V. From Germany, With Love
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
After another Sallust novel, V for Vengeance, Wheatley left the character for a while before returning to him in 1946 for Come Into My Parlour. I believe the premise of this book, and the events of three of its chapters, directly inspired From Russia, With Love, published 11 years later. It also contains the seeds of James Bond’s biography.
Chapter One, titled ‘The Spider’s Lair’, opens with a description of Berlin on the morning of June 23, 1941, introducing us to the status of the war at that date, including the Germans’ attitude to it:
‘For them, to expect victory had now become a habit of mind, and defeat unthinkable.’
After a few paragraphs, we move indoors:
‘Their confidence was shared by the quiet little middle-aged man who sat at his desk in a spacious second-floor room that looked out on a sunny courtyard at the back of the great S.S Headquarters on the Alexander Platz.’
Fleming used information from dozens of sources, mixed and distilled through his imagination, when writing From Russia, With Love, but one long scene was directly inspired by this chapter. Chapter Four of Fleming’s novel, ‘The Moguls of Death’, begins with a short introduction to Smersh, ‘the official murder organization of the Soviet government’. Then we again move indoors, only this time to Smersh headquarters at 13 Sretenka Ulitsa in Moscow:
‘The direction of Smersh is carried out from the 2nd floor. The most important room on the 2nd floor is a very large light room painted in the pale olive green that is the common denominator of government offices all over the world. Opposite the sound-proofed door, two wide windows look over the courtyard at the back of the building.’
The office’s occupant, Colonel General Grubozaboyschikov or ‘G’, is the head of Smersh. In both Wheatley and Fleming’s scenes, we are introduced to a very senior figure in the hierarchy of the hero’s deadliest opponents—the S.S. in Sallust’s case, Smersh in Bond’s—as they prepare for an important meeting at enemy headquarters. Cementing that Fleming worked directly from Wheatley’s scene, both characters also happen to work in large offices on the second floor that overlook courtyards at the back of their respective buildings.
That isn’t in itself all that remarkable, but the pattern of building off Wheatley’s structure continues throughout the scene. The inhabitant of the office in Come Into My Parlour—who we learn is none other than Heinrich Himmler—now moves into his conference room to hold the monthly meeting of the country’s intelligence chiefs:
‘The three Directors of Intelligence for the Army, Navy and Luftwaffe were present, and the civilian Intelligence Chiefs for the Foreign Office and Economic Warfare. At the far end of the table sat Himmler’s Principal Assistant, the S.S. General Kaltenbrunner; the only man, so it was whispered, of whom Himmler himself was afraid. Behind Kaltenbrunner, at a small separate table against the far wall, two S.S. majors waited, unobtrusive but observant, to act as secretaries and take notes of all that passed at the meeting.’
The scene in From Russia, With Love also moves to a conference room:
‘On the far side of the table sat Lieutenant-General Slavin, head of the G.R.U., the intelligence department of the General Staff of the Army, with a full colonel beside him. At the end of the table sat Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky of R.U.M.I.D., the Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a middle-aged man in plain clothes. With his back to the door, sat Colonel of State Security Nikitin, Head of Intelligence for the M.G.B., the Soviet Secret Service, with a major at his side.’
In both, we are being shown the senior level of the enemy’s spy machinery, and the bland bureaucracy of it becomes increasingly chilling. Wheatley’s detail that two S.S. majors sit at a separate table unobtrusively taking notes at the meeting is a wonderfully sinister little touch: it also sounds authoritative, as though Wheatley really knew how these meetings worked. Fleming does much the same, but has each officer in the room accompanied by an A.D.C.:
‘In the Soviet Union, no man goes alone to a conference. For his own protection, and for the reassurance of his department, he invariably takes a witness so that his department can have independent versions of what went on at the conference and, above all, of what was said on its behalf. This is important in case there is a subsequent investigation. No notes are taken at the conference and decisions are passed back to departments by word of mouth.’
