Sherlocked: going through the motions, or being too clever by half

(Note: contains spoilers. You probably wouldn’t want to read this if you have yet to see the first episode of the fourth series of Sherlock. You have been warned.)

Sherlock returned to our screens last Sunday, some seven years after Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman first appeared as the modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and three years after the third series (although there was that rather disappointing one-off one last year which purported to be a reimagining of the original, late-Victorian setting of the Sherlock Holmes adventures but which turned out to be an extended dream-sequence). I watched it, because it’s Sherlock, and even though I will be watching the rest of the series I must say that it hasn’t been the most auspicious of starts.

Yes, there was an updating of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ – the one in which a criminal is going around smashing up plaster busts of Napoleon Bonaparte because he hid a stolen jewel in one of them, but he doesn’t know which one – became ‘The Six Thatchers’, the twist being that although Sherlock thought that the missing item was a jewel (with the same name as the one in the original story) it was in fact a memory-stick which led onto a bringing-up of Mary’s back-story which in turn set up the episode’s denouement.

 And yes, there were references to various other Holmes stories, such as The Sign of Four (Agra/A.G.R.A., the use of Toby the dog), ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’ (when Holmes got it wrong and asked Watson to mention the word ‘Norbury’ to him “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers”, although in the original he was referring to the place in South London and not a disgruntled ex-MI6 secretary), ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’ (the client who doesn’t think so much of Sherlock’s deduction after it’s been explained to him) and of course the never-written one about Sumatra (“a story for which the world is not yet prepared”), among others. The writers even managed to cram in a reference to John’s blog, just like Conan Doyle himself managed to have Holmes occasionally refer to Dr Watson’s write-ups of his cases (the conceit here being that although they put a lot of business his way, he didn’t care much for them).  

However, I cannot help but think that Sherlock has lost its way, and that the many references were there because they had to be, just like the bits where Sherlock acts like an arse because not only is he cleverer than everyone else, he knows he is. But these things which identify an episode of Sherlock as being an episode of Sherlock were mere window-dressing, for ‘The Six Thatchers’ seemed for the most part to be less Sherlock Holmes than some sort of James Bond pastiche. The solving of a mystery took second place to a tale of secret agents for hire, a fight in a swimming-pool, shady governmental goings-on, betrayal, a few overseas locations, much running around (including in the vicinity of the MI6 building, no less) and characters pointing guns at each other. By the time it got to Mary the former assassin being shot in the aquarium (I did warn you that this post contained spoilers) I was frankly past caring, aside from wondering how this compares with Tracy getting shot just after becoming Mrs Bond at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and considering that this might not be the last we’ve seen of Amanda Abbington, given how reluctant writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are when it comes to moving on from main characters after they’ve been killed off (witness the fact that Jim ‘Miss Me?’ Moriarty is still a major talking-point).

By the show’s own high standards, this wasn’t a good return. It’s not been well received and I cannot help but think that Gatiss put more thought into the poem he wrote as a repost to the critics; the writers have always been clever in the way they’ve adapted the old stories but it’s got to the point where they’re either going through the motions or being too clever by half. But hey, I’ll still be watching the rest of the series, which I hope will return to the old format of concentrating on solving crimes (I for one cannot wait to see what Toby Jones can do as a villain after his superlative performance in The Witness for the Prosecution, of which more perhaps in a future post), although there are hints at some more Holmes family business – as if Mycroft wasn’t being over-used already – with references to ‘Sherrinford’, the non-Canonical third brother. They do like to keep us guessing, don’t they?

Cocktail hour, part three

For cocktail ideas, we have recently turned to a colourful book called Vintage Cocktails which, in addition to being ring-bound which makes it easier to put on a book-holder, has hit upon the novel idea of keeping the ingredients and instructions as brief as possible, as well as helpfully providing a full colour picture of said cocktail so that us amateur mixers have an idea of what the finished result should look like.

