From Russia With Love

"This was the fifth Bond book. The books were doing very well in England, but Fleming still hadn’t broken America. He said, ‘I’m just going to put everything into this book. And if this doesn’t work, I’ll stop writing and do something else.’ It’s very similar to the film, because From Russia with Lo ve was the second Bond film made and they were still sticking pretty closely to the books. I think it’s the best written of the Bond books. It has some fantastic and very memorable sequences and all the Bond elements you want. Fleming really did put a lot into it. It’s set in Istanbul. It’s got a sequence on the Orient Express. There’s a beautiful woman. It’s got spies and all sorts of mad adventures in Turkey. The opening is different from the other Bond books. In the first third of the book, Bond doesn’t appear in person. It follows in some detail the setting up of a plot by the Russian secret service to bring Bond down. It’s really vividly written, creating this great villain, Red Grant, and also Rosa Klebb, the evil Russian spymaster. Once we get into it, it’s a classic Bond story. There are a couple of bits in it which will make a modern reader wince and maybe stop reading the book. The Turkish spymaster, Kerim Bey, has an old-fashioned attitude towards women, and Bond thinks Bey is a great character. This leads into the whole debate about misogyny in the Bond books. If that is something you don’t want to read about, then I would say not to read the book. But if you read it in the historical context of when it was written and what Fleming was trying to do, it is culturally interesting. [SPOILER ALERT] At the end of the book, Bond is killed by Rosa Klebb with the famous poisoned dagger that comes out of the end of her shoe. Fleming had said that if From Russia with Love didn’t take off, it would be the end of Bond. But the book did take off in America—particularly when President Kennedy said it was one of his favourite books and that he had it on his bedside table. At that point, Bond’s future was assured and—lo and behold—they found an antidote, and Bond came back alive in the next book."

"I think this is probably the best Bond book. It was one of Kennedy’s top ten reads. It’s different from the others in that the first third is about Smersh and Grant, who turns out to be an assassin. Also, it’s set in Istanbul which is my favourite city. I told my wife we should buy a place there but she’s not having any of it. Bond always takes us to places that, I suppose especially in the 60s, are so exotic. Fleming was actually in Istanbul in the 1950s and he uses an incident in this book, I think, where the Greek Commissioner was attacked by the Turks and the Turkish authorities just stood by. What Fleming does is he has a central character who’s totally compelling – a fantasy figure who men want to be like and women want to sleep with. He’s sophisticated and charming with a slight brutality. It dates a bit now some of that, the language and the racial depictions perhaps don’t work so well. But you’d have to struggle to look at literary fiction over the past 50 years and come up with a character who has really inhabited the popular consciousness. Also, Fleming’s a journalist and he writes in this muscular, punchy style. He has three pages on how a gun works. That really appeals to the geek in all of us. It had a fantastic cover too."

"The James Bond books represent the other end of the spectrum. These are cartoon characters in a way, but they produced the most famous single fictional spy who worked for MI6. Bond is very important. It is also quite difficult to extract the novels from the movies because we sort of visualise them. But From Russia with Love is on my list for two reasons. The first is it is the only one with an Irish angle and I am always looking for the Irish angle. And the second is there is a clear connection to Fleming’s work as an intelligence officer in the Second World War. The Irish angle is Donovan or ‘Red’ Grant, a Smersh killer, who in the movie is a blond powerful figure who goes round killing people at the drop of a hat, which of course is one of those myths about the Secret Service that people are always killing each other just like that, and that everyone has a ‘licence to kill’… According to the book, Grant, this Russian killer, is the son of an Irish mother and a German circus strongman. Now, in fact, a circus strongman really did exist. In April 1940 a German agent called Ernest Weber-Drohl landed in Southern Ireland, which was neutral during the Second World War, and he was captured by the Irish police and prosecuted in the Dublin district court for being a foreign agent. His defence was that he was a professional weightlifter who had appeared as ‘Atlas the Strong’ with a circus in Ireland before the war, and he had come back to Ireland to find his two illegitimate children. And this was the kind of little news item which would have gone through to Britain because they were so worried about German spies in the Second World War. Ian Fleming was the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence at the time, and it seems to me almost inconceivable the item didn’t pass across his desk, because the co-incidence of writing about it in From Russia with Love is just too strong. It’s the combination of the debonair skill of the English gentleman, and his light-footed ability to move through the highest levels of society without any kind of problems, with fantastic technical expertise, backed up with the most improbable gizmos of one sort or another. And although Bond gets wounded or into trouble, he always manages to come out on top in the end. It is not complete fiction. There was a man called Biffy Dunderdale whom Fleming knew and who was the MI6 Head of Station in Paris in the 1930s. He was a man of great sangfroid and style who liked fast cars and pretty women and was quite an important figure. He travelled under the name of John Green, and was a glamorous figure a bit like Bond. On the other hand, one of the reasons he was in the Service was because he spoke Russian like a native, as well as other languages, which was definitely something you needed – and still do – and something James Bond never seemed to be able to do. They [the CIA] are just an enormously bigger organisation and have a lot more resources. They started from almost nothing in the Second World War. They are much better backed up in terms of technical back-up and resources. But they don’t operate in the same way as people like James Bond, who was a bit of a loner, relying on his native wit to get by. You do get some people like that on the American side but they don’t have that languid air of effortless superiority which certainly epitomises Bond and, by default, our perception of the Secret Service."

"Well, this is all about the Cold War . It is a similar story to what Gaz Hunter was into – going across the East German border, lurking around, possibly getting captured and tortured by the Russians. There was just stuff in there that really grabbed my attention. For example, when they were being covertly filmed while they were making love in the hotel. That is stuff that can be used against you. It has been known and, of course, there are some willing locals around Hereford where the SAS are based. Did you know that an old nickname for the SAS is Sex and Suntans?! When you are getting bitten by mosquitoes in some stinking jungle or dying of thirst there is no glamour there. But there is, of course, the pride in being part of the élite and there are glamorous jobs when you get taken out of the jungle and find yourself bodyguarding the British Ambassador of Kabul. The SAS look after him. Yes, I once had to look after £90 million-worth of diamonds in two briefcases with a friend. I thought we would have an armoured car and protection, but no. They belonged to the Sultan of Brunei and they were a present for his brother. So I was sat in first-class in British Airways with £45 million-worth of jewels stuffed under my seat."