously a bad idea for staying stealthy. Also lasers! chitoryu12 posted:As far as anyone can find it, this book does not exist for real. Maybe unrelated, but this wasn't long after the Penguin Books obscenity trial over publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover. chitoryu12 posted:Bond should go back to weapons school if he thinks the AK is a submachine gun! Well, yes and no. It's true that the Soviets designated the Kalashnikov as an avtomat and not a pistolet-pulemyot, but not everyone followed suit. Romania and East Germany, for instance, designated their domestic versions as submachine guns. And that's not even getting into what western intelligence would make of the AK at a time when few of their own armies had anything quite like it. Britain itself wouldn't give up full power battle rifles as standard issue until the 1980s and then they did it in the worst way possible. Not sure a professional KGB hit team would be using a prototype scope intended for a different rifle and different cartridge when they already had AKs modified for night fighting and suitable optics to put on them. chitoryu12 posted:It's unclear if Fleming took any direct inspiration, as it would not be until after his death that the publication of her diary led to a renewed interest in her in the Soviet press, but he likely would have heard of at least the idea of her ilk. At the very least he should have heard of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who was sent on a tour of the western Allies after being pulled from frontline duty. chitoryu12 posted:Okay? Then OVER and OUT. Fleming really should have known better than to do this.
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Feb 4, 2020 23:50
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Somebody Awful posted:Not sure a professional KGB hit team would be using a prototype scope intended for a different rifle and different cartridge when they already had AKs modified for night fighting and suitable optics to put on them. Do you know when those were issued though? My cursory research has people putting first gen (passive) night vision a few years after this was written, which is why Fleming gave Bond an active infrared scope. The Soviet night vision at the time was the same bulky multi-part equipment. He also likely wouldn’t have known the Dragunov was in development at that point and gave Trigger an AK rather than a Mosin.
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Feb 5, 2020 00:00
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I suspect the Soviet sniper would be using an active infrared sight just like Bond. The NSP-2 is relatively portable and seems to have been in use around this time. There was also an earlier SPN-1 active IR sight issued for the Mosin rifle. Edit: searching some more, I found an eBay listing for a 1957 dated Russian manual with drawings of IR sights mounted on the SKS, RPD, and milled AK. Edit again: this is speaking in terms of realism, mind you. Fleming's Soviets don't seem to even be aware of active infrared optics, what with Bond staring at them through one for three nights in a row. Somebody Awful fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Feb 5, 2020 |
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Feb 5, 2020 00:59
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Somebody Awful posted:I suspect the Soviet sniper would be using an active infrared sight just like Bond. The NSP-2 is relatively portable and seems to have been in use around this time. There was also an earlier SPN-1 active IR sight issued for the Mosin rifle. Fleming only mentions a scope and there's no concerns about his active IR being visible (it would be no different than shining a spotlight to Trigger), so I'm safe guessing it was just an AK with a telescopic sight attached. I don't think it would be too hard for a KGB agent to get a PSO-1 a year or two before official deployment attached to her AK.
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Feb 5, 2020 05:03
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007 In New Yorkquote:It was around ten o’clock on a blue and golden morning at the end of September and the B.O.A.C. Monarch flight from London had come in at the same time as four other international flights. James Bond, his stomach queasy from the B.O.A.C. version of ‘An English Country House Breakfast’, took his place stoically in a long queue that included plenty of squalling children and in due course said that he had spent the last ten nights in London. Then to Immigration – fifteen minutes to show his passport that said he was ‘David Barlow, Merchant’ and that he had eyes and hair and was six feet tall; and then to the Gehenna of the Idlewild Customs that has been carefully designed, in Bond’s opinion, to give visitors to the United States coronary thrombosis. Everyone, each with his stupid little trolley, looked, after a night’s flight, wretched and undignified. Waiting for his suitcase to appear behind the glass of the unloading bay and then to be graciously released for him to fight for and hump over to the Customs lines, all of which were overloaded while each bag or bundle (why not a spot-check?) was opened and prodded and then laboriously closed, often between slaps at fretting children, by its exhausted owner. Bond glanced up at the glass-walled balcony that ran round the great hall. A man in a rainproof and Trilby, middle-aged, nondescript, was inspecting the orderly hell through a pair of folding opera-glasses. Anybody examining him or, indeed, anyone else through binoculars was an object of suspicion to James Bond, but now his conspiratorial