This is even more sinister—‘in case there is a subsequent investigation’—but essentially performs the same task: it sounds like Fleming knows how these meetings really take place, and that we’re getting an inside look, right inside ‘the spider’s lair’. And, like Wheatley, he also had an inside source, in his case the Soviet defector Grigori Tokaev.[1]
Wheatley’s chapter continues by relating the meeting’s progress. Initially it is about the course of the war, but then Himmler comes to an unexpected item on the agenda:
‘At item thirteen, he read out: “Gregory Sallust”—paused for a moment, frowned, and added: “What is this? I seem to know that name.”
“I had it put on the agenda, Herr Obergruppenführer,” said Canaris, quietly.
Himmler squinted at him. “Well, Herr Admiral?”
The Admiral looked round, gathering the attention of his audience. “As you are all aware,” he began, “in some respects the British Intelligence Service has deteriorated since the last war. It cannot be denied that they are extremely efficient in securing certain types of information. For example, captured documents prove beyond dispute that their appreciations of our ‘Order of Battle’ in various theatres of war are uncannily accurate. On the other hand, they seem to have very little idea as to what is going on inside Germany itself. Generally speaking, our internal security is highly satisfactory; but the British do possess a limited number of ace operators who, from time to time, have succeeded in penetrating some of our most closely guarded secrets, and my people tell me that Sallust is the most dangerous of them all.”’
Admiral Canaris was the real-life chief of the Abwehr. His raising of Sallust’s name is immediately objected to by Gruppenführer Grauber, who registers his surprise that ‘the case of any individual enemy agent’ would be of sufficient importance to occupy the time ‘of such a high-powered meeting as this’. Grauber is fictional, Sallust’s arch-enemy from the previous four books. He controls ‘the operations of all Gestapo agents in countries outside the Reich’, and is liable to pop up anywhere at any time to capture Sallust or one of his allies and sadistically torture them. We haven’t seen him previously in a bureaucratic setting like this, and his presence is the equivalent of drawing the camera back to show a new, bigger picture perspective on his run-ins with Sallust.
By openly acknowledging the implausibility of a single agent being so significant as to be discussed by Himmler and other senior Nazi figures, Wheatley hopes to blunt readers’ disbelief. He takes this further by having Canaris make the case that Sallust is enough of a threat that he could soon cause their side significant damage:
‘“The progress of our ‘K’ series of new secret weapons has now reached a point at which their further development necessitates a much greater number of people having knowledge of them. This will automatically increase the danger of the enemy getting wind of these immensely important devices, by which we hope to bring the war with Britain to a successful conclusion without undertaking the hazards of an invasion. If a leak does occur, the British will obviously put their best men on to the job of securing for them the secrets of Peenemünde. Sallust speaks German as well as if he was born here, so all the odds are that he will be allocated to this task. Prevention being better than cure, I should like to have the Herr Gruppenführer’s assurance that adequate precautions are being taken against him.”’
The pattern of this is repeated in Fleming’s novel. The Russians also discuss the progress of the war—the Cold one—with references to events in Morocco, Yugoslavia, Cyprus and elsewhere. They speak rather more highly of the British than the Germans do, and their meeting doesn’t have any points on the agenda other than Bond, but scepticism over the importance of the single enemy agent under discussion is similarly expressed:
‘“Within the Secret Service, this man may be a local hero or he may not. It will depend on his appearance and personal characteristics. Of these I know nothing. He may be fat and greasy and unpleasant. No one makes a hero out of such a man, however successful he is.”
This doubt is immediately countered:
Nikitin broke in. “English spies we have captured speak highly of this man. He is certainly much admired in his Service. He is said to be a lone wolf, but a good looking one.”’
In Come Into My Parlour, Himmler checks Canaris’ analysis of the threat by asking Grauber what he knows of the British agent:
‘Grauber shrugged his great shoulders. “The Herr Admiral exaggerates the danger. Sallust is certainly a man to watch. He is resolute and resourceful, and he has pulled off some very clever coups. So far he has always managed to elude us; but if he puts his nose inside Germany again, I’ll get him.”
