Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (32 page)

Black threat is even clearer in the murder of the significantly named and sexually attractive Mary Trueblood, Strangways’ assistant, a scene Fleming describes with lascivious relish: ‘A man stood in the doorway. It wasn’t Strangways. It was a big Negro with yellowish skin and slanting eyes. There was a gun in his hand. It ended in a thick black cylinder. Mary Trueblood opened her mouth to scream. The man smiled broadly. Slowly, lovingly, he lifted the gun and shot her three times in and around the left breast.’ The subtext does not need spelling out.

But then, having invoked the spectre of black revolution in Jamaica with his comments about Queen’s Club being burnt to the ground, and the murder of Mary Trueblood, Fleming backs away. Soon after his arrival in Jamaica, Bond meets Pleydell-Smith, the Colonial Secretary, who has recently read up about Bond’s adventures in Jamaica in
Live and Let Die.
‘Splendid show. What a lark!’ he says. ‘I wish you’d start another bonfire like that here. Stir the place up a bit. All they think of nowadays is Federation and their bloody self-importance. Self-determination indeed! They can’t even run a bus service. And the colour problem! My dear chap, there’s far more colour problem between the straight-haired and the crinkly-haired Jamaicans than there is between me and my black cook.’

Although the authority of Pleydell-Smith is slightly undermined by the fact that he has failed to notice that his new secretary, Miss Taro, is a spy, he is described by Fleming as young and energetic, with ‘bright, boyish eyes’. Bond takes to him immediately: ‘Bond grinned at him. This was more like it. He had found an ally, and an intelligent one at that.’ The Jamaica Pleydell-Smith describes is certainly a more anxious place for the colonial authorities than that of
Live and Let Die
four years previously because of the blacks’ ‘self-importance’ – Bond notes on arrival that the immigration official is ‘Negro’ – but this threat is depicted as weakened by their incompetence (the bus service) and division (the colour problem).

Bond and Pleydell-Smith go for lunch at Queen’s Club, where the latter ‘delves well below the surface of the prosperous peaceful island the world knows’. In a comment that again calls to mind Evelyn Waugh’s, Pleydell-Smith explains to Bond that ‘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 too lazy.’ Having run through the other constituent parts of the population – the English, who ‘take a fat cut and leave’, the Portuguese Jews (‘snobs’), Syrians and Indians – he gets to the Chinese (in real life the bugbear of Sir Hugh Foot and generally unpopular because of their commercial success and exclusivity). They are ‘solid, compact, discreet – the most powerful clique in Jamaica. They’ve got the bakeries and the laundries and the best food stores. They keep to themselves and keep their strain pure … Not that they don’t take the black girls when they want them. You can see the result all over Kingston – Chigroes – Chinese Negroes and Negresses. The Chigroes are a tough, forgotten race. They look down on the Negroes and the Chinese look down on them. One day they may become a nuisance. They’ve got some of the intelligence of the Chinese and most of the vices of the black man. The police have a lot of trouble with them.’

It is ‘Chigroes’ – an expression that seems to be the invention of Fleming – who carry out the murders of Strangways and Trueblood and act as overseers on Crab Key. But they are only operating on behalf of Dr No. It is still the outsider who represents the greatest threat to Jamaica in the novel. Furthermore, Dr No has achieved his wealth and therefore his power thanks to his success as a gangster in New York. So there is a suggestion that it is the crime-ridden nature of American society that, in the end, threatens Jamaica, as well as the fact that the British have allowed American missiles to be stationed on their territory near the island.

More than anything, though, it is the British themselves who are to blame. It was the Jamaican imperial government who sold Dr No the island in the first place for the tempting sum of £10,000. Furthermore, the complacency of the elite residents of Richmond Road is nothing compared to what Bond finds at King’s House. Leaks from a spy in the centre of British power on the island twice threaten Bond’s life – the poisoned fruit and the centipede in his bed. Foot – a ‘great success’ – has left (he would in real life leave in late 1957 to try to sort out the difficulties in Cyprus), and the acting Governor, dressed in ‘an inappropriate wing collar and spotted bow tie’, is a time-server who keeps trying to close the Strangways case to avoid trouble – ‘all he wants is to retire and get some directorships in the City’, Bond is told by a friend in the Colonial Office. (So offended were the colonial authorities by their depiction in the novel that in 1962 they refused permission to film
Dr No
inside King’s House.) The acting Governor even wants to shut down the Secret Service office in Jamaica, having ‘every confidence in our police’, earlier dismissed by M as only understanding ‘sex and machete fights’, and seen as unsuccessful in investigating Strangways’ disappearance.

Nonetheless, the novel makes clear that this imperial weakness is not unique or specific to Jamaica. Britain’s responsibilities are shown to be widespread – in the radio calls from stations around the globe, and in M’s comment ‘There were plenty of other worries waiting
to be coped with round the world’ – but there are simply not the resources to make good on these commitments. Bond notes M’s concerns about the ‘slim funds of the Secret Service’, and how M had been unsuccessfully ‘trying for years to get the Treasury to give him an Auster [a light aircraft] for the Caribbean station’. Yet, more than financial, it is viewed as a failure of hardiness and purpose: M complains at the beginning of the novel, ‘Nowadays, softness was everywhere.’