mind merely registered that this would be a good link in an efficient hotel-robbery machine. The man with the glasses would note the rich-looking woman declaring her jewellery, slip downstairs when she was released from Customs, tail her into New York, get beside her at the desk, hear her room number being called to the captain, and the rest would be up to the mechanics. Bond shrugged. At least the man didn’t seem interested in him. He had his single suitcase passed by the polite man with the badge. Then, sweating with the unnecessary central heating, he carried it out through the automatic glass doors into the blessed fresh fall air. The Carey Cadillac, as a message had told him, was already waiting. James Bond always used the firm. They had fine cars and superb drivers, rigid discipline and total discretion, and they didn’t smell of stale cigar smoke. Bond even wondered if Commander Carey’s organization, supposing it had equated David Barlow with James Bond, would have betrayed their standards by informing C.I.A. Well, no doubt the United States had to come first, and anyway, did Commander Carey know who James Bond was? The Immigration people certainly did. In the great black bible with the thickly printed yellow pages the officer had consulted when he took Bond’s passport, Bond knew that there were three Bonds and that one of them was ‘James, British, Passport 391354. Inform Chief Officer.’ How closely did Carey’s work with these people? Probably only if it was police business. Anyway, James Bond felt pretty confident that he could spend twenty-four hours in New York, make the contact and get out again without embarrassing explanations having to be given to Messrs Hoover or McCone. For this was an embarrassing, unattractive business that M. had sent Bond anonymously to New York to undertake. It was to warn a nice girl, who had once worked for the Secret Service, an English girl now earning her living in New York, that she was cohabiting with a Soviet agent of the K.G.B. attached to the U.N. and that M. knew that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. were getting very close to learning her identity. It was doing the dirt on two friendly organizations, of course, and it would be highly embarrassing if Bond were found out, but the girl had been a first-class staff officer, and when he could, M. looked after his own. So Bond had been instructed to make contact and he had arranged to do so, that afternoon at three o’clock, outside (the rendezvous had seemed appropriate to Bond) the Reptile House at the Central Park Zoo. Yes, this really is the opening in one unbroken string! I think it's a relic of the formatting, as this story was originally printed in The New York Herald Tribune in 1963 (though it originates from research trips starting in 1959). If you just want a summary: Bond, under the pseudonym "David Barlow", is going to find a former Secret Service girl and let her know that her boyfriend is a KGB agent and the FBI and CIA are about to find out her past employment. quote:Bond pressed the button that let down the glass partition and leaned forward. ‘The Astor, please.’   The 1964 New York World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, was one of the biggest events in all of New York City's history and considered one of its proudest moments. The early 1960s were optimistic about the future, and this fair was all about the future to young Baby Boomers! It was a showcase of the latest technology and world culture, filled with pavilions built to showcase the latest corporate inventions from tires to computers. International cuisine and regional American cuisine, like Swiss fondue and Louisiana Creole cuisine, were introduced to a mass audience. While the fair had issues with making a profit for its organizers and it nearly went bankrupt, it was a massive success to the public and a cultural touchstone before the Vietnam War swept that away.  It also serves as one of the biggest influences on the development of Walt Disney World. Disney had demonstrated the first audio-animatronic figures at the fair through shows like "Carousel of Progress" and "It's a Small World", as well as a Ford-sponsored prototype of the PeopleMover system that still runs at the Magic Kingdom. When plans fell through for Disney to turn the park in Queens into a new Disneyland, he relocated his attractions to Disneyland in California and began seeking cheap land in the swamps south of Orlando, FL for a new plan. His tremendous vision for a city of the future, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, was too grandiose and his health too poor to be implemented (he would die of cancer in 1966), but the Epcot theme park was inspired by the World's Fair and Walt Disney World is now practically a city-state in and of itself as the Disney media juggernaut grows without pause. quote:James Bond sat back and lit one of his last Morland Specials. By lunchtime it would be king-size Chesterfields. The Astor. It was as good as another and Bond liked the Times Square jungle – the hideous souvenir shops, the sharp clothiers, the giant feedomats, the hypnotic neon signs, one of which said BOND in letters a mile high. Here was the guts of New York, the living entrails. His other favourite quarters had gone – Washington Square, the Battery, Harlem, where you now needed a passport and two detectives. The Savoy Ballroom! What fun it had been in the old days! There was still Central Park, which would now be at its most beautiful – stark and bright. As for the hotels, they too had gone – the Ritz Carlton, the St. Regis that had died with Michael Arlen. The Carlyle was