III. Scars and Girls
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Also excerpted in The Spy’s Bedside Book was Dennis Wheatley’s short story Espionage, featuring a showdown in a bathroom at the Paris Ritz, and it was to Wheatley’s work that Fleming would most often return, particularly his character Gregory Sallust. Sallust first appeared in 1934 in Black August, a bleak tale set in an undated future in which Britain is rapidly descending into anarchy. Advance copies sent to libraries and booksellers led to so many orders that the book had to be reprinted six times before it was even published.
Sallust, the novel’s protagonist, is described as ‘cruel’, ‘cynical’ and ‘fatalistic’. A journalist by profession, he initially appears to be in a similar mould to Leslie Charteris’ Saint: a devil-may-care lady-killer with scant respect for the law. His response to the crisis is to hire a general’s uniform and commandeer an unwitting platoon to help him make good an escape to the West Indies. But along with the heroics customary for a thriller of the time, Sallust is unusually brutal and cavalier, at one point confessing that while the worsening situation has been hell for many people, he’s enjoying it. Facing the prospect of being shot by firing squad towards the close of the book, he quotes Rudyard Kipling’s bawdy poem The Ladies: ‘I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it and now I must pay for my fun.’
Wheatley partly based Sallust on the extravagantly named Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe, a charismatic officer he had met during the First World War who became a petty criminal and fraudster and was murdered in an infamous case that Wheatley was a little too involved in for his own comfort. Another inspiration was Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond—we learn that a scar on his ‘lean, rather wolfish face’ is a result of a blow received during his night-time excursions across the trenches in the First World War; Drummond famously favoured precisely the same sort of expedition. Wheatley once tried his hand at writing an outline for a Drummond story, which survives.[1]
The following year, Wheatley tried another tack, with a new protagonist. The hero of The Eunuch of Stamboul glories in the ludicrous moniker Swithin Destime, which is about as ‘Peregrine Maltravers’ as one can imagine. Destime takes the Orient Express to Istanbul, where he soon meets a beautiful Russian bookseller called Tania Vorontzoff. Living under the threat of her invalid mother being deported back to Russia, Tania is forced to work as an agent for the fearsome Kazdim Hari Bekar, a terrifying eunuch and head of the city’s secret police. Before long, Destime has uncovered a plot by Islamic fanatics plotting a revolution in Turkey, which if successful could lead to world war. He falls in love with an aristocratic English girl, who chides him that he is in over his head: the gifted amateurs of fiction might always be able to know how to act when faced with such events, she tells him, but in real life you need to know what you’re doing.
In the latter stages of the book, Destime is captured by Kazdim and two of his henchmen, and he wonders what the gifted amateurs of fiction would do in his place:
‘No doubt Bulldog Drummond would grab the two thugs, crack their heads together and carry the twenty-stone Eunuch off on his shoulders as a memento of the occasion. The Saint, he feels, would be more likely to poke the Eunuch in the stomach, grab the pistol of the thug nearest to him and reverse it, before remarking: “Brother, permit me. You are not holding that correctly—it should point the other way.”
Those were the sorts of things he should be doing, Swithin knew quite well, but as it was, he sat there staring dumbly at the Eunuch, while the great brute placidly lit another cigarette and puffed at it thoughtfully, watching him with that unwinking stare by which a snake fascinates a bird.’
It’s an amusing scene that shows how closely Wheatley had studied the genre—but it also fatally undermines his protagonist as a hero. Apart from breaking the fourth wall, in drawing so much attention to the fact that Destime doesn’t know what he’s doing, we simply hanker for the characters he mentions who do.
The novel sold well nevertheless, and was made into a film released the following year, titled The Secret of Stamboul (The Spy in White in the US). Now renamed Captain Larry Destime, the hero was played by James Mason in one of his earliest starring roles. Frank Vosper played Kazdim, and the similarity to a Bond villain in the mould of Le Chiffre is unmistakeable. Tania and Destime dine on caviar and champagne when Destime is called away by an urgent telephone call. This is a distraction, as Kadzim then summons Tania to his box—he is slowly revealed from shadow, a bulky bald figure in formalwear with a strangulated but sinister and commanding voice: ‘You are dining with an Englishman…’
~
Despite the relative success of The Eunuch of Stamboul, it seems Wheatley realised that he was at his best when he played it straight: the novel had a solid Buchan-style plot, but Swithin Destime was too ineffectual a hero to last for more than one novel. Wheatley had previously written a thriller with a character who combined the bravado and style of The Saint with the physical ruthlessness of Bulldog Drummond, but Black August hadn’t quite worked for other reasons. Now Wheatley went back to Gregory Sallust and tried again, this time inserting him into the kind of adventure he had just put Swithin Destime through.