In April 1957, Fleming travelled to Tangier to interview John Collard, an English solicitor who had worked for the Internal Diamond Security Organisation, established to reduce diamond smuggling from Sierra Leone and elsewhere. The result was a series
of articles for the
Sunday Times,
collected into a book,
The Diamond Smugglers,
which would echo and amplify many of the themes of
Dr No.
Fleming has great fun ‘Bondifying’ the whole thing, changing Collard into a ‘famous spy’, giving him a pseudonym, John Blaize, with Bond’s initials, and even allowing him Bond’s (and Fleming’s) golf handicap of nine. But he is also fascinated by Blaize’s comments about Liberia and Sierra Leone, in which he is ‘scathing about Liberia … The first Negro State
[sic],
and Utopia in the imagination of coloured peoples all over the world, and if this was going to be the pattern of Negro emancipation Blaize didn’t hold out much hope for the future of Ghana and the Federation of the West Indies.’ He ‘despised many of the comic opera Negroes in official positions, but he thought even less of the white men who backed them and often incited them in their venality’.

For Blaize, Sierra Leone is an imperial possession gone totally wrong, with corruption and squalor everywhere, leading to rioting and ‘a complete collapse of law and authority throughout the whole of a British colony nearly as big as Ireland’. He believes that only prompt action by a handful of men on the ground with ‘guts’ prevented European families being ‘hacked to death’. And again, the fault is not just with the Africans, but with ‘drift, weak local government and ignorance in Whitehall’. He concludes, like M, that, We’ve got bits and pieces of territory all around the world, and not enough money and enthusiasm to go around.’

No one can accuse Bond of ‘softness’ or a lack of enthusiasm. In
Dr No,
through bravery and initiative, he survives a tortuous journey past electric shocks, a red-hot zinc tube, huge spiders, then a captive giant squid, defeated with his improvised weapons. Dr No himself perishes, buried in guano. There is wider hope, too, at the end, when the brigadier in command of the Caribbean Defence Force takes prompt action. He is a ‘modern young soldier’, ‘unimpressed by relics from the Edwardian era of Colonial Governors, whom he
collectively referred to as “feather-hatted fuddy-duddies’”. A modern navy warship, HMS
Narvik
(flagship of the British Task Force for the atomic bomb tests in Monte Bello Islands in 1952), is on station to be sent to Crab Key. Perhaps,
Dr No
suggests, the empire is not entirely moribund after all. Best of all, for Bond and Fleming, resolution is achieved without any help from the Americans, who, in a way, caused the problems in the first place. And yet, stepping back, the overriding picture is of imperial decline, a feeling not entirely washed away by the therapeutic, fantastical heroism of Bond.

1958–60 Goldfinger; For Your Eyes Only; Thunderball

The man from the Central Intelligence Agency was due in by Pan American at 1.15. Bond hoped he wouldn’t be a muscle-bound ex-college man with a crew-cut and a desire to show up the incompetence of the British, the backwardness of their little colony.

Thunderball

Six weeks after Fleming’s return from Jamaica,
From Russia, with Love
was published by Cape in hardback. It came wrapped in what would be an award-winning jacket by a new designer, Richard Chopping, featuring the embrace of a gun and a rose. It was also serialised and heavily pushed in Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
from 1 April, a week before publication. (From July the following year,
Express
support would also include a strip cartoon of Bond’s latest adventures. Bond was on a roll.)

Fleming’s previous novel,
Diamonds are Forever,
the first to be serialised by the
Express,
had sold well, but
From Russia, with Love
was the breakthrough, the first emphatically on the best-seller lists. The timing of publication was good, against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions. An advertising campaign played on Eden’s visit to Goldeneye. Reviewers were impressed as well, the
TLS
calling it Fleming’s ‘tautest, most exciting and most brilliant tale’. Bond, the paper declared, was ‘the intellectual’s Mike Hammer’. Raymond Chandler commented that Fleming’s public would now ‘never let him go’.

From the outset, Fleming had been described by reviewers as ‘Peter Cheyney for the carriage trade’ – a thriller writer for educated, knowing, even ‘intellectual’ readers. But beginning in April 1955 with
Casino Royale,
the books were now appearing as paperbacks with ever-increasing commercial success. The year after the publication of
From Russia, with Love,
Fleming explained to a US TV company: ‘In hard covers my books are written for and appeal principally to an “A” readership, but they have all been reprinted in paperbacks, both in England and in America and it appears that the “B” and “C” classes find them equally readable.’ So readable, in fact, that the Bond books are credited with bringing the American paperback revolution to Britain. Fleming’s paperback publisher, Pan, would later affirm that no fewer than ten of the first eighteen million-selling UK paperbacks were Bond novels.

All these factors combined to make Fleming a new literary superstar. So much so that when
Dr No
was published a year later, the inevitable backlash occurred. Suddenly he was noticed, and important enough to be shot down. First off the blocks was literary critic Bernard
Bergonzi, who deplored the relish with which violence was described at a ‘horror-comic level’, and wrote that ‘Fleming rarely rises above the glossy prose of the advertising copywriter.’ Further missing the point about Fleming’s cleverly updated jingoism and imperial nostalgia, Bergonzi compared Bond unfavourably to the Buchan heroes, who were ‘more virtuous, and deserved their ultimate victory. Much of this patriotic ethic now seems impossibly priggish and even hysterical.’ He was closer to the truth when he wrote: ‘His fantasies of upper class life can only be a desire to compensate for the rigours of existence in a welfare state.’