In anticipation of some seasonal cocktails, we’ve prepared in advance to the extent of mixing together a sugar syrup (equal parts sugar and water) which is stored in the fridge. We’ve also bought some vermouth with which to make martinis. But what sort? Good question! Gin or vodka, shaken or stirred, dry or dirty? That last one involves adding some of the brine from the olive-jar, and that is Allison’s preference. Stirring rather than shaking is, it turns out, the preferred way of mixing a martini; evidently Ian Fleming was being a bit of a contrarian when he had James Bond ask for them ‘shaken not stirred’ (Bond makes an appearance in Vintage Cocktails too, for the Vesper martini – the one from Casino Royale – is in there, although it’s not the exact recipe that’s given in said novel).

Anyway, it so happens that if you require a dirty martini, the way to go about it is to rinse a small amount of vermouth around the glass before mixing the other ingredients – gin or vodka, plus the olive brine – with ice and then adding them to the glass; strong stuff (although not as strong as some, for Winston Churchill’s idea of a martini was to show a bottle of gin to a bottle of vermouth, and then drink the gin; thus, a Churchill martini is just neat gin served with vermouth being present in the same room). Moving along, the dry martini consists of equal parts vodka (or gin) and vermouth, stirred together. A compromise – the dirty dry martini (with vodka, rather than gin) – has been developed here.

I rather fancied a whisky-based cocktail instead, so I flipped through Vintage Cocktails to see what I could find. A few, such as the Manhattan, the old fashioned and the Rob Roy, involve Angostura bitters which is not (yet) something with which I’ve seen fit to grace our drinks cabinet although it’s probably only a matter of time. A rusty nail – which I have long regarded as my ideal, go-to cocktail – was out too, because we don’t have any Drambuie. Then I happened across whisky sour.

It’s not really something I’ve come across before. Bourbon is the preferred whisky for this, and we don’t have that either (when it comes to the hard stuff, I’m more of a Scotch drinker), but Vintage Cocktails says that you can use rye instead, and as this is an Anglo-Canadian household we do have a bottle of that (and not just any rye whisky, but Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye; nothing but the best, here). And I’d already made some sugar syrup, so why not?

The Vintage Cocktails recipe for whisky sour called for 2 oz whisky, 1 oz sugar syrup and ¾ oz lemon juice, shaken with ice, strained into a tumbler and garnished with an orange slice (I used a lemon one instead, since I had to juice one of those anyway). A slight variation on this can be found in Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book; the man behind The Ipcress File simplifies it, with the juice of half a lemon and a teaspoon of sugar being added to 2 oz whisky and shaken with ice. What with having already made up some sugar syrup, I stuck with Vintage Cocktails for this one.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the result!

Bond in Motion

A recent museum visit has been to the London Film Museum for Bond in Motion, an exhibit which was meant to have closed months ago but which is still going due to popular demand. This is a collection of vehicles from the Bond movies - cars, boats, aircraft and assorted props. If you're a fan of the series, or if you're vaguely interested in that sort of thing, it's worth going.

On entering, we're confronted with a scale-model helicopter that was used in the explosion-laden attack on 007's childhood home in Skyfall. Upstairs are some storyboard sketches from the films, but downstairs is where the hardware is to be seen.

First off, we're confronted with two Rollers; Goldfinger's one from, err, Goldfinger and the one from A View to a Kill - you remember, the one that Christopher Walken and Grace Jones pushed into a lake, and Roger Moore managed to survive by using one of the tyres as a makeshift aqualung. You don't remember? That's fine, because this exhibition has flat-screens on the walls next to each exhibit showing the scenes from the film each vehicle appeared in.

Next up is a plane - the mini-jet from Octopussy that ran out of petrol; nearby is the reversible jacket used in the same pre-credits sequence. 

What's that red car over there? It's Tracy's Mercury Cougar from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, complete with skis on the back, and the chase sequence on the accompanying flat-screen shows that it was Diana Rigg's character who got to do the driving, with George Lazenby relegated to the passenger seat.

Just along from here are the BMWs from the Pierce Brosnan era, including the remote-controlled repmobile from Tomorrow Never Dies (fun fact: the chase sequence was filmed in the car park at Brent Cross shopping centre), parked opposite the villain's Jag and the 'disappearing' Aston from Die Another Day. Further along is another Aston, the V8 Volante from the Timothy Dalton era, with the cello-case they used to escape propped up nearby.