perhaps the lone survivor. The rest were all the same – those sighing lifts, the rooms full of last month’s air and a vague memory of ancient cigars, the empty ‘You’re welcomes,’ the thin coffee, the almost blue-white boiled eggs for breakfast (Bond had once had a small apartment in New York. He had tried everywhere to buy brown eggs until finally some grocery clerk had told him, ‘We don’t stock ’em, mister. People think they’re dirty’), the dank toast (that shipment of toast racks to the Colonies must have foundered!). Ah me! Yes, the Astor would do as well as another. Of course, you can now ironically buy brown eggs for an even higher price than white ones! The Ritz-Carlton hotel was indeed demolished in 1951, but the St. Regis was still open at the time of Bond's visit. Bond seems to be referring to a dip in quality instead, as Vincent Astor (who was in the process of restoring it) died in 1959 and the operating license was sold to Mexican hotel mogul Cesar Balsa. Balsa saved the building from demolition and ensured that the hotel would survive into the present day despite the economic troubles New York City would face in the coming decades. Michael Arlen was an Armenian-British essayist and scriptwriter who was famous for his thrillers and gothic horror works. His novel, The Green Hat, was popular but so scandalous with its references to homosexuality and syphilis that the adaptations A Woman of Affairs and Outcast Lady heavily censored it. Arlen was a flamboyant figure with a yellow Rolls-Royce who helped fund The Vortex by a young Noel Coward, but died of cancer in 1956. quote:Bond glanced at his watch. He would be there by eleven-thirty, then a brief shopping expedition, but a very brief one because nowadays there was little to buy in the shops that wasn’t from Europe – except the best garden furniture in the world, and Bond hadn’t got a garden. The drug-store first for half a dozen of Owens incomparable toothbrushes. Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette’s own product, Tripler’s for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner’s because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie’s to look over the new gadgets and, incidentally, make a date with Solange (appropriately employed in their Indoor Games Department) for the evening. The name Solange would later be recycled for the Casino Royale film as the wife of Alex Dimitrios, the man whom Daniel Craig's Bond wins the Aston-Martin DB5 from. When Solange inadvertently tips Bond off to Quantum's plans, Le Chiffre has her killed.  Hoffritz was a popular store with multiple locations, with the one Bond visited being inside the Roosevelt Hotel at 367 Madison Avenue between 45th and 46th Street; it changed its name to International Cutlery before closing and is now a Jean-Claude Biguine salon. FR Tripler's was right across the street and currently home to a real estate agency next to a JoS. A. Bank clothing store.  At this time, Abercrombie & Fitch was a single 12-story sporting goods store that included a basement shooting range, sporting books store, watch repair shop, gun store, golf school, and all sorts of other floors for sporting and shooting goods and services. This is before their rebranding into a casual clothing brand.  Scribner's unfortunately closed in 1989 after 76 years in business, though the Charles Scribner name still exists as a publishing company. The space is now a Lululemon. quote:The Cadillac was running the hideous gauntlet of the used car dumps, and chromium-plated swindles leered and winked. What happened to these re-sprayed crocks when the weather had finally rotted their guts? Where did they finally go to die? Mightn’t they be useful if they were run into the sea to conquer coastal erosion? Take a letter to the Herald Tribune! Bond was an early proponent of the cool and legal practice of throwing your car batteries into the ocean. quote:Then there was the question of lunch. Dinner with Solange would be easy – Lutèce in the sixties, one of the great restaurants of the world. But for lunch by himself? In the old days it would certainly have been the ‘21’, but the expense-account aristocracy had captured even that stronghold, inflating the prices and, because they didn’t know good from bad, deflating the food. But he would go there for old times’ sake and have a couple of dry martinis – Beefeaters with a domestic vermouth, shaken with a twist of lemon peel – at the bar. And then what about the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers, and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central? No, he didn’t want to sit up at a bar – somewhere spacious and comfortable where he could read a paper in peace. Yes. That was it! The Edwardian Room at the Plaza, a corner table. They didn’t know him there, but he knew he could get what he wanted to eat – not like Chambord or Pavilion with their irritating Wine and Foodmanship and, in the case of the latter, the miasma of a hundred different women’s scents to confound your palate. He would have one more dry martini at the table, then smoked salmon and the particular scrambled eggs he had once (Felix Leiter knew the head-waiter) instructed them how to make. Yes, that sounded all right. He would have to take a chance with the smoked salmon. It used to be Scotch in the Edwardian Room, not that thickly cut, dry and tasteless Canadian stuff. But one could never tell with American food. As long as they got their steaks and sea-food right, the rest could go to hell. And everything was so long frozen, in some vast communal food-morgue presumably, that flavour had gone from all American food except the