Even monstrous Gestapo chiefs can have their turf unexpectedly invaded by other departments. Grauber’s response to the pressure is to airily talk down the idea that this single British agent is a major threat, while at the same making it clear that he is a danger. In doing so, he is defending his department and trying to evade personal blame for having failed to stop Sallust. His underplaying of Sallust’s impact is in itself suggestive of his effectiveness, as he can’t afford to pretend that he’s no threat at all—the best he can do is admit he has proven to be a menace in the past, but not so notable one that a whole operation proposed by another agency need be devoted to catching him. The act might be enough to fool the others in the room, but for readers of the series to date there’s a pleasing irony: implausible as it might seem that Himmler and other senior Nazis would have discussed a single agent in a meeting such as this, we know that Canaris’ assessment was the right one: Sallust is in fact capable of changing the fate of world events, and Grauber having to pretend otherwise considering their history is rather delicious. By having his fictional arch-villain interact with real-life senior Nazis like Canaris and Himmler, and doing so in a closely detailed and seemingly authentic setting, Wheatley is also deepening the stakes of the series so far. The evil Grauber is himself under pressure from men we know to be even more evil. At the same time, Wheatley is making Sallust a more credible figure: the real-life head of the Abwehr knows his name, and will set in motion the plot of the novel.
Fleming does something very similar in his scene. General Vozdvishensky defends having initially failed to recall the agent under discussion:
‘“Certainly I know the name of this Bond. He has been a great trouble to us at different times. But today my mind is full of other names–names of people who are causing us trouble today, this week. I am interested in football, but I cannot remember the name of every foreigner who has scored a goal against the Dynamos.”’
Vozdvishensky is the (fictional) head of Soviet foreign intelligence efforts. He is a new character to the series, so there is not nearly as much irony in his assessment of Bond, but Fleming is using the jostling for position among the enemy’s spy chiefs in a very similar way to Wheatley, to give a higher level view of the novels to date by showing how they have been viewed by senior intelligence figures. Like Grauber, Vozdvishensky responds to pressure from his colleagues by denying the single British agent is a major threat, but as readers we know he is.
The irony of Grauber being forced to claim that Gregory Sallust isn’t too much of a problem would have been lost on new readers to the series. Wheatley was conscious of this. To bring them up to speed on the context, he has Canaris rattle off a few examples of his hero’s activities:
‘“He even had the effrontery to beard Reichsmarschall Goering at Karinhall, and got away with it; and I have good reason to believe that he completely fooled von Geisenheim, one of our astutest Generals, less than a month ago in Paris.”’
The first incident appeared in Faked Passports, the second in V for Vengeance.
Similarly, Fleming uses the bickering intelligence chiefs to give us a potted history of Bond’s previous exploits:
‘“Comrade Colonel Nikitin will no doubt refresh our memories further, but I recall that this Bond has at lease twice frustrated the operations of Smersh. That is,’ he added, ‘before I assumed control of the department. There was this affair in France, at that Casino town. The man Le Chiffre. An excellent leader of the Party in France. He foolishly got into some money troubles. But he would have got out of them if this Bond had not interfered. I recall that the Department had to act quickly and liquidate the Frenchman. The executioner should have dealt with the Englishman at the same time, but he did not. Then there was this Negro of ours in Harlem. A great man—one of the greatest foreign agents we have ever employed, and with a vast network behind him. There was some business about a treasure in the Caribbean. I forget the details. This Englishman was sent out by the Secret Service and smashed the whole organization and killed our man. It was a great reverse. Once again my predecessor should have proceeded ruthlessly against this English spy.”
Colonel Nikitin broke in. “We had a similar experience in the case of the German, Drax, and the rocket. You will recall the matter, Comrade General. A most important konspiratsia. The General Staff were deeply involved. It was a matter of High Policy which could have borne decisive fruit. But again it was this Bond who frustrated the operation. The German was killed. There were grave consequences for the State. There followed a period of serious embarrassment which was only solved with difficulty.”’
Here we have the action of Casino Royale, Live and Let Die and Moonraker summarised from the perspective of senior figures in Smersh. (The only novel in the series to date whose events are not mentioned is Diamonds are Forever, which had no connection to Cold War espionage.)