Moving on, there's another aircraft, the 'Little Nelly' gyrocopter from You Only Live Twice (a big screen behind it shows us the airborne action sequence) alongside assorted motorbikes, the tuk-tuk from Octopussy and the Renault that got taken apart in the Paris chase in A View to a Kill.

What about the boats? They're here somewhere ... the speedboats from Live and Let Die and The World Is Not Enough are present and correct, and there are underwater bits and bobs from Thunderball, For Your Eyes Only and Never Say Never Again (yes, the unofficial one's here too). As far as sub-aquatic Bond is concerned, though, the one everyone really wants to see is the Lotus that turns into a submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me.

But that is of course merely the second most famous of Bond's vehicles. What of the silver-grey Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger that became part of 007 folklore to such an extent that two of his successors have driven it too? It's here, more or less in the middle; no exhibition of Bond vehicles is complete without a DB5.

There are two modern Astons as well, both of which show evidence of having been well-used to say the least. The DBS from Casino Royale, the one that got rolled multiple times, is next to the DBS from Quantum of Solace that is missing a door on the driver's side and although it's roped off there's a sign on the seat saying that no-one is allowed to sit on it (yes, I was tempted). Both of these, by the way, have the steering wheel on the left-hand side - all previous vehicles (the ones supplied by Q-Branch, at any rate) have had the wheel on the right, British style. Daniel Craig's blood-stained dinner jacket is displayed nearby.

Fancy a coffee? Displayed in the cafeteria (and yes, they are playing Bond themes on a loop) are the helicopter and armoured train models from GoldenEye and a glass cabinet displaying an array of tie-in toys.

Then there's a collection of props in a glass cabinet near one of the Astons; contents include a Walther PPK with a silencer, a sliver money clip and several passports issued to various incarnations of 'Bond, James'; did the makers really go to this amount of detail? There's even an old-fashioned paper driving licence which shows that Bond has four penalty points!

Well, given how many of the afore-mentioned vehicles ended up getting damaged in some way, you wouldn't expect the world's greatest fictional spy to have a clean licence, would you?

James Bond and the Second World War

Reading Solo by William Boyd recently got me thinking. Specifically, I latched onto the Normandy flashback at the start, and wondered about what clues Ian Fleming gave about his creation’s war experiences. It is well known that the Bond character was based on a number of wartime secret agents and commandos with whom Fleming (a desk-bound naval intelligence officer) was acquainted, and it was with this in mind that I realised that in Fleming’s novels the Second World War is for the most part conspicuous by its absence. From the start, Bond was introduced as a secret agent of the Cold War, with little detail given about how he came to be where he was.

Curious, I delved into the books for details and came up with the following, which has been published on the James Bond Dossier website:

http://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/content/james-bond-and-the-second-world-war.htm

The literary James Bond: Solo and Moonraker

Much though I like James Bond – the books as well as the films – I don’t tend to go for the ‘continuation’ novels much. These are the ones that have been written by authors who aren’t Ian Fleming and there have been a lot of them; a parade of thrillers of varying quality where the hero happens to be a British secret agent by the name of James Bond, agent 007, licenced to kill, etc. Some, like the films, are set in the present day (present day when the book in question was written, at any rate) while others are set within the character timeline as laid out by Fleming (Fifties, early Sixties); the latter are usually better. The people who make the Bond films have never gone for adapting one of the continuation novels for the big screen.

That said, my ears pricked up recently when I heard that Anthony Horowitz had written a Bond novel; I rather liked what he did with Sherlock Holmes so I will get round to reading Trigger Mortis at some point. This was at the back of my mind when I came across a copy of Solo by William Boyd in the library and so I thought I’d give that a go. I’ve had Boyd recommended to me several times and while I doubt the recommenders had his Bond novel in mind, that’s what I went for.

(By the way, this contains spoilers – regarding Moonraker (the novel) as well as Solo. You have been warned.)

Boyd kicks off with a foreword that states that he’s sticking with the chronology of Bond’s ‘life’ as laid out in You Only Live Twice, the last novel to be published when Fleming was still alive and the one which included an obituary of Bond (missing presumed dead following a mission to Japan). This dates Bond to having been born in 1924 (although there is apparently some debate among ‘Bondologists’ regarding the literary character’s precise age as Fleming did change the timelines a bit over the course of his twelve novels and two collections of short stories), and it’s with this in mind that Solo kicks off with some rare war reminiscences on the part of 007 before introducing Bond in 1969 on his 45^th birthday.