Italian. Everything tasted the same – a sort of neutral food taste. When had a fresh chicken – not a broiler – a fresh farm egg, a fish caught that day, last been served in a New York restaurant? Was there a market in New York, like les Halles in Paris and Smithfields in London, where one could actually see fresh food and buy it? Bond had never heard of one. People would say that it was unhygienic. Were the Americans becoming too hygienic in general – too bug-conscious? Every time Bond had made love to Solange, at a time when they should be relaxing in each other’s arms, she would retire to the bathroom for a long quarter of an hour and there was a lengthy period after that when he couldn’t kiss her because she had gargled with T.C.P. And the pills she took if she had a cold! Enough to combat double pneumonia. But James Bond smiled at the thought of her and wondered what they would do together – apart from Lutèce and Love – that evening. Again, New York had everything. He had heard, though he had never succeeded in tracing them, that one could see blue films with sound and colour and that one’s sex life was never the same thereafter. That would be an experience to share with Solange! And that bar, again still undiscovered, which Felix Leiter had told him was the rendezvous for sadists and masochists of both sexes. The uniform was black leather jackets and leather gloves. If you were a sadist, you wore the gloves under the left shoulder strap. For the masochists it was the right. As with the transvestite places in Paris and Berlin, it would be fun to go and have a look. In the end, of course, they would probably just go to The Embers or to hear Solange’s favourite jazz and then home for more love and T.C.P. Yes Bond, go to the BDSM meetup spot just to "go have a look." Definitely no intention of participating.  Lutèce, at 249 E. 50th Street, closed in 2004 after 43 years in operation. It had been one of the final luxury French restaurants of the old guard before its closure, with its founder Andre Surmain dying in 2018.  The Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant has been in continuous operation (minus a fire in 1997) since 1913. It's a perfectly fine restaurant, but I'd hardly call the oyster stew and Miller High Life the "best meal in New York." I guess Bond really is a man of simple tastes when you get down to it.    The Edwardian Room at the Plaza Hotel is now an event space rather than a restaurant. In 1970 the restaurant was renamed The Green Tulip and fully redesigned into what has been called a "horrible mistake" and "something out of a shopping center department store". The horror show of folk singers and Wizard of Oz-style waiter costumes on gaudy carpeting lasted for only a few years before the hotel copped to their mistake and returned it to The Edwardian Room, but it hasn't held a restaurant for years. quote:James Bond smiled to himself. They were soaring over the Triborough, that supremely beautiful bridge into the serried battlements of Manhattan. He liked looking forward to his pleasures, to stolen exeats between the working hours. He enjoyed day-dreaming about them, down to the smallest detail. And now he had made his plans and every prospect pleased. Of course things could go wrong, he might have to make some changes. But that wouldn’t matter. New York has everything. New York may have changed, but this remains the same. It really does have everything. quote:New York has not got everything. The consequences of the absent amenity were most distressing for James Bond. After the scrambled eggs in the Edwardian Room, everything went hopelessly wrong and, instead of the dream programme, there had to be urgent and embarrassing telephone calls with London head-quarters and, and then only by the greatest of good luck, an untidy meeting at midnight beside the skating rink at Rockefeller Center with tears and threats of suicide from the English girl. And it was all New York’s fault! One can hardly credit the deficiency, but there is no Reptile House at the Central Park Zoo. And yet even on the simplest of assignments, James Bond can find a way to gently caress it up! But you're not here for Bond making a mess of things. You're here for the official James Bond scrambled eggs recipe! quote:SCRAMBLED EGGS ‘JAMES BOND’  I unfortunately have not gotten the time to make this recipe myself, but this is quite a lot of butter! The original recipe actually came from Ian Fleming's Sunday Times column, Atticus, on December 25th, 1955. Fleming credits the recipe (very slightly different) to Bartolomeo Calderoni of the May Fair Hotel in London, who would later publish The Complete Book of Cold Dishes in 1978. And that's it! We only have one more Ian Fleming official Bond story left, albeit one that was incomplete: The Man with the Golden Gun.
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Feb 5, 2020 17:55
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Somebody Awful posted:Maybe unrelated, but this wasn't long after the Penguin Books obscenity trial over publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Yeah, it's probably unrelated - that sounds much more like a crappy pulp novel; James Hadley Chase rather than D H Lawrence. Semi-relatedly, google Silber Grusel-Krimi for some absolutely awesome German pulp covers of the period.
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Feb 5, 2020 22:41
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Not going to lie, that James Bond Sniper story was really good. The stark differences in writing between this thread and the Twilight thread are glaring. Flemming was a pretty good writer, all told.
