Getting In At The Bottom Floor: 'Dr. No' by Ian Fleming (1958)

Fleming was a bit of a lad

I suppose I am (as usual) stretching the concept of the ‘lost world’ with this one. But bear with me, and see if you can follow: one of my own personal headcanon lost worlds is the lost world of James Bond’s 1950s Britain, and the tail end of its empire. Reading Bond, for me, is like getting a glimpse into an alien world, full of completely foreign presumptions and expectations about the world. This worldview, largely, is not only Bond’s, but Fleming’s own.

You Only Read Twice: My History With Dr. No

I’m fairly certain that I picked up this battered 1964 Pan edition of Dr. No in 2013, in a charity shop in Epsom in Surrey. I read it in a Wetherspoons (The Assembly Rooms, Epsom) over a couple of ales, and finished it in the airport on a trip to Budapest that same year. Even then, I was interested not only in the fantastical, over-the-top world of Bond, but in the man himself: how he dressed, what he ate, how he liked to enjoy himself. It was famously said during Fleming’s lifetime that the Bond novels owed their success to the winning combination of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism,’ and for whatever reason, it was the snobbery that fascinated me. Bond’s aspirational upper-middle-class lifestyle is described in the kind of delicious detail that must have been catnip to rationing-bound readers during the grey British 50s.

Here at the Explorer's Club, I'm at the tail end of a Bond fixation that gripped me over the past winter. It started with a chance viewing of Moonraker, seen as God intended (on RTE 2, midweek, with ad breaks). This lead me to dig out this battered paperback from the Club library.

The Devil Is A Gentleman: Wheatley and Fleming

Besides Bond’s more obvious literary inspirations (John Buchan and other early 20th century spy writers), the debt Fleming owed to Dennis Wheatley is finally being accepted. Both men worked in (or adjacent to) British intelligence during the war, and they certainly knew one another from Wheatley’s famous networking lunches during this period. Fleming was well-read in his genre, and would have been familiar with Wheatley’s spy characters Roger Brooke and Gregory Sallust. More specifically, Fleming almost certainly took inspiration from Wheatley’s own use of luxury brand names and product placement in his novels, something which had had not been common before Wheatley. Dennis called it ‘the luxury tradition of cheap literature,’ and Fleming adopted it wholesale. As Wheatley's Duc de Richleau drank Imperial Tokay wine and smoked Hoyo De Monterrey cigars, James Bond would smoke cigarettes specially rolled for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street (also true of Fleming), drank Old Grandaddy Bourbon, and thrashed his 1930 Blower Bentley along the Albert Embankment.

Reading Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born by Matthew Parker, I got the feeling that Fleming himself was actually quite a bit more privileged and moneyed than even Bond, something I wasn’t expecting. Both enjoy the finer things in life, but Bond does so as part of a difficult and dangerous life as a civil servant, while Fleming lived a life much closer to that of the idle rich.

Rereading Dr No this past winter here at the Explorer’s Club (over some Tullamore Dew Caribbean), I was reminded that though the movie version was Bond’s first, the book was actually the sixth in the series. This means that the chronology is of course, quite different. It’s a bit jarring to visualise the story of Dr No in a universe in which the likes of Live And Let Die have already happened!

Fleming is really hitting his stride by this point, and many of the classic Bond elements we would now recognise are solidly in place. It was surprisingly to me just how much of the Bond we know is already in place in the books, and was to make its way through to the films.

The Sun Never Sweats: Bond’s Jamaica

Dr No gets underway when M sends Bond on a mission to Jamaica to investigate the deaths of two British agents. As Bond prepares to leave grey, wet, dreary Britain for these sunnier climes, M is even a little bit jealous of his protégé. And Fleming, of course, knew Jamaica well. He had first visited the island on an intelligence reccy during the war, took one look at this warm, idyllic colony where the British Empire still held sway, and swore that he would live there one day. After the war, he built his ranch (the famous Goldeneye) on the northeast coast, where for two months of every year, he lived a life of swimming, drinking, shagging, and writing spy thrillers.