After an evening of dining, drinking and mild flirtation, Bond test-drives a new car (a Jensen FF; nice) and is given a new mission – there’s a civil war going on in the West African state of Zanzarim (a thinly-disguised version of the Biafran War in Nigeria; Boyd himself grew up in West Africa which must have helped with the setting). Quite simply, M wants Bond to go there posing as a journalist and take out the main rebel leader. It doesn’t entirely go according to plan (although the rebels are nonetheless defeated) and Bond is shot and left for dead by his supposed MI6 contact in the country (she’s also one of the two love interests here) and a sinister Rhodesian mercenary. After a brief convalescence, he decides to ‘go solo’ in order to get revenge.

Travelling to the United States on a false passport, he manages to track down the people he’s after with surprising ease, although things get complicated when it turns out that the American authorities (among them Felix Leiter’s nephew) are also after the surviving rebel leaders as they’ve set up an aid agency which is actually a front for a massive drug-smuggling operation. As per a lot of Fleming’s villains, the Rhodesian mercenary character is physically disfigured, in this case as a result of his previous fighting experience.

Bond out for revenge: This has been done before in the films – Licence to Kill, Quantum of Solace – but not really in the novels although a running theme, especially in some of the earlier ones, is Bond’s desire to bring down SMERSH after what happened in Casino Royale. Here, the character is older and wiser, but also more impulsive while still being prone to acts of extreme violence when he’s in the mood. He is, after all, a killer.

There are a few aspects of Solo that are rather formulaic of Bond; what he wears, what he eats, what he smokes and what he drinks (I suppose that these details have to be in place so that we can be sure that this is James Bond; authors dealing with Fleming’s creation do have to use some Fleming-esque details). The women with whom he is romantically involved seem to be there for no better reason than because they have to be there in a James Bond adventure (as soon as his contact in Zanzarim is revealed to be a woman, you know it’s only a matter of time before he has sex with her). It gets better outside the Bond comfort zone.

I found the civil war descriptions to be the best part of this novel, while the war reminiscences – Boyd has a young Lieutenant Bond of the RNVR serving in Normandy with 30 Assault Unit, which had been set up by Fleming himself – are a very clever tribute to Bond’s creator. Bond going for a spot of personal vendetta is also a good way of taking the character out of the usual comfort zone (see above). I tend to steer clear of Bond continuation novels for a reason (the formulaic feeling aside, some of them got a bit silly, and I wasn’t much impressed with the Sebastian Faulks one a few years ago) but this was pretty good; I’ll certainly be looking to read more William Boyd novels as a result.

I decided to follow this Bond literary experience up by going back to the original: Ian Fleming. I thought I’d read all of those years ago but it would seem not; while clearing out some old books recently I came across an Ian Fleming omnibus containing three Bond novels. Judging by the position of the bookmark (a card from a scuba-diving club!), it looked as though I hadn’t got as far as the third one, Moonraker. Post-Solo, that is what I read. I remembered that the film was one of those so-bad-it’s-hilarious ones (if you haven’t seen it, four words – Roger Moore in space – will tell you all you need to know), but as the novel was first published in 1955 I doubted whether it went that far. I already knew, thanks to reading a book about the afore-mentioned wartime commando unit that Fleming set up, that the villain of the piece is a former Nazi who changed his identity in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The story begins in London where we find out that Bond is 37 years old, as he reflects that he’s eight years away from hitting 45, at which point he will cease to be a Double O agent and get a desk job instead (evidence here of Fleming changing Bond’s chronology over time, as previously mentioned). He’s flirting with the secretaries, although the principal flirtee is not Miss Moneypenny but one Loelia Ponsonby, secretary to the Double O Section (evidently the makers of the films thought that one secretary was sufficient). Anyway, time for a briefing from M: Sir Hugo Drax is a millionaire businessman who is bankrolling a British missile project known as Moonraker, an act for which he’s been knighted. Not much is known about his background but he’s a member of M’s club, Blades, and M thinks he might be a wrong ’un because he cheats at cards. There follows a card-table confrontation, the sort of thing that Fleming did so very well, as Bond – who, in addition to being the Secret Service’s best card player, also happens to know all there is to know about card-sharping – gives Drax a very expensive taste of his own medicine (£15,000 from a single game of bridge, and that’s at 1950s prices). Drax, foreshadowing several other villains who get bested by Bond in a club or casino, advises him to “spend the money quickly”.