In both novels, the scenes develop the idea that the hero of the series is a worthwhile target to be the focus of the attention of the chief enemy’s most senior figures. Wheatley concludes his chapter with Himmler rapping out his verdict:
‘“If this man is so dangerous he must be eliminated before he has a chance to do us any further mischief. Lure him here. Set a trap for him and kill him. See to that, Grauber, or I will make you answer for it personally. Within three months, I require a certificate of Sallust’s death from you.”’
One can almost follow Ian Fleming’s thought process as he read these lines. The idea of Grauber having to not only kill Sallust but also provide his death certificate is wonderfully menacing, but Fleming thought of a way to better it:
‘General G.’s hand went to the internal office telephone. He spoke to his A.D.C. “Death Warrant,” he said harshly. “Made out in the name of ‘James Bond’”.
The scene ends with the men at the table passing around Bond’s death warrant, each of them signing it in turn, after which we are introduced to Rosa Klebb.
There are, naturally, thousands of differences between these long scenes, but their structure and tone are strikingly similar, and the core premise the same in both: the leaders of the enemy camp hold a meeting at their headquarters, snipe at each other, but eventually agree to set a trap and kill Britain’s greatest secret agent. Both scenes set up the main plot of the novels. In Wheatley’s, the Germans predict that the agent in question will be sent to find out about their new ‘K’ series of weapons. Smersh’s konspiratsia adds a sweetener to the British to make sure Bond is sent—Tatiana’s supposed adoration of him—but the main lure is also a piece of top-secret technology, the Spektor cipher machine. Both plots also involve the manipulation of a beautiful woman, albeit in different ways.
But this is not the end of Come Into My Parlour’s influence on Fleming. He also drew on it for another of his novels, and in a way that goes to the heart of James Bond’s identity. In the chapter following the meeting at S.S. Headquarters, Grauber approaches Canaris to ask his advice on trapping Sallust, asking if he has any further details about the man. Canaris’ response is worth quoting at length:
‘“Sallust comes of good middle-class stock, but his parents were only moderately well off and both of them died when he was quite young. He was an imaginative and therefore troublesome boy and after only two and a half terms was expelled for innumerable breaches of discipline from his public school, Dulwich College. With the idea of taming him, his uncle sent him as a cadet to H.M.S. Worcester. The freer life seems to have suited him, but again, owing to his refractory nature, he was never made a Petty Officer, as they term their Prefects. On leaving he did not go to sea, because he did not consider that such a career offered a sufficiently remunerative future: instead he used a portion of his patrimony to give himself a year on the Continent. He has a quite exceptional flair for languages so he could soon speak German and French like a native. He was still at an age when he ought to have been at school, but he was already his own master and a handsome, precocious young blackguard. The women adored him and he had an insatiable curiosity about the night life, both high and low, of all the cities he visited, so there wasn’t much he hadn’t done by the time the war broke out and he returned to England.”
Canaris paused for a moment, then went on: “He got a commission at once in a Territorial Field Artillery Regiment, and in due course was sent to France. At the age of twenty-one he was serving on the staff of the Third Army. At the battle of Cambrai he was wounded and carries the scar to this day. It lifts the outer corner of his left eyebrow, giving him a slightly satanic appearance. He showed great gallantry at the time he was wounded and was given the M.C.
“After the War he took up journalism; not regular work, but unusual assignments that took him abroad again. As a special correspondent he saw the high spots of the Graeco-Turkish war of nineteen nineteen, and the Russo-Polish war of nineteen twenty. Then he spent a lot of time in Central Europe, studying the development of the new states that emerged from the Versailles and Trianon Treaties—Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and so on. It was through his articles on such subjects, I believe, that he came into touch with that formidable old rascal Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust.”
Grauber’s solitary eye flickered slightly and he suddenly sat forward. “So you know about him, do you? My compliments, Herr Admiral; he keeps himself so much in the background that I thought hardly anyone here had the least idea of the power he wields behind the scenes on every major problem concerning the British Empire.”
