The perspective given by eighty-odd years of spy novels shows Ian Fleming to be a minor writer who, himself, did little to advance the form. Fleming possessed only meager talents as a maker of plots, and he fails absolutely when compared with the men who are popularly assumed to have been his teachers—Buchan and Sapper. He fails to render more than cartoon reality in his characters, either major or minor. With setting Fleming does do a bit better, as he needs to create settings to cover the lacunae i...

The legendary Teutonic superman Beowulf would seem to have a counterpart today in the teenagers' culture hero James Bond, secret agent 007…. [An] essential similarity exists both in general framework of the narrative and in plot details of the two bodies of work. Elements common to traditional hero-romances are present, of course, in both the Beowulf epic and the Bond novels: improbable adventures, heroic ideal of brave leader and loyal followers, concept of the hero as representative of good,...

Don't try to read any of the Bond adventures seriously! To read Bond as a scholastic exercise surely would smack of what's been termed "comic incommensurability." Bond was meant for fun, for escape, and legitimately requires the "willing suspension of disbelief"! Just like the fairy tale of the princess and the pea, real literary critics can't sleep very well when they try to read Fleming just like they'd read James Joyce. If Fleming was interested in ...

I do not care for Mr. Bond. I do not care for him at all. In this I am at variance with Mr. Amis, who in The James Bond Dossier convicts me and all like me of being perishing little snivelers [see excerpt below], nearsighted 20th-century weaklings whose sexual inadequacies lead us, twisted little devils that we are, to condemn a fully committed man who does things his way and only his way. Priggish Puritan prude snipes at never-bend stout English oak. Red glare gleams in eye—Mr. Amis points out that ...

Fleming's tradition is sub-literary. Since 1954 he has written novels at the rate of one-and-a-half a year; you can read them without undue strain at the rate of one-and-a-half a night. His field is the secret service thriller—a well-recognized, well-paid, almost routine English trade. Why then should his books have sold more than a million copies, why should the responsible English critics be in a state of outrage; why, for example, should Paul Johnson devote a leading article in The New Stat...

Mr Bergonzi's extremely interesting essay … 'The Case of Mr Fleming' [see excerpt above] raises two important points about the examination of popular culture. The first is the necessity of getting close to the audience for the particular form under study. We often speak of the literature of wish-fulfilment, without considering how seriously the public takes this sort of thing. I think that Mr Bergonzi is guilty of this fault in castigating the New Statesman public for its approva...

I have just been reading a long complaint, in the monthly The Twentieth Century, about the unsatisfactory tone of Ian Fleming's novels. The author of this complaint, Bernard Bergonzi [see excerpt above], having remarked that these novels are similar to John Buchan's in subject (spies and pursuits), then goes on to say that, whereas Buchan's books are fundamentally decent and do depend on an ethic of sorts, Commander Fleming's tales are without any ethical frame of reference and h...

The substance of Mr. Fleming's book [The Diamond Smugglers] is a series of reminiscences by a pseudonymous 'John Blaize,' describing his experiences as an official of the International Diamond Security Organisation…. The trade in illicit diamonds is described as 'the greatest smuggling racket in the world'; and it is clear there are many people and a great deal of money involved in the business. When we get down to cases, however, the difficulty is—as Mr. Fle...