Bond then gets assigned to Drax’s Moonraker project HQ down in Kent, where there’s already an undercover agent called Gala Brand, a Special Branch officer who’s posing as Drax’s secretary. So far, names aside, this seemed more like the basic plot to Die Another Day (which was bad without being funny) rather than Moonraker; proof that there’s always something in the films that can be traced back to the original source material. Between them Bond and Brand find out that Drax (who, by the way, has a facial disfigurement) is up to something, almost getting killed by part of a cliff falling on them in the process; they sort-of figure out what Drax is really up to, and there follows a car chase across Kent (Bond’s vehicle here is a pre-war supercharged Bentley; like many of its successors, it gets wrecked) after which Drax reveals his evil plan to the pair of them (the rocket that’s going to be test-fired actually contains a Soviet-supplied atomic warhead that’s going to destroy London) before leaving them to an elaborate death (specifically, they’re imprisoned close enough to the rocket that they’ll be killed when it launches) from which they are able to escape and foil the plans in such a way that this also results in Drax’s own demise.

Already knowing that Drax was an unrepentant Nazi before reading the book probably didn’t help in terms of the suspense but there are many clues that point the reader to this (all of the rocket technicians and henchmen are German, and Drax even drives a Merc). For an audience reading this in the 1950s, the combination of Nazis and nuclear annihilation would have been a potent mix. However, the main reason why I’ve chosen to divulge so much of the plot is to point out the main thing that I learned from reading Moonraker, which is the extent to which the component parts of your average Bond film can be found here: Early encounter with the villain at a card table, bonkers plan, car chase, ruthless henchman, full explanation of said plan for the benefit of 007 and his attractive female companion prior to elaborate but somehow escapable death – they’re all here.

Moonraker, though, also has a few elements that are not typical of a Bond adventure. It is set entirely in England, and we get to see some of the action from the woman’s point of view as well as that of Bond – and she, not Bond, is the one who actually finds out that Drax is going to fire the missile at London. And there’s a twist at the end – she doesn’t end up getting romantically involved with Bond (this may explain why ‘Gala Brand’ has never been a character name in the films). In creating James Bond, Ian Fleming came up with a winning formula but that didn’t mean that his thrillers had to be formulaic.

James Bond's scrambled eggs

There’s a little-known short story by Ian Fleming whose title never has, and probably never will, be used as a title for a Bond film. It’s called ‘007 in New York’ and for many years it was unpublished in Britain. It was written for the American version of a travelogue that Fleming wrote; he was so negative about New York that his publishers persuaded him to add a little something involving James Bond visiting said city in order to avoid antagonising his readers in the US.

It is less than ten pages long. The main plot, such as there is one, is about a mission concerning a woman who used to work for MI6 and whose boyfriend works at the UN; unbeknown to her, he’s actually a KGB agent who’s on the verge of being found out by the FBI. Bond has travelled incognito to New York to warn her (this probably forms the basis of the final scene in Quantum of Solace where Bond meets a Canadian agent whose boyfriend is the ex-lover of Vesper Lynd; by warning her of the man’s intentions, he saves her from a similar fate).

A lot of the story concerns food. Bond arrives feeling a bit queasy due to his having consumed “the BOAC version of ‘An English Country House Breakfast’” on the flight, and after some consideration he decides to have lunch at the Edwardian Room at the Plaza rather than the Oyster Bar at Grand Central (“the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life”). The former is a place where his friend Felix Leiter knows the head waiter, and on a previous visit Bond had instructed the staff on how to make his particular version of scrambled eggs which he intends to have with smoked salmon.

