The James Bond Dossier
Encyclopedia
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
, is a critical analysis of the James Bond novels. Amis dedicated the book to friend and background collaborator, the poet and historian Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...
. Later, after Ian Fleming’s death, Amis was commissioned as the first continuation novelist for the James Bond novel series, writing Colonel Sun
Colonel Sun
Colonel Sun , by Kingsley Amis, is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's death in 1964; Glidrose Productions used the collective pseudonym "Robert Markham", for British novelist Kingsley Amis, with the intent of so publishing other novels by different writers...
(1968) under the pseudonym Robert Markham
Robert Markham
Robert Markham is a pseudonym created by Glidrose Publications in the mid-1960s. By 1967, Glidrose, the publishers of the James Bond novel series created by Ian Fleming, had exhausted all available material written by Fleming before his death in 1964...
. The James Bond Dossier was the first, formal, literary study of the James Bond character. More recent studies of Fleming’s secret agent and his world include The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (2001), by the historian Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black may refer to:*Sir Jeremy Black , British admiral*Jeremy Black , drummer for Apollo Sunshine and Mouth Music*Jeremy Black , British military historian...
.
History
Written at the Bond-mania’s zenith in the 1960s, The James Bond Dossier is the first, thorough, albeit tongue-in-cheek, literary analysis of Ian Fleming’s strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer. As a mainstream novelist, Amis respected the Bond novels, especially their commercial success, believing them ‘to be just as complex and to have just as much in them as more ambitious kinds of fiction’. That was a controversial approach in the 1960s, because from early on, since the mid-1950s, the James Bond novels were criticised by some detractors for their violence, male chauvinism, sexual promiscuity, racism, and anti-CommunismAnti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
.
Despite his intellectual respect for the Fleming canon, Amis’s way of writing about it, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, ‘. . . partly guys academic procedures and pretensions by applying them to low-cultural objects’ and, as such, is deliberately provocative. In that context, the Dossier can ‘. . . look like a cheeky two-fingered salute to the academic world, a farewell raspberry blown at all things pedantically donnish, in a manner Lucky Jim
Lucky Jim
Lucky Jim is an academic satire written by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first novel, and won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction...
would surely have approved. For to Ian Fleming’s œuvre Amis brought the anatomising and categorising zeal he never had devoted and never would devote to more elevated works of literature’.
From essay to book
Kingsley Amis had several motives for writing the Dossier. He had recently retired from teaching and wanted to ‘put behind him the more rigid austerities of university life’. He wanted to expand his range as a writer beyond poetry and mainstream fiction. The need to make more money was also a consideration. Primarily, however, he wanted to show the academics that the literature of popular culturePopular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
could be as substantive as the literature of high culture
High culture
High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture...
. Consequently, in November 1963, he announced to Conquest the idea of writing an essay (of some 5,000 words), about the James Bond novels. In May 1964, after reading all of the then-published books (twelve novels and a short story anthology), his preliminary work revealed them as genre literature more substantive than the standard disposable thrillers. In the event, he expanded the essay to book length, and submitted it to his publisher, Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
, in late 1964. In one hundred and sixty pages, The James Bond Dossier methodically catalogues and analyses the activities and minutiae of secret agent 007: the number of men he kills, the women he loves, the villains he thwarts, and the essential background of Ian Fleming’s Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
world of the 1950s.
After Fleming’s death in August 1964, Glidrose Productions Ltd.
Ian Fleming Publications
Ian Fleming Publications is the production company formerly known as both Glidrose Productions Limited and Glidrose Publications Limited, named after its founders John Gliddon and Norman Rose...
, owners of the international book rights, asked for Amis’s editorial assessment of the uncompleted manuscript of The Man With The Golden Gun
The Man with the Golden Gun (novel)
The Man with the Golden Gun is the twelfth novel of Ian Fleming's James Bond series of books. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in the UK on 1 April 1965, eight months after the author's death. The novel was not as detailed or polished as the others in the series, leading to poor but polite...
, which Jonathan Cape deemed feeble, and perhaps unpublishable. He reported that the manuscript was publishable, but would require substantial modifications. Because Amis was not the only writer consulted, it remains controversial if his editorial suggestions were implemented, and to what extent Amis contributed directly to the revision of the manuscript. In the event, the Dossier’s publication was delayed a year, because Jonathan Cape asked Amis to include discussion of The Man With the Golden Gun. Both books were published in 1965; later that year, Amis reviewed The Man With the Golden Gun in the New Statesman.
The Dossier
The James Bond Dossier includes most of the Bond fiction cycle, excepting Octopussy and The Living DaylightsOctopussy and The Living Daylights
Octopussy and The Living Daylights is the fourteenth and final James Bond book written by Ian Fleming in the Bond series...