“Oh, yes, I know about him.” The Admiral’s thin mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “He took seven thousand marks off me at baccarat one night at Deauville in nineteen twenty four, drank me under the table afterwards and sent the money back next morning with a charming little note to the effect that, seeing the poor state of Germany’s post-war finances, he did not feel it fair to take such a sum off one of her secret agents at a single sitting. You can repeat that story if you like. I have often related it as a lesson in good manners to my subordinates...”’
Fleming and Wheatley both added a great deal of their own tastes and experiences to their characters (Wheatley was wounded at Cambrai), and fictional secret agents tended to be good-looking, fluent in languages, with extensive combat experience. But the similarities between the biography of Sallust presented here and that given for Bond in his obituary in You Only Live Twice, published in 1964, go far beyond the conventions of the genre, or coincidence:
‘James Bond was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud. His father being a foreign representative of the Vickers armaments firm, his early education, from which he inherited a first-class command of French and German, was entirely abroad. When he was eleven years of age, both his parents were killed in a climbing accident in the Aiguilles Rouges above Chamonix, and the youth came under the guardianship of an aunt, since deceased, Miss Charmian Bond, and went to live with her at the quaintly-named hamlet of Pett Bottom near Canterbury in Kent. There, in a small cottage hard by the attractive Duck Inn, his aunt, who must have been a most erudite and accomplished lady, completed his education for an English public school, and, at the age of twelve or thereabouts, he passed satisfactorily into Eton, for which College he had been entered at birth by his father. It must be admitted that his career at Eton was brief and undistinguished and, after only two halves, as a result, it pains me to record, of some alleged trouble with one of the boys’ maids, his aunt was requested to remove him. She managed to obtain his transfer to Fettes, his father’s old school. Here the atmosphere was somewhat Calvinistic, and both academic and athletic standards were rigorous. Nevertheless, though inclined to be solitary by nature, he established some firm friendships among the traditionally famous athletic circles at the school. By the time he left, at the early age of seventeen, he had twice fought for the school as a light-weight and had, in addition, founded the first serious judo class at a British public school. By now it was 1941 and, by claiming an age of nineteen and with the help of an old Vickers colleague of his father, he entered a branch of what was subsequently to become the Ministry of Defence. To serve the confidential nature of his duties, he was accorded the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the R.N.V.R., and it is a measure of the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with the rank of Commander…’
To summarize: James Bond and Gregory Sallust both lost both their parents at a young age; Fleming specifies at what age and how it happened. Both were sent to public school (the same one as their respective authors), but expelled after similarly short amounts of time. As terms at Eton are known as ‘halves’, this may be why Bond did not last quite as long as Sallust: ‘two and a half halves’ wouldn’t have worked. Wheatley was himself expelled from Dulwich, whereas Fleming lasted the duration at Eton.
Both Bond and Sallust had naval training while young, although Bond’s is significantly more extensive. Wheatley based his character’s experience on his own: he had also been a cadet on HMS Worcester. Bond ends the war a Commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, as did Fleming. (In Traitors’ Gate, published in 1958, Sallust would become a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, which was Wheatley’s rank by the end of the war.) Both Bond and Sallust have fluent German and French. Both discovered the attentions of women at a young age, Sallust while roaming the cities of Europe and Bond a little earlier with the maid incident. Both are decorated: Sallust an M.C. and Bond a C.M.G.
Then there is Canaris’ anecdote about losing money to Sir Pellinore at baccarat in Deauville in 1924. This is very reminiscent of the incident that Fleming claimed, in an interview with Playboy, had inspired Casino Royale:
‘I was on my way to America with the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey. We were in Estoril in Portugal, and while we were waiting for transport, we killed some time in the casino. While there, I recognised some German agents, and I thought it would be a brilliant coup to play with them, break them, take their money. Instead, of course, they took mine. Most embarrassing. This incident appears in Casino Royale, my first book—but, of course, Bond does not lose.’[2]
Fleming told several versions of this story, but a British operative’s attempt to deliver a blow to Germany’s fortunes in a foreign casino is the ‘hook’ of the anecdote in all its forms, and it’s a strikingly unusual idea. So what happened here? In Casino Royale, Fleming changed the location of Estoril to Royale-les-Eaux, a fictionalised version of Deauville, and baccarat was also the game played. It seems unlikely, therefore, that Fleming had told Wheatley about the incident, as they would have then both to have independently decided to relocate it to northern France, with Wheatley doing so first. So perhaps it was the other way around: Wheatley had heard of such an incident happening and told the anecdote to Fleming, who then decided to try it out himself while in Estoril, after which he used it in the plot of Casino Royale.