Oddly, he’s prepared to order this despite his poor airline breakfast having presumably contained eggs of some description, and his evident belief that eggs in New York are of poor quality compared to those back home; “one could never tell with American food. As long as they got their steaks and sea-food right, the rest could go to hell … flavour had gone from all American food except the Italian” – one wonders just how scathing Fleming had been about New York in the first place if this is what he was like when he trying to avoid annoying the locals!

That said, the Bond of the books is, like his creator, very partial to scrambled eggs; he eats them in most of the novels. What’s notable about ‘007 in New York’ is that it includes what was apparently Fleming’s favourite scrambled egg recipe.

Why not have a go? The recipe is for four “individualists” and calls for a dozen eggs, so that’s three per person, and between five and six ounces of butter – after dividing that by four and measuring it out, I noted that that’s more than double (maybe even triple) the amount of butter that I’d usually use for scrambled eggs.

Admittedly, when I do scrambled eggs it’s usually because that’s what happens when omelette-making doesn’t quite go according to plan. Wondering about Fleming’s egg-scrambling technique, I consulted the oracle – Delia Smith (in this instance, volume one of How to Cook) – and was mildly surprised to find that, while going for two eggs per person and considerably less butter, Delia’s method is more or less identical – melt some (between half and two-thirds) of the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, turn the heat down, add eggs, stir continuously until the eggs aren’t quite ready, then take off the heat, add the rest of the butter and keep stirring. I tend not to add any butter at the later stage, and it’s been a while since I took the eggs off the heat to finish them, if I ever did.

But I did so this time, following the Fleming recipe to the extent of adding some finely-chopped chives (since we have chives in the garden) although I didn’t go for his serving recommendation. He reckoned that the result should be served “on hot buttered toast in individual copper dishes (for appearance only) with pink champagne (Taittinger) and low music.” Hot buttered toast I could do, but I have neither copper dishes nor pink bubbly, so I just had mine on a plate with some coffee.

It was, of course, delicious (anything with that amount of butter would be), although a little on the wet side. Proper egg-scrambling is truly an art that has to be mastered. In terms of quantities, though, I reckon I’ll stick with Delia in future.

Ian Fleming's war

The creator of James Bond continues to fascinate to this day, and I have found him cropping up in several books I’ve been reading recently. He has, for example a walk-on role in Artemis Cooper’s biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy, whose book The Traveller’s Tree was used extensively by Fleming in Live and Let Die, dropped in on him in Jamaica while he was busy writing Casino Royale).

As was the case with Paddy and many others of his generation, Fleming’s life was very much defined by what he did in the Second World War. Indeed, the war came as a release for Ian Fleming, who by 1939 was an ex-public schoolboy who’d flunked Sandhurst, had a go at journalism and ended up in an undemanding desk-job at a stockbroker’s in the City – in contrast to his elder brother Peter who had made a name for himself as a travel-writer. An interview with Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, changed all that and Fleming was finally able to find his role in life as a naval intelligence officer – a role in which he excelled.

Fleming’s war work is covered by Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII by Nicholas Rankin which was published last year. If, like me, you like war adventures such as Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches and more recent fare like Agent Zigzag, and find the whole Bletchley Park story to be fascinating, I suspect you will find it hard not to be drawn to a book about a commando unit formed by the creator of the world’s most famous fictional spy with the aim of capturing intelligence data intact.

These men, who Fleming rather unflatteringly referred to as his ‘Red Indians’, all volunteered for commando work from the regular forces (this being a naval intelligence unit, they were mostly Royal Marines with a few naval officers). After being highly trained in the ways of sabotage and silent killing at places like Achnacarry they were blooded at Dieppe before being given the unenviable task of going in with the first wave of troops who went ashore at places like Salerno and the Normandy beaches, with orders to find and capture the Germans’ code books, radar equipment and Enigma machines before they had a chance to destroy them. Fleming, who knew too much to be allowed into the field (much to his own frustration), chose their targets and later used their experiences as the basis of the Bond novels.