(1966), the final collection of 007 short stories, which was published after the Dossier. Kingsley Amis’s argument is that the Bond novels are substantial and complex works of fiction, and certainly not, as Ian Fleming’s critics said, ‘a systematic onslaught on everything decent and sensible in modern life’. He viewed them as popular literature, akin to that of the Science Fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
genre he critiqued in New Maps of Hell (1960).
Although written in Amis’s usual, accessible, light-hearted style, The James Bond Dossier is neither patronizing nor ironic — it is a detailed literary criticism of the Ian Fleming canon. In the main, he admires Fleming’s achievement, yet does not withhold criticism where the material proves unsatisfactory or inconsistent, especially when the narration slips into ‘the idiom of the novelette’. Amis reserves the most serious criticism for the academically pretentious rejections of the Bond books, a theme implicitly informing the Dossier.
Each of the 14 chapter deals with one aspect of the novels — ‘No woman had ever held this man’ defends Bond's attitude to and treatment of women: “Bond's habitual attitude to a girl is protective, not dominating or combative”; ‘Damnably clear grey eyes’ describes M., the head of SIS: “a peevish, priggish old monster”; ‘A glint of red’ is about the villains, who have in common only physical largeness and angry eyes; and so forth. According to his first biographer, Eric Jacobs, the hand of sovietologist and scholar Robert Conquest is betrayed in Amis’s precise dissertation upon the genesis and changing nomenclatures of SMERSH
SMERSH
SMERSH was the counter-intelligence agency in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially founded on April 14, 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin...
, the employer of the villains of the early novels. Three appendixes deal with science fiction, literature and escape, and 'sadism'. With ‘almost parodic scholarly dedication’, Amis provides a ten-category (‘Places’, ‘Girl’, ‘Villain’s Project’, etc.) reference guide (pp. 156–159) to the Bond novels and short stories.
Along the way, Amis enjoys himself, for example, when he explains away plot inconsistencies in Dr No (1958), wherein Bond is implausibly captured by the eponymous villain. That ‘Bond is temporarily helpless in his creator’s grip’, does not matter, because ‘three of Mr Fleming’s favourite situations are about to come up one after the other. Bond is to be wined and dined, lectured on the aesthetics of power, and finally tortured by his chief enemy’. Earlier, Amis had discussed the matter of Bond’s correct designation: ‘It’s inaccurate, of course, to describe James Bond as a spy, in the strict sense of one who steals or buys or smuggles the secrets of foreign powers . . . Bond’s claims to be considered a counter-spy, one who operates against the agents of unfriendly powers, are rather more substantial’.
Although, as noted elsewhere, Amis wrote three books related to the James Bond franchise, and may or may not have contributed to one of Fleming's novels, The James Bond Dossier would end up being the only book of this type to be published under Amis' own name.
Critical endeavours
In the 1968 essay ‘A New James Bond’, anthologised in What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (1970), Kingsley Amis revisits the literary character, and explains why he accepted the commission of writing Colonel Sun (1968), discusses the challenge of impersonating the writer Ian Fleming, and explores the stylistic and world-view differences among the spy novels of Ian FlemingIan Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
, John le Carré
John le Carré
David John Moore Cornwell , who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré"...
, and Len Deighton
Len Deighton
Leonard Cyril Deighton is a British military historian, cookery writer, and novelist. He is perhaps most famous for his spy novel The IPCRESS File, which was made into a film starring Michael Caine....
. Moreover, under the pseudonym ‘Lt.-Col. William “Bill” Tanner’ — M.’s CoS and 007’s best friend in SIS — Amis wrote his second Bond book, The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007
The Book of Bond
The Book of Bond or, Every Man His Own 007 is a book by Kingsley Amis which was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1965. For this work, Amis used the pseudonym Lt.-Col. William Tanner...
(1965), a tongue-in-cheek, how-to-manual to help the everyman find his own inner secret agent.
Other studies of the James Bond phenomenon include: Double O Seven, James Bond, A Report
Double O Seven, James Bond, A Report
Double O Seven, James Bond, A Report , by O. F. Snelling, is the first book-length, critical analysis of the James Bond novels, and the only such study Ian Fleming approved...
(1964), by O. F. Snelling (revised, re-titled, and re-published on-line, in 2007, as Double-O Seven: James Bond Under the Microscope [2006]), an analysis of Bond’s literary predecessors, his image, women, adversaries, and future; Ian Fleming: The Spy Who Came In with the Gold (1965), by Henry A. Zeiger, a biography of Fleming as a commercial writer; The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (2001), by historian Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black may refer to:*Sir Jeremy Black , British admiral*Jeremy Black , drummer for Apollo Sunshine and Mouth Music*Jeremy Black , British military historian...
, an analysis of the cultural politics of the Bond books and films; James Bond and Philosophy: Questions Are Forever (2006), edited by James B. South and Jacob M. Held, a collection of essays which discuss ethical and moral issues arising out of the Bond stories; and Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (2006), a discussion of how post–Second World War England is represented in the novels and films.