Dennis Wheatley signing copies of his books for Honor Blackman at a charity event in October 1966. Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Come Into My Parlour was an unusually violent novel for 1946. Erika falls into the clutches of Grauber, who forces her to watch a woman being tortured with electrodes. After escaping from the Lubyanka and the bowels of a U-boat, Sallust infiltrates the Schloss in which Erika is being held and follows Helga, a vivacious Gestapo gaoler with ‘good legs and provocative breasts’ to her room, where she strips off her fur coat for him. He shoots her in the back, but the bullet goes through her spine in the area of her kidneys and doesn’t kill her outright. Reasoning that the lower part of her body is the life of such an ‘over-sexed young animal’, Sallust doesn’t hesitate:
‘He knew what he would have wished himself had he been her. Putting the point of his gun within a few inches of the base of her skull he blew out her brains. He felt no compunction at all about the act. It was the merciful thing to do.’
Four more Sallust novels followed, the final adventure in the series, The White Witch of The South Seas, being published in 1968. Wheatley outlived Fleming, but doesn’t seem to have ever publicly mentioned that his work was an influence on James Bond. This might be because to have done so would have detracted from his sense of his own achievements. Wheatley often blew his own trumpet—sometimes even within the pages of his own novels—but having sustained millions of sales over several decades, he would have had reason to believe his characters would be regarded by subsequent generations in much the same way as the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Three Musketeers and Richard Hannay. But his star quickly faded, and he is all but forgotten now. His books soon dated in part because of his politics: although he could throw in some unexpected perspectives, he was for the most part an unabashed reactionary imperialist who made Fleming look like Jeremy Corbyn. He had always felt that other writers had trapped themselves by focussing on just one character, so had alternated his series, and genres; but this strategy seems to have backfired, as he has not been remembered for one character the way Fleming is for James Bond. Indeed, his spy novels are barely remembered at all. There were successful film adaptations of Wheatley’s work, but none captured the public’s imagination to anything like the same degree as the Bond films. None of the Sallust books were ever adapted for film, Wheatley thought in part because the necessity of vast crowds and battle-scenes would have made them too expensive to produce.[3]
It could also be that Wheatley was unaware of the extent to which he had influenced Fleming. In his memoirs, he mentioned that he had been friends with Fleming, but didn’t elaborate on it. But he was well aware of Fleming’s success. In his novel The Unholy Crusade, published in 1967, he even referred to himself in the same sentence as Fleming, who had died three years earlier. His hero, aspiring novelist Adam Gordon, visits his cynical publisher, from whom he learns the hard facts of a writer’s life:
‘He must not be misled by the incomes made by such writers as Agatha Christie, Somerset Maugham, Dennis Wheatley, Ian Fleming, J.B. Priestley, A.J. Cronin, Howard Spring and a few others of that kind. They could be counted on the fingers of two hands.’
This is a classic piece of self-advertising from Wheatley, although there’s a touch of desperation to it, almost as if he is reminding himself as well as his readers that he is in the same league as the others. Later in the same book, he makes a bid for establishing himself as one of the thriller greats, when he has a Wing Commander marvel at his hero’s adventures:
‘“So you are now Richard Hannay, Gregory Sallust and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.” His face suddenly became serious. “But this is a dangerous game you’re playing, and your pals in the Mexican Security set-up won’t equip you against all emergencies. I mean, real secret agents don’t have daggers that spring out of the soles of their shoes, cars that eject flame and tintacks in the path of their pursuers, and all those other silly, amusing gadgets that one reads about in the Bond books.”’