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Feb 6, 2020 16:15
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 Even Ian Fleming knew this would be the last Bond novel. The case over Thunderball ended in December 1963 with a success for Kevin McClory; after several years of litigation, Ivar Bryce (who was financing Ian's side of the case) convinced him to throw in the towel. His legal woes would not end that soon, however, as the previous month he had filed an action against The Daily Sketch for printing Bond's obituary in the paper and was almost immediately afterward sued by Jack Whittingham, the scriptwriter who had helped in the abortive attempt at a Bond film that became Thunderball. Much like Major Smythe, he suffered constant heart pain and took nitroglycerin pills and digitalis to try and improve his shortened lifespan. When he traveled to Jamaica in January 1964, his wife didn't come with him. Fleming spent his time writing The Man with the Golden Gun instead with Ivar Bryce, Charles Wacker, and his mistress/muse Blanche Blackwell. His attempt to moderate his drinking and smoking was futile and he had been rendered only capable of writing for about 90 minutes a day instead of his previously breakneck pace. Despite their fighting, he was lonely without his wife and he called Ann to join him; she begrudgingly left for the tropics she never cared much for, only to learn why she hadn't come when some irritating moments with their friends led to him telling her "gently caress off. Go home at once. Do you expect me to look at your face every evening?" He eventually calmed down, but the last year of his life was not a happy one. He knew his time had come. Fleming returned to England in March with his draft, which he gave to his editor William Plomer in a sorry state. It required so much work that Fleming almost demanded it be put on hold for him to revise the next year. His time in his home country was one of pain and sorrow, as he was in and out of the hospital or bedridden with illness. Realizing that he would never improve, he took to the same heavy smoking and drinking that had left him in such a condition and began spending less time with his equally depressed wife and more time with his nurse, Sister Bridget Jones. He developed a fear of the number 13 and the color black, demanding the bedroom carpet be changed to red. His mother Eve died on July 26, and for the first time in his life Ian Fleming began to fear death. Despite barely hanging on by a thread, on August 11 Fleming chose to stagger into the Royal St. George's golf club for lunch with his friends, then dinner with Michael Astor at the hotel. It was finally too much, and he collapsed of a heart attack shortly after the meal. His last recorded words were to the ambulance drivers: "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days." At 1:30 AM on August 12, 1964, Ian Fleming died. As the tributes poured out from the newspapers and authors, the question of what to do with his draft remained. The complicated task of sorting out who had the rights to what led to Ann Fleming being made Honorary President of the production company, Glidrose Publications (the contract of the sale to Booker had required all presidents appointed by Fleming to be male). Kingsley Amis, whom Fleming had struck up a friendship with in his final months, was paid to complete the editing of The Man with the Golden Gun for publication in April 1965. It received rather poor reviews, but few were willing to truly excoriate a hastily finished first draft of a dead man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R500VKA9-Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSbj2Mx2By8 The Man with the Golden Gun was originally going to be the follow up to You Only Live Twice, moving the action from Jamaica to Cambodia, but the Samlaut Uprising made filming a bad idea at the time and they shelved it. It would finally be revived in the 70s for Roger Moore's second outing; this would be the final Bond film produced by Harry Saltzman, who had to sell his stake in Eon to pay back a massive loan from the Union Bank of Switzerland. Live and Let Die had achieved success from aping the popular genre films of the time, and so Moore's second would do the same. Now taking place predominately in Hong Kong and Thailand, it took cues from kung fu films to an almost stereotypical degree. A new MacGuffin was added, the Solex Agitator, playing on the 1973 energy crisis. The comedy was dialed up even further than usual, almost to slapstick levels, and ruined one of the greatest car stunts of all time with a slide whistle sound effect. While it was a financial success as usual, it's regarded as one of the lowest points of the series. Shock rocker Alice Cooper created a song for the film, which he claims they initially wanted to use before switching to a John Barry song sung by Scottish singer Lulu. Barry disliked the film's score and the song has some of the most overtly sexual lyrics of any Bond theme, but it was a hit for the singer. I'm personally not that fond of it and it seems to have a divisive reputation in the fandom.
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Feb 6, 2020 16:22
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chitoryu12 posted:His last recorded words were to the ambulance drivers: "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days." 
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Feb 6, 2020 19:09
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Feb 7, 2020 02:17
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Chapter 1: 'Can I help you?'quote:The Secret Service holds much that is kept secret even from very senior officers in the organization. Only M. and his Chief of Staff know absolutely everything there is to know. The latter is responsible for keeping the Top Secret record known as ‘The War Book’ so that, in the event of the death of both of them, the whole story, apart from what is available to individual Sections and Stations, would be available to their successors. This is another thing the movies don't do. Bond can always show up under his real identity (or at least his real face with no disguise) and never get called out, no matter how many public gun battles he gets into to save the world from nuclear destruction on an almost yearly basis. In the original canon, however, he's a downright celebrity even if people don't know his face. This actually helps explain why he gets caught so often on missions! In real life he'd probably have been pulled off active duty after the Goldfinger case had him in the papers meeting with the president. quote:The Liaison Section was the first cog in the machine, the first sieve. The operator got back on the line: ‘Just a moment, sir. I’ll put you on to an officer who may be able to help you.’ Huh. What's that about Colonel Boris? quote:James Bond spoke slowly and clearly. ‘This is Commander James Bond speaking. Number 007. Would you put me through to M., or his secretary, Miss Moneypenny. I want to make an appointment.’ Wow, they even gave him a passport! What nice chaps in Leningrad! quote:‘Yes,’ said Captain Walker sympathetically. ‘We seem to have got that part of it right. But I’m afraid I can’t place these people you want to talk to. Who exactly are they? This Mr Em, for instance. I don’t think we’ve got anyone of that name at the Ministry.’ And in the last book, we finally get M's real name! quote:The Chief Security Officer picked up the direct telephone to Captain Walker. Captain Walker said to James Bond, ‘drat! There’s the other telephone again. Shan’t be a minute.’ He picked up the green telephone. ‘Yes, sir?’ I dunno, I think Bond would like the Hard Man treatment. quote:Captain Walker got back to James Bond. ‘Sorry about that. It’s being a busy day. Now then, this inquiry of yours. Afraid I can’t help you myself. Not my part of the Ministry. The man you want is Major Townsend. He should be able to locate this man you want to see. Got a pencil? It’s No. 44 Kensington Cloisters. Got that? Kensington double five double five. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have a word with him and see if he can help. All right?’ Good thing Bond drinks enough vodka to meet the KGB "high life" impression. Also, note that we've finally gone all the way into the KGB instead of SMERSH a decade after their real life founding! quote:No. 44 Kensington Cloisters was a dull Victorian mansion in grimy red brick. It had been chosen for its purpose because it had once been the headquarters of the Empire League for Noise Abatement, and its entrance still bore the brass plate of this long-defunct organization, the empty shell of which had been purchased by the Secret Service through the Commonwealth Relations Office. It also had a spacious old-fashioned basement, re-equipped as detention cells, and a rear exit into a quiet mews. I don't believe this is a real place, but there was a real Anti-Noise League that put on an exhibition in the Science Museum in South Kensington in 1935 demonstrating gadgets and technology for reducing noise, such as silent typewriters, quiet circular saws, and soundproofed rooms. These were people who were serious about keeping things nice and quiet, to the extent that architectural theorist Hope Bagenal proposed apartment blocks where everyone's radios had their operating hours and volume limits set by a building attendant. quote:The Red Roses laundry van watched the front door shut behind James Bond and then moved off at a sedate speed to its garage not far from Scotland Yard while the process of developing the canonflex film went on in its interior. You may recall the Inspectoscope that Bond read a report on in the beginning of Moonraker. Looks like the Service has invested. quote:It was a pleasant, very light room, close-carpeted in dove-grey Wilton. The military prints on the cream walls were expensively framed. A small, bright fire burned under an Adam mantelpiece which bore a number of silver trophies and two photographs in leather frames – one of a nice-looking woman and the other of three nice-looking children. There was a central table with a bowl of flowers and two comfortable club chairs on either side of the fire. No desk or filing cabinets, nothing official-looking. A tall man, as pleasant as the room, got up from the far chair, dropped The Times on the carpet beside it, and came forward with a welcoming smile. He held out a firm, dry hand. Bond would have probably begged to be taken to the basement, knowing him. quote:Such was the ultimate sieve which sorted out the wheat from the chaff from those members of the public who desired access to ‘The Secret Service’. There were other people in the building who dealt with the letters. Those written in pencil or in multicoloured inks, and those enclosing a photograph, remained unanswered. Those which threatened or were litigious were referred to the Special Branch. The solid, serious ones were passed, with a comment from the best graphologist in the business, to the Liaison Section at Headquarters for ‘further action’. Parcels went automatically, and fast, to the Bomb Disposal Squad at Knightsbridge Barracks. The eye of the needle was narrow. On the whole, it discriminated appropriately. It was an expensive set-up, but it is the first duty of a Secret Service to remain not only secret but secure. Wow, Colonel Boris seems like such a helpful man! Doing all this just to get Bond meeting with his old boss again! quote:So now James Bond paused before he replied to Major Townsend’s question about how he could be of help. He looked at the Soft Man and then into the fire. He added up the accuracy of the description he had been given of Major Townsend’s appearance and, before he said what he had been told to say, he gave Colonel Boris ninety out of a hundred. The big, friendly face, the wide-apart, pale-brown eyes, bracketed by the wrinkles of a million smiles, the military moustache, the rimless monocle dangling from a thin black cord, the brushed-back, thinning sandy hair, the immaculate double-breasted blue suit, stiff white collar and Brigade tie – it was all there. But what Colonel Boris hadn’t said was that the friendly eyes were as cold and steady as gun barrels and that the lips were thin and scholarly. Kingsley Amis's role in the completion of this book is controversial. At its most extreme are the claims that the manuscript was completely unfinished and that Amis wrote at least part of the book himself. At the other end is the claim (including by Fleming's biographer, Andrew Lycett) that he merely reviewed it and the published book is exactly what Fleming had wrote in Jamaica before returning to his homeland to die. In their December 2016 auction, Sotheby's sold a copy of the corrected typescript of the novel for £65,000. The notes are in Fleming's own hand, indicating that he had already been in the process of revising the manuscript when he died, and there's one page of suggestions from Amis. This should put to bed the rumor that Amis actually had to finish the book, but their writing styles are similar enough that it's likely impossible to confirm if any of the text we see here was added by him. quote:James Bond said patiently: ‘It’s really quite simple. I’m who I say I am. I’m doing what I naturally would do, and that’s report back to M.’ The mention of Bond's work from "The Property of a Lady" is enough to convince Townsend that this really is Bond. He hands Bond the newspaper (treated to retain excellent fingerprints) and heads across the hall to the Hard Man's room to borrow his phone scrambler. quote:Major Townsend picked up the green receiver and was put through to the Laboratory. ‘Major Townsend speaking. Any comment?’ He listened, carefully, said ‘thank you’, and got through to the Chief Security Officer at Headquarters. ‘Well, sir, I think it must be 007. Bit thinner than his photographs. I’ll be giving you his prints as soon as he’s gone. Wearing his usual rig – dark-blue single-breasted suit, white shirt, thin black knitted silk tie, black casuals – but they all look brand new. Raincoat bought yesterday from Burberry’s. Got the Freudenstadt question right, but says he won’t say anything about himself except to M. personally. But whoever he is, I don’t like it much. He fluffed on his special cigarettes. He’s got an odd sort of glazed, sort of far-away look, and the “Scope” shows that he’s carrying a gun in his right-hand coat pocket – curious sort of contraption, doesn’t seem to have got a butt to it. I’d say he’s a sick man. I wouldn’t personally recommend that M. should see him, but I wouldn’t know how we’re to get him to talk unless he does.’ He paused. ‘Very good, sir. I’ll stay by the telephone. I’m on Mr Robson’s extension.’ Hm, a strange gun in his pocket? I know Bond may be careless about how he operates (remember Grant?), but surely the rest of the Service will make sure to take Townsend at his word about his odd behavior and make sure he's thoroughly checked first. Just in case. quote:There was silence in the room. The two men didn’t get on well together. Major Townsend gazed into the gas fire, wondering about the man next door. The telephone burred. ‘Yes, sir? Very good, sir. Would your secretary send along a car from the pool? Thank you, sir.’ Ah. I was wrong. They're all like this. quote:James Bond smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile which didn’t light up his eyes. He said, ‘That’s very kind of him. Would you tell him I’m afraid I shan’t be free.’
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Feb 7, 2020 15:41
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Also, I know I usually only show the standard first edition cover of each book as Fleming commissioned and approved, but there's a neat thing about the very first print run of this book. Originally, the book was meant to have an embossed golden gun on the cover under the dust jacket as a neat little surprise for readers. Unfortunately, the gun didn't hold up well and the cost of the gilding was cost-prohibitive considering the retail cost of a regular novel. After only 940 printings, the concept was scrapped. These are now extremely rare collectibles that run upwards of $12,000.
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Feb 7, 2020 15:51
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chitoryu12 posted:I don't believe this is a real place, but there was a real Anti-Noise League that put on an exhibition in the Science Museum in South Kensington in 1935 demonstrating gadgets and technology for reducing noise, such as silent typewriters, quiet circular saws, and soundproofed rooms. These were people who were serious about keeping things nice and quiet, to the extent that architectural theorist Hope Bagenal proposed apartment blocks where everyone's radios had their operating hours and volume limits set by a building attendant. A proto-HOA!
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Feb 7, 2020 23:37
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Out of all the Bond books I read way back when, I think this is the one I remember the most of. We'll see if I'm right.Runcible Cat posted:Semi-relatedly, google Silber Grusel-Krimi for some absolutely awesome German pulp covers of the period. What's Weasels Ripped My Flesh in German? 
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Feb 8, 2020 04:28
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It seems appropriate to the thread that I stumbled across this meta-criticism of Fleming and Bond this evening - not commenting on Bond directly, but on those who have analyzed him in the past. I'll leave it here if you have a spare five minutes. http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2020/2/7/enemy-action Oberndorf fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 06:16
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Jesus christ, some of the reviewers were vile in their treatment of Fleming.
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Feb 9, 2020 19:42
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I didn't realize so much of it came from one guy with an ax to grind. 
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Feb 9, 2020 21:09
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Muggeridge is the only man twattish enough to visibly irritate Michael Palin when he tried his schtick on TV about the controversy surrounding the life of Brian, he peddled his poo poo for decades, it's quite a good watch that debate because he makes a right tit of himself. He embodies the absolute nadir of British faux intellectual criticism, one can draw a lot of parallels between his style as a journalist and that of our current illustrious PM and many other journalists besides.
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Feb 9, 2020 21:31
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That's an excellent article and it encapsulates a lot of my problem with modern criticism of Fleming's writing. Refusing to read and fully understand the books and Fleming's own life creates an inherent inability to review them critically. Everyone who posts very negative reviews of the Bond books seems to be approaching it with either an agenda or preconceived notions of their content and filters the writing through that without understanding the context, both historically and from Fleming's own quirks and life.
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Feb 9, 2020 21:47
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Polyakov posted:Muggeridge is the only man twattish enough to visibly irritate Michael Palin when he tried his schtick on TV The whole debate is on YouTube if anyone else wants to suffer through it. According to the comments, Muggeridge was also a serial groper during his BBC days before he found religion.