Published in 1936 after being serialized in The Daily Mail, Contraband was in many ways the real start of the Sallust series. Wheatley dedicated the book to a friend who liked ‘straight’ thrillers’, and that’s just what it is, following a familiar pattern: a gentleman adventurer reports to an older man in the secret service, and is given a mission to stop a villainous plot that has international implications; he races through glamorous casinos and hotels at home and abroad, using his fists and firearms against assorted henchmen until he is drugged, struck unconscious and captured by the rich, deformed villain, who interrogates and/or tortures him; after learning the full particulars of the villain’s plan (usually from the villain himself), he escapes, saves the beautiful woman in the cocktail dress he took a fancy to in the first chapter and assures the safety of the realm.
This had been the formula of British secret service stories since the 19th century, but while all its elements are present in Contraband, the tone of the novel is often surprising: casinos and luxury hotels had never before been pervaded with quite such a feverish atmosphere of sweat, fear and danger, and the hero’s ethics are, as in Black August, unusually ambivalent—he ends his adventure protecting the villain’s moll from the law because he has fallen in love with her.
In the first chapter of Contraband, titled ‘Midnight At The Casino’, we are introduced to Gregory Sallust as though for the first time: he has been transformed from his previous incarnation as a journalist in a dystopian future into a secret agent in the here and now, gambling in Deauville ten days before la grande semaine. Sallust is about to call it a night when he catches sight of an English aristocrat he recognizes, accompanied by a beautiful woman he does not:
‘She must be a poule, Gregory decided, but a devilish expensive one. Probably most of the heavy bracelets that loaded down her white arms were fake, but you cannot fake clothes as you can diamonds, and he knew that those simple lines of rich material which rose to cup her well-formed breasts had cost a pretty penny. Besides, she was very beautiful.
A little frown of annoyance wrinkled his forehead, catching at the scar which lifted his left eyebrow until his face took on an almost satanic look. What a pity, he thought, that he was returning to England the following day.’
The line about Sallust’s scar giving him an almost satanic look appears, with minor variations, in several novels in the series: it tends to show ‘a livid white’ against his dark features when he is angry. Like Contraband, Casino Royale opens with a handsome, world-weary British secret agent gambling late at night in a casino in northern France (the fictional resort of Royale-les-Eaux, which Fleming modelled loosely on Deauville and Le Touquet.[2] In Chapter 8 of Casino Royale, we learn that Bond also has a scar on his face, although it runs down his right cheek rather than lifting his left eyebrow. It makes him appear ‘faintly piratical’ and, along with his comma of black hair and cruel mouth, would become part of Fleming’s standard description of the character. In the same chapter, we are given the following description of Vesper Lynd:
‘Her dress was of black velvet, simple and yet with the touch of splendour that only half a dozen couturiers in the world can achieve. There was a thin necklace of diamonds at her throat and a diamond clip in the low vee which just exposed the jutting swell of her breasts. She carried a plain black evening bag, a flat oblong which she now held, her arm akimbo, at her waist. Her jet-black hair hung straight and simply to the final inward curl below the chin.
She looked quite superb and Bond’s heart lifted.’
In Contraband, the woman who lifts Sallust’s heart is Sabine Szenty, a Hungarian who turns out to be part of a smuggling gang (the English aristocrat, Gavin Fortescue, a half-crippled dwarf, being the master-villain). Sabine has ‘sleek black hair’, a ‘fresh and healthy’ complexion, and wears ‘light make-up’. In Casino Royale, we are told that Vesper is ‘lightly suntanned’ and wears no make-up, except on her mouth.
As well as sharing their taste in women’s looks, Bond and Sallust have remarkably similar attitudes to the fairer sex:
‘He knew from past experience that he could sweep most women off their feet inside a week with the intense excitement of a hectic, furious, laughing yet determined pursuit, and what magnificent elation could be derived from carrying a rich man’s darling off from under his very nose despite her better sense and the rich man’s opposition. Gregory had done it before and he would certainly have attempted it in this case if only he had had a few days left to work in.
The more he studied her, between making bets, the more the desire to do so strengthened in his mind. He could never bring himself to be anything more than “uncle-ish” to “nice” girls, however attractive, and he barred respectable married women, except on rare occasions, on practical grounds. The aftermath of broken hearts and tear-stained faces with possible threats of being cited as co-respondent by an injured husband was, he considered, too heavy a price to pay. He preferred, when he took the plunge into an affair, a woman whom he could be reasonably certain was content to play his own game. Nothing too easy—in fact it was essential to his pleasure that she should move in luxurious surroundings and be distinguished of her kind, and so quite inaccessible except to men of personality even if they had the wealth which he did not. Then, when victory was achieved, they could laugh together over their ruses, delight in one another to the full and, when the time came as it surely must, part before satiation; a little sadly, perhaps, but as friends who had enriched life’s experience by a few more perfect moments.’