A few paragraphs later, this character warns our hero that if his enemies realize what he is planning to do he may find a knife stuck into him faster than he can ‘take the first sip of a dry Martini’. Wheatley is going to some lengths to position Gregory Sallust as having followed in the line of Buchan’s hero. At the same time, he appears to be belittling Bond, who is not just heroically intrepid like Hannay and Sallust, but completely unrealistic to boot. Or perhaps not, as most of the ‘silly, amusing gadgets’ in Fleming’s work were inspired by real devices, something that Wheatley, with his experiences in the war, might well have known.[4]
However, Wheatley doesn’t seem to have known James Bond all that well: 007 drinks vodka martini, of course. This chimes with research done by Phil Baker: according to an exhaustive catalogue Wheatley made of his 4,000-strong library in 1964 for insurance and tax purposes, he didn’t own any of Fleming’s books.[5] Nevertheless, he did comment directly on Fleming’s work on at least one occasion. In 1971, Swedish thriller expert Iwan Morelius asked Wheatley what he thought of James Bond. ‘I enjoyed Ian Fleming’s books,’ he replied, ‘particularly the first, Casino Royale, which I thought was his best, but some of the others such as the one about the Chinese doctor in the Caribbean were, I thought, so improbable as, to my mind, he was written out.’[6]
This seems a peculiar remark coming from Wheatley, whose plots were often extremely improbable, but perhaps he felt that Fleming’s strengths lay more in traditional spy thriller territory: Casino Royale was certainly much more low-key than Dr No.
It might also be that Wheatley was aware of his influence on Fleming, but didn’t think it particularly remarkable. Fleming took some elements of his work, but dramatically refashioned them into something entirely new. One could call it derivative, but Wheatley was himself a highly derivative writer: Gregory Sallust was built on the shoulders of Bulldog Drummond and the Saint. He added fresh twists to them, and Fleming did the same to Sallust. In his memoirs, Wheatley remarked of his 1938 novel The Golden Spaniard that ‘the main theme was a plagiarism of Alexandre Dumas’ Twenty Years After’, before commenting that he felt it was one of the best books he had written.[7]
Fleming also never acknowledged Wheatley’s influence on his work, but that’s hardly surprising. He acknowledged the influence of John Buchan, E Phillips Oppenheim, Sax Rohmer and Sapper, but these were all writers long past their heyday and comparisons between his work and theirs didn’t show him up as being derivative, simply because he didn’t draw as much from them. Hammett and Chandler were writing crime fiction in another vernacular: nobody could think they were too close, and an association with their work made his seem up-to-date. Wheatley, on the other hand, was still writing spy thrillers, and drawing attention to his influence might have been revealing a little too much of what went into making the Bond ‘sausage’. Fleming was also notably naïve about the perils of using others’ ideas as a springboard for his own work; his use of George Griffith’s The Outlaws of The Air in Thunderball went unnoticed in the storm of accusations of plagiarism and legal proceedings over that novel, which producer Kevin McClory claimed was too similar to a script he and others had worked on prior to its publication. Fleming settled out of court.
But then how has Wheatley’s influence been so overlooked by Fleming’s critics? It’s no coincidence that Kingsley Amis, O.F. Snelling and others hopped from the clubland heroes to Bond, leaving a gap of three or four decades between—they had read the former in boyhood and moved on to other fare as adults before being drawn back into the genre by Fleming’s huge success and new spin on it. Sometimes the coincidences of personal taste left gaps that were never filled in. Snelling skipped over Leslie Charteris as a potentially significant influence on Fleming in two sentences because he didn’t personally find The Saint a memorable character, while Julian Symons claimed that a ‘characteristic Wheatley book contains chunks of pre-digested history served up in a form which may appeal to readers with a mental age of twelve’.[8] That’s a little harsh, I think, but then I wasn’t much older when I first devoured the Sallust novels, and of course millions of teenagers have read James Bond stories. It’s no great surprise when later in the same book Symons claims:
‘Fleming is the heir of Buchan and ‘Sapper’, and James Bond was a more sophisticated version of Bulldog Drummond.’[9]
This is a view that has solidified over the decades, but which, I hope I’ve shown, is far too bald. But neither am I saying that Wheatley was Fleming’s only influence. As well as his own experiences and fertile imagination, he drew on a large and disparate body of material when writing his novels: it was the way in which he collated it all that created their magic. So he might take a dose of authoritative-sounding facts from E.H. Cookridge’s Soviet Spy Net, snippets of inside information on life in Berlin from Sunday Times correspondent Antony Terry, testimony from a Soviet defector, add a plot premise and the structure of a couple of chapters from Wheatley’s Come Into My Parlour, throw in his own observations of the international situation, and fashion from it all a rich but distinctive stew. One testament to Fleming’s originality is that his voice is so unmistakeable—wherever the ideas came from, he transformed them into something else entirely.