I enjoyed this book. It’s well-paced, providing a thorough context in terms of intelligence work and the use of irregular forces before turning the focus on the commandos themselves (as befits a man who was always the brains behind the operation and rarely in the thick of the action, Fleming himself becomes a background figure who occasionally interacts with the commando officers but rarely with the NCOs and men – most of whom had no idea of the wider context of what they were doing at the time). There’s humour and pathos amid the firefights and destruction, and Rankin never stoops to glorify the war. Towards the end of the war, 30 Assault Unit came into its own, capturing a mass of material ranging from weapons blueprints to scientists to submarines to admirals and the entire archive of the German navy going back to the nineteenth century. For obvious reasons that’s not a story that was widely told at the time (and the men of 30 Assault Unit aren’t alone in that; for example, the codebreaking achievements of Bletchley Park weren’t made public until the 1970s), and it’s good that we can finally hear the stories of a very brave group of men.

Rankin has also included a lot of tie-ins with quotes from Bond novels, which is understandable as James Bond is the reason why most people have heard of Ian Fleming (which in turn is why his name features prominently on the title of Rankin’s book) and it’s actually very interesting to see how parts of his books tie in with his war work. A lot of the character names are the names of people who Fleming worked with (rather amusingly, one officer was very disparaging of Fleming at the time but later changed his mind after he ‘became’ a character in one of the books), but there are quite a few plotlines which relate directly to the war. To give three examples: From Russia with Love is all about MI6 trying to get its hands on a top-secret decoding machine; the villain of Moonraker is an ex-Nazi who changed his identity in the chaos surrounding the war’s end (a chaos in which 30 Assault Unit was uncovering all sorts of secrets); and finally, you’ll certainly have a new perspective on the short story Octopussy after reading this.

Ian Fleming also makes an appearance in Op. JB: The Last Great Secret of the Second World War by Christopher Creighton, a supposedly factual account where he accompanies the author on a top-secret mission to Berlin at the end of the war to extract Martin Bormann under the cover-name of ‘James Bond’ (which is what the ‘JB’ stands for). Surprisingly, the publishers of this story didn't market it as fiction, and it comes with an oft-repeated caveat that all official records relating to the events described have been destroyed (some of them by the author!). I don’t believe this. It’s too far-fetched, there are too many cameos by famous people – over the course of the book, the author/narrator meets with Churchill, the King, Eisenhower, Rommel and even Hitler himself – and the overall effect is that of an attempt at a war-story along the lines of The Eagle has Landed. The blurb on the cover boldly proclaimed: ‘Fact or fiction – decide for yourself’. After reading it, I decided that it’s fiction, and rather low-grade fiction at that. Don't bother with this one.

Bond ... James Bond

I have never made much of a secret of the fact that my favourite film series is, by some considerable distance, the James Bond films. Naturally, then, I was excited by the release of the new film, Skyfall, which I went to see in the cinema this week.

Pre-Skyfall preparation – reading the reviews in the papers aside – involved re-watching Daniel Craig’s first appearance as 007 in Casino Royale (inexplicably, the only Bond film I own on DVD – I still haven’t got round to replacing the VHS tapes), a repeat of You Only Live Twice (screenplay by Roald Dahl, I kid you not) and the generally excellent Top Gear special on Bond cars. Top Gear has in my opinion gone off the boil in recent years, becoming (as the Bond films did at some point) very much a parody of itself, but this particular special was definitely worth tuning in for. The very good interviews aside, the story of how an Aston Martin DB5 came to be used in Goldfinger was definitely worth retelling (in an attitude similar to that taken by British Leyland over The Italian Job, Aston Martin initially didn’t want anything to do with it, and the makers only insisted on an Aston because Bond had driven one – a DB Mark III – in the novel). Plus, there was a real treat in store in the form of converting a Lotus Excel for use as an actual submarine, in homage to The Spy Who Loved Me. Only the people at Top Gear could have come up with that.

And so to the movie itself. Well, almost. The film was billed as starting at 7pm, although this was of course the time that the half-hour of adverts and trailers was due to start, some of the former being obvious Bond tie-ins which included, rather annoyingly, quite a bit of the pre-credits sequence from the film I was about to see.