This, despite being written by another writer in 1936, will nevertheless be recognizable to anyone familiar with Ian Fleming’s work. It chimes very closely with James Bond’s attitudes in Casino Royale:
‘With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola—sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness—was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play—the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.’
Published 17 years later, this is more sexually explicit than the passage from Contraband, as well as being notably darker, more cynical and better-written. But the core of it is the same, with Sallust’s desire to avoid ‘the aftermath of broken hearts and tear-stained faces’ echoed in Bond’s disdain for ‘the tears and the final bitterness’. Wheatley’s depiction of sex was also notably graphic for the time: he has his hero ponder whether a major character is a high-class prostitute—while desiring her.
After the opening chapters, the plots of Contraband and Casino Royale diverge considerably, although they share a markedly similar tone. Towards the end of the novel, Sallust urges Sabine to turn King’s Evidence. She refuses. ‘Then there’s only one thing for it,’ Sallust replies: ‘I’ve got to get you out of England before the police decide to act’:
‘That would mean your having to give up your job, no?’
‘Oh, to hell with the job! I would have given a lot to be in at the death, when we corner Gavin and the Limper, but that’s a bagatelle compared with your safety.’
‘Are there not extradition laws so that they could bring me back?’
‘There are, but I don’t think they would apply them. You see, your having saved Wells and myself makes the police reluctant to prosecute you in any case now. It’s only that they’re bound to do so by the law if they catch you.’
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘Where could we go?’
Gregory stood up and, forgetting the abrasions on his chest and back, stretched himself. He grimaced suddenly and lowered his arms. ‘The world’s big enough and there are plenty of places where the two of us could lose ourselves very happily for a time.’
This, too, feels familiar. After the end of the mission to bankrupt Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, Bond initially desires only to sleep with Vesper and, once the attraction has worn off, gently drop her. If that proved too difficult, he considered taking another assignment abroad or ‘which was also in his mind, he could resign and travel to different parts of the world as he had always wanted’. He then decides he wants to marry Vesper instead—only for her to kill herself.
Contraband was a best-seller: it was already in its fifth impression within a month of publication.[3] It added ‘spy novelist’ to Wheatley’s established reputation in other genres. In 1938, he was asked by Hutchinson to edit A Century of Spy Stories, part of their highly successful series of anthologies, and in the same year he provided an endorsement for The Oldest Road, an old-fashioned spy novel that mixed a Buchan-esque international conspiracy with the occult. Wheatley claimed this was a ‘really first-class thriller’ that had ‘the genuine ring of an adventure actually culled from the annals of our Secret Service’. The novel’s author, ‘D.G. Waring’, was Dorothy Waring, also known by her ex-husband’s surname Harnett. She had briefly led the British Fascists, and at the time the novel was published was on the Committee of the Nazi-sympathising group The Link.[4]
The Oldest Road made little impact on the thriller despite Wheatley’s endorsement, but the genre was rapidly changing, with newcomers ripping up what had previously been acceptable in it. A few years previously, Wheatley had become friends with Reg Cheyney, a brash East Ender who had turned his hand to several professions, including news editor of the Sunday Graphic and private detective. Reg was nearly as dodgy as Wheatley’s old friend Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe and, like Dorothy Waring, had also been involved with the far right: in 1931, he had joined Oswald Mosley’s New Party, and was in charge of its ‘thug section’, known as ‘Biff Boys’.[5] He was also a writer. After trying out several pseudonyms, he had settled on Peter Cheyney, under which name he published several newspaper and magazine serials, including stories featuring a Raffles-esque jewel thief called Alonzo MacTavish. Cheyney became increasingly influenced by hard-boiled private eye and detective fiction from the United States—the pulps—and in 1936 found enormous success with his debut novel This Man Is Dangerous, featuring a wise-cracking, machine-gun-toting F.B.I. agent called Lemmy Caution. The first page gives a fair idea of its tone:
‘Take a look at me. My name’s Lemmy Caution by rights but I got so many aliases that sometimes I don’t know if I’m John Doe or it’s Thursday. In Chicago—the place that smart guys call Chi just so’s you’ll know they’ve read a detective book written by some punk who always says he nearly got shot by one of Capone’s cannoneers but didn’t quite make the grade—they used to call me “Two-Time” because they said it always took two slugs to stop me, an’ in the other place where coppers go funny colours when they think of me they call me Toledo.’
This was a million miles from Wheatley’s prose style, but the idea of a hero as brutal, ruthless and even lawless as the villains he tackled was something new in the British thriller—and Wheatley noticed. The following year, he wrote the introduction for Cheyney’s second book, a collection of short stories titled You Can’t Hit A Woman, saying he was putting readers ‘on to a real good thing’.[6]