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Feb 10, 2020 04:16
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Chapter 2: Attentat!quote:The Chief of Staff stood in front of M.’s desk and said firmly, ‘I really wouldn’t do it, sir. I can see him, or someone else can. I don’t like the smell of it at all. I think 007’s round the bend. There’s no doubt it’s him all right. The prints have just been confirmed by Chief of Security. And the pictures are all right – and the recording of his voice. But there are too many things that don’t add up. This forged passport we found in his room at the Ritz, for instance. All right. So he wanted to come back into the country quietly. But it’s too good a job. Typical K.G.B. sample. And the last entry is West Germany, day before yesterday. Why didn’t he report to Station B or W? Both those Heads of Station are friends of his, particularly 016 in Berlin. And why didn’t he go and have a look at his flat? He’s got some sort of a housekeeper there, Scots woman called May, who’s always sworn he was still alive and has kept the place going on her savings. The Ritz is sort of “stage” Bond. And these new clothes. Why did he have to bother? Doesn’t matter what he was wearing when he came in through Dover. Normal thing, if he was in rags, would have been to give me a ring – he had my home number – and get me to fix him up. Have a few drinks and run over his story and then report here. Instead of that we’ve got this typical penetration approach and Security worried as hell.’ M waves off Tanner's worries. He doesn't find any of this suspicious enough to not let Bond in to report to him personally, at least while his security measures are present. Back in the hallway, Bond gazes blankly down at Moneypenny. She immediately recognizes that there's something terribly wrong, but Tanner tells her not to worry as he calls the head of security and begins piping the sound from M's office into their room. quote:James Bond took his usual place across the desk from M. A storm of memories whirled through his consciousness like badly cut film on a projector that had gone crazy. Bond closed his mind to the storm. He must concentrate on what he had to say, and do, and on nothing else. It's always easier to brainwash someone who already feels these things subconsciously. quote:M. said fiercely, ‘It certainly is. I suppose among other things you’ve forgotten is reading reports of our P.O.W.s in the Korean war who were brainwashed by the Chinese. If the Russians are so keen on peace, what do they need the K.G.B. for? At the last estimate, that was about one hundred thousand men and women “making war” as you call it against us and other countries. This is the organization that was so charming to you in Leningrad. Did they happen to mention the murder of Horcher and Stutz in Munich last month?’ These don't appear to be real people, but in 1962 a KGB spy named Bogdan Stashinsky was put on trial for murder after defecting to the West. He had assassinated Ukrainian nationalists Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera with a gun that fired an atomized cyanide mist in the victim's face, causing what appeared to be a fatal heart attack. quote:‘Oh yes, sir.’ Bond’s voice was patient, equable. ‘They have to defend themselves against the secret services of the West. If you would demobilize all this,’ Bond waved a hand, ‘they would be only too delighted to scrap the K.G.B. They were quite open about it all.’ At this point the spy ring has been publicly revealed to include Burgess, Maclean, and Fleming's acquaintance Kim Philby. Burgess had died of alcoholism only 5 months before Fleming began writing this book. quote:‘We thought it more important that I should come back and fight for peace here, sir. You and your agents have taught me certain skills for use in the underground war. It was explained to me how these skills could be used in the cause of peace.’  This is the real weapon used by Stashinsky. It was carried concealed in a rolled-up newspaper. quote:The Chief of Staff had burst into the room, followed by the Head of Security. They threw themselves on James Bond. Even as they seized his arms his head fell forward on his chest and he would have slid from his chair to the ground if they hadn’t supported him. They hauled him to his feet. He was in a dead faint. The Head of Security sniffed. ‘Cyanide,’ he said curtly. ‘We must all get out of here. And bloody quick!’ (The emergency had snuffed out Headquarters ‘manners’.) The pistol lay on the carpet where it had fallen. He kicked it away. He said to M., who had walked out from behind his glass shield, ‘Would you mind leaving the room, sir? Quickly. I’ll have this cleaned up during the lunch hour.’ It was an order. M. went to the open door. Miss Moneypenny stood with her clenched hand up to her mouth. She watched with horror as James Bond’s supine body was hauled out and, the heels of its shoes leaving tracks on the carpet, taken into the Chief of Staff’s room. As Tanner checks Bond's pulse, M casually mentions how he had the deployable bulletproof glass installed after his predecessor was shot by a crazed officer. He orders Tanner to call up Sir James Molony and have Bond taken surreptitiously for treatment. They'll pay up Bond's bill at the Ritz and put a notice in the newspaper expressing their happiness at Bond's return from his disappearance and time convalescing after his experiences, which will also serve as a way of telling the Soviets that their plan failed. quote:Bill Tanner had been writing furiously to keep up with M. He looked up from his scratch pad, bewildered. ‘But aren’t you going to make any charges, sir? After all, treason and attempted murder … I mean, not even a court martial?’ That's the rub for this one. If you knew a bit about the book, you might be wondering why Bond would be put on assignment so soon after being brainwashed and attempting to assassinate his boss. The answer is simple: it's a suicide mission. Either he really has been cured, or he'll receive his punishment without the world at large knowing a thing. quote:There was a knock on the door and the duty Medical Officer came into the room. M. bade him good afternoon and turned stiffly on his heel and walked out through the open door.
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Feb 10, 2020 15:03
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