The film was certainly more dialogue-heavy and character-driven than previous Bond films, and I don’t see that as being a bad thing, especially with a cast like this. Ever since Casino Royale, there’s been a move towards redefining what a Bond film is (as well as being a direct sequel, Quantum of Solace was, to all intents and purposes, a revenge-flick – the Bond franchise had never done the former before, while as far as the latter is concerned the only previous one had been Licence to Kill), and as far as this fan is concerned that’s no bad thing. Skyfall breaks new ground for the Bond films in that it’s the first to explicitly emphasise 007’s back-story – and what’s wrong with revealing a bit more about the main character? In the books, Ian Fleming didn’t really get round to this until rather late in the day, with the story of Bond’s parents being killed when he was a boy not being told until You Only Live Twice, the last Bond novel to be published while Fleming was still alive.

In the book, this was told in the form of an obituary written by M, which duly features in Skyfall after Bond is presumed to have been killed in action in the pre-credits sequence. That he is in fact alive and living on a beach somewhere is also taken from You Only Live Twice (the novel, not the film).

Craig is, I think, an excellent Bond – tough and determined but, unlike most of the others, showing a vulnerable side and literally being seen to bleed (in flat contradiction of Q’s final piece of advice to Bond in The World Is Not Enough). He brings something to the role the others didn’t; he certainly looks like more of a killer than Roger Moore in his prime, and yet the vulnerability (an area previously explored only by the seriously under-rated George Lazenby) adds something to the character, making James Bond appear as something more than a wise-cracking government hit-man. Of the old Bonds, he’s closets to Timothy Dalton, who was himself perhaps too serious coming in after Roger Moore (Pierce Brosnan certainly sent things back the other way by restoring a lot of the gags). It helps, I think, that such a portrayal of Bond came at the same time as a welcome reboot of the franchise, which has helped those responsible for the films in that they no longer feel obliged to stick to a prescribed Bond formula. If you want to know why they had to reboot Bond, simply note that Die Another Day – the most self-parodying of the Bond films as well as one of the most extravagant in terms of special effects – was released in the same year as The Bourne Identity. Suddenly, overblown special effects didn’t look too clever, and as well as establishing a new timeline for Bond, Casino Royale was rather stripped-down compared to what had gone before.

Of the other characters, Judi Dench was on top form as M, and Javier Bardem brought in a performance as the villain that hasn’t been seen in many a year – I would not be surprised to find Raoul Silva spoken of in the same breath as Auric Goldfinger and Francisco Scaramanga in years to come. A renegade MI6 agent as the baddie has been done before, but not like this (and a cyber-terrorist to boot; very modern!). Throw in the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney, and it’s obvious that Sam Mendes established a heavyweight cast for this, so much so that I’m struggling to think of a Bond film that was as well-acted as this one.

The relative lack of gadgets aside (these were dismissed by the new Q in a throwaway remark about MI6 not going in for exploding pens any more) was more than compensated for by the appearance of the legendary DB5, complete with the optional extras it had in Goldfinger. Even though we all knew what was coming thanks to the publicity, there was still an audible gasp in the cinema when Bond opened the lock-up to reveal the Aston.

Aside from a couple of times where Bond looks at his watch (yes, it’s an Omega, we get it) and an obvious close-up of his mobile phone, I don’t think that the product placement distracted from my enjoyment of the film. Having read the books, I’ve argued on many occasions that product placement with James Bond is not a recent phenomenon but something that goes back to Ian Fleming himself, who with his journalist’s eye for detail used brand-names as a means of making sure that Bond appeared sophisticated and worldly-wise – the Bond of the books wears certain brands or styles of clothes and smokes a particular (specially-made) brand of cigarette, for example, and when reciting the famous cocktail recipe in Casino Royale he really does specify Gordon’s rather than just gin. I guess the difference is that Fleming wasn’t getting paid to do it (although by all accounts he did receive the odd freebie after publication), whereas (for example) Heineken paid a lot of money to ensure that it’s their beer that Bond is seen to be drinking. Sticking with drinks, I note that Bollinger is now the official Bond champagne, although I seem to recall that in the books Bond liked Pol Roger. Or was it Taittinger?

All in all, I really liked it. After the relative disappointment of Quantum of Solace, Skyfall brings the Bond franchise, and Craig’s Bond for that matter, back to the superlative heights of Casino Royale. Daniel Craig is no longer standing in the shadows of any of his predecessors. He’s a great Bond but he’s not the best there’s ever been – yet. However, give him a couple more, and the original may no longer be the best.