was no longer the global power it had once confidently assumed it always would be and was now running, or perhaps limping, in third place behind the USA and Soviet Russia in any international race. On the home front it struggled simply to get by, a depressing state of affairs for a country which thought it had won the war. Even seven years after the end of hostilities, basic foodstuffs were in short supply (sweets and sugar rationing ending in 1953), there were uncleared bomb sites in many cities and government restrictions on building materials for anything other than housing meant that many buildings including the morale-boosting British pub were at best badly run-down, at worst still bombed-out shells. Until 1952, Britons were required to carry Identity Cards, something perceived (still) as a very un-British, ‘foreign’ affectation unless there was a war on and in 1953, to add insult to injury, the England football team was soundly thrashed 6–3 by Hungary at Wembley Stadium and a new, small family car called a Volkswagen Beetle was being imported from, of all places, Germany.
It may have been a scarred country stumbling to find its place in a reshaped world, but it was not all gloom. In 1953 Mount Everest was finally conquered (technically by a New Zealander and a Nepalese, but it counted as a ‘British’ achievement). The number of television sets increased to two-and-a-half million (from around 300,000 in 1950) so that an estimated twenty million proud Britons could watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and two young scientists at Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick, discovered something called ‘DNA’. And on 13 April, a thriller called Casino Royale was published.
It marked, according to the critic Julian Symons, ‘the renaissance of the spy story’ and it unleashed the character of James Bond on an unsuspecting world. Prior to 1953, new fictional heroes had been compared to Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond, or Jonah Mansel, the ‘Terrible Trio of popular fiction between the two wars’ (as created by John Buchan, ‘Sapper’ and Dornford Yates).2 One could add Leslie Charteris’ Simon (the Saint) Templar to this list; but now Bond was the new standard.
Casino Royale, Pan, 1955, illustrated by Roger Hall
Bulldog Drummond, Hodder & Stoughton, 1920
Before Bond, heroes had been upright, square-jawed, patriotic, honourable, and always kind to women, dogs, and horses, though not necessarily in that order. If a John Buchan hero had a gun in his hand it was usually because he was striding through the heather of a Scottish grouse moor – and the same could be said of the heroes of Geoffrey Household’s thrillers of the early Fifties, substituting a Dorset heath for Scotland. Any game that James Bond was hunting with a gun was invariably human and he did not really seem to care too much if an innocent bystander got in the way, and whilst avid fans of E. Phillips Oppenheim and Peter Cheyney would feel right at home with the descriptions of luxury living and thick-eared violence, there was no doubt that Bond was something different.3
Unlike the grey and shady worlds created before the war by those masters of the more ‘realistic’ spy novel, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler (and indeed W. Somerset Maugham in his influential 1928 ‘novel of the secret service’ Ashenden – or The British Agent), Fleming had created a Technicolor dream land littered with fast cars, trips abroad, good food, fine wines, and beautiful women. It was just the sort of fantasy needed to brighten the monochrome Fifties landscape.
As John Welcome was to put it, Casino Royale had ‘put the blood and thunder (especially the blood) back into the thriller … [restoring] three essential ingredients: pace, violence and vitality.’4
Confident that he had written a successful thriller, Fleming himself indulged in a bit of fantasy. He bought a gold-plated typewriter and then requested a first print run of 10,000 copies from his publisher. The publisher, Jonathan Cape, took this request from a debut author as seriously as any publisher ever takes a request from a writer and printed half that quantity. That first run sold out in under a month and Fleming was left grinding his teeth when a second print of only 2,000 copies went equally quickly.5
However shaky, to Fleming, was the start for Casino Royale (though many a contemporary crime writer would be very pleased, in fact rather smug, with that initial hardback print run), it has been estimated that within five years, once the Pan paperback edition had appeared in 1955, a million Britons had bought Casino Royale, though fewer than one in 10,000 would ever visit a casino.6 They did not have to: the fact that James Bond was quite at home in a casino or a five-star hotel, or on a transatlantic jet-liner or a beach in Jamaica, was fantasy enough for most readers in those austere times.
There was another male fantasy which James Bond provided in satisfying quantities in comparison with what had gone before: sex. Kingsley Amis put it succinctly thus: ‘No decent girl enjoys sex – only tarts. Buchan’s heroes believed this. Fleming’s didn’t.’
It may seem that James Bond provided everything readers, at least male ones, desired that they were denied in real life: sex, travel, luxury branded goods, un-rationed foods, alcohol, sadistic villains and guns to battle them with, cars, and all with an impressive salary of £1,500 a year, as well as a small private income, as revealed in Moonraker. (Bond’s boss, ‘M’, by the time we get to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, received a staggering £5,000 a year, almost as much as a Chancellor of the Exchequer.) Which red-blooded male would not want to be James Bond (perhaps without the famous Casino Royale carpet-beater torture scene), let alone read about him?
Yet in the overall thriller market, Bond did not have it all his own way, far from it. Fleming himself took a keen interest in how his rivals in the bookshops were doing and in 1955 undertook a piece of undercover work, wining and dining an executive from a rival publisher, Collins. He was somewhat chastened to learn that the books of the leading writer of adventure thrillers, Hammond Innes, were regularly selling between 40,000 and 60,000 copies in hardback and were already proving successful as Fontana paperbacks. They were to be even more successful in the next decade, despite the fact that they contained no sex or sadism and relatively little violence. Innes’ heroes were anything but supermen, rather they were invariably honest, decent, and upright citizens. They certainly did not have expensive tastes in wine, food, or clothes and were more likely to be found driving a bulldozer or a snow plough than a supercharged Bentley (though Hammond Innes’ books always supplied a touch of the exotic through their settings). The reader could always rely on Innes for an exciting scene or two involving skiing or sailing, usually in extreme weather conditions, and travel to a foreign land unfamiliar to most readers. The Strange Land, published in 1954, was far from one of Innes’ best adventures but it was set in Morocco, a country which today is considered a tourist destination only a three-hour-flight away but for most readers back in 1954 must have been as mysterious as Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
There was also competition from other thriller writers who were now seasoned veterans. Dennis Wheatley, who had briefly worked with Fleming on deception initiatives during the war, was exorcising his two favourite demons in the shape of communism in Curtain of Fear and Satanism in To the Devil – A Daughter. That other stalwart of the thriller genre, Victor Canning, who like Wheatley and Innes had first been published before 1939, was also enjoying considerable success. Three of his thrillers – The Golden Salamander, Panthers’ Moon and Venetian Bird, set in Algeria, the Swiss Alps, and Venice respectively – had been filmed between 1950 and 1952, with reliable British stars such as Trevor Howard and Richard Todd. In 1953, arguably Canning’s best spy story A Forest of Eyes was published as a Pan paperback. Set in Yugoslavia, this book was clearly influenced by Eric Ambler’s 1938 thriller Cause for Alarm set in Italy (Canning and Ambler were wartime pals), which also, coincidentally, became a Pan paperback in 1954.