Goldeneye as it is today, a luxury resort

The Empire (with Jamaica as a last vestige of it by the 50s) is an important subtext to all the Bond novels. The 50s is a time in which Britain is grappling with no longer being a world power. Bond, and the fantastical version of British Intelligence he represents, is a way of playing out the fantasy that Britain is still important, a nation with global reach. Jamaica is a kind of nostalgic locus, a reminder of how things were when Brittania ruled the waves.

Before Bond leaves London, there’s a fun scene with a proto-Q character, an armourer named Boothroyd who instructs Bond that he must use a Smith and Wesson rather than his preferred Beretta (‘ladies gun, sir’).

When Bond gets to Jamaica, he’s given a rundown on what the island is like by the local Colonial Secretary at the Queen’s Club:

It’s like this. The Jamaican is a kindly, lazy man with the virtues and vices of a child. He lives on a very rich island but he doesn’t get rich from it. He doesn’t know how to and he’s very lazy. The British come and go and take the easy pickings, but for about two hundred years no Englishman has made a fortune out here. He doesn’t stay long enough. He takes a far cut and leaves. It’s the Portuguese Jews who make the most. But they’re snobs and they spend too much of their fortunes on building fine houses and giving dances.

As Bond drives around Jamaica, he enjoys the colour, warmth, sunlight, the downtrodden locals - and cheerfully notes that it feels as if little has changed in several hundred years (ie, since slave times). Then he gets to his base, a house he has used before, in Live And Let Die. Idly, he wonders what happened to Solitaire, the Bond girl from that particular adventure. But not for too long - there's work to do. Of course, Bond can’t get stuck into the mission proper without being adequately fed and watered. So after making arrangements with his local contact, Quarrel, he gets down to business:

Bond ordered a double gin and tonic and one whole green lime. When the drink came he cut the lime in half, dropped the two squeezed halves into the long glass, almost filled the glass with ice cubes, and then poured in the tonic. He took the drink out on to the balcony, and sat and looked out across the spectacular view. He thought how wonderful it was to be away from headquarters, and from London, and from hospitals, and to be here, doing what he was doing …

It might seem obvious to say, but Bond drinks a lot, and at really inappropriate times too. Whenever danger is near and you’d think a clear head and a steady hand would be called for, Jimmy is downing at least two thirds of a bottle of spirits.

No Time To Dine

Despite his regular bleariness, Bond notices that every ‘Chinese-negro’ on the island seems to be in on a plot to get him. Turns out they’re all in the employ of Dr Julius No, a half-German half-Chinese supervillain who lives inside a mountain of seagull guano on an island called Crab Key.

Here we find one of the classic Bond tropes most fully fleshed out: the Bond villain. Elements of this trope emerged in earlier books, but it comes together in its recognisable modern form here. Dr. No is physically grotesque: impossibly tall, thin, sinuous and snake-like, with a surgically reconstructed bald head, and metallic crab claws for hands. He is, of course, a descendant of the stock 'yellow peril' evil Chinese mastermind character of the 1890s, typified by Fu Manchu (created by Sax Rohmer, who Fleming read as a boy). He engages in the classic Bond ritual of meeting his spy enemy on tense but friendly terms at first, clothing Bond and Honey (the latest Bond girl) in fine new clothes and feeding them a luxury meal. The only thing missing is the game of golf or pigeon shoot. No is educated, loquacious, and eloquent. He admits that his own vanity is what requires him to reveal not only his evil plan, but his life story, to Bond before killing him.

And to return to the 'Lost World' theme one final time, Dr. No lives in his own hermetically sealed private world. Inside his remote guano mountain, his lair has the appearance of the most plush of high-end hotels. He stocks only the finest products in his wine cellar, his larder, and even the bedrooms and bathrooms of his prisoners. He has specially selected Crab Key as a place where he can hide from the world and plot without being disturbed. His lair is an extension of his own desire for total control. It is this element that has always fascinated me about Bond villains, perhaps realised best in the films by Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me and Drax in Moonraker.

In Dr. No, Fleming hews closer to what he knew than perhaps any other Bond novel. The post-war world of Bond, Britain's fall from superpower status (Dr No's plan targets American might, not British), and Fleming's own retreat to Empire nostalgia in Jamaica, combine to create a very specific lost world. It's a place I expect we'll return again, here at the Explorer's Club.