Fleming also outgrew Wheatley’s influence, and those of writers like Buchan and Sapper. Even as early as Moonraker, we find an ending that subverts the genre’s expectations, and James Bond adopts a pose that is much more self-reflective than Gregory Sallust could ever have managed:
‘“I’m going to marry that man,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow afternoon.” And then, as if no other explanation was needed, “His name’s Detective-Inspector Vivian.”
“Oh,” said Bond. He smiled stiffly. “I see.”
There was a moment of silence during which their eyes slid away from each other.
And yet why should he have expected anything else? A kiss. The contact of two frightened bodies clinging together in the midst of danger. There had been nothing more. And there had been the engagement ring to tell him. Why had he automatically assumed that it had only been worn to keep Drax at bay? Why had he imagined that she shared his desires, his plans?
And now what? wondered Bond. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure-the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. The exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.’
As his career progressed, Fleming strained at the shackles of the genre even further, eventually writing short stories that owed more to Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. And while Wheatley and Fleming’s tone, plots, characters and even world views were often very similar, their style and pace weren’t. The Sallust series is about a secret agent on the run, usually behind enemy lines, constantly in physical danger and managing to survive by the skin of his teeth. He is also constantly changing into uniforms to impersonate Nazi officers and other figures, and these aspects of his work helped pave the way for the likes of Alistair Maclean’s Where Eagles Dare and Adam Hall’s Quiller novels.
In contrast, Fleming removed pace almost entirely from his thrillers, concentrating instead on the excitement of the various elements: the outlandish villain, the beautiful girl, the extraordinary conspiracy, all pulled together by his unique voice and filtered through the eyes of James Bond. Wheatley used incidental atmospheric details to make his peripatetic plots more realistic; Fleming used peripatetic plots as diversions to showcase the main action of his novels, which was the atmospheric details.
But despite these differences, there can be little doubt that Wheatley’s novels were a lodestar for Fleming, and the seeds of both the character of James Bond and of many of his adventures are contained within them. Bond shares attributes with Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay, The Saint and other characters, but they pale in comparison to the similarities with Gregory Sallust. Sallust is Britain’s greatest secret agent, dark-haired and cruelly handsome, has a facial scar, was orphaned at a young age, was expelled from his public school, has a naval background, falls in love with and eventually marries a Countess, but is also a womanizer, is fluent in French and German, a daredevil, ruthless and yet frequently sentimental, well-informed, fond of gambling, Champagne and Savile Row suits. James Bond is every single one of these. In addition, Fleming was clearly inspired by the Sallust novels for several key plot ideas. It’s time to classify Dennis Wheatley as a major influence on Ian Fleming.
Notes
[1] Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming’s World of Intelligence by Nigel West (The Scarecrow Press, 2009), pp220-221; and see Fleming’s inscription in his author’s copy of the novel: http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/etexts/fleming/index.shtml#IF03133
[2] Interview with Fleming, Playboy, December 1964, p104.
[3] Fyra decennier med Dennis Wheatley by Iwan Hedman (Morelius) and Jan Alexandersson (DAST, 1973), p177.
[4] The spikes Le Chiffre uses against Bond’s Bentley in Casino Royale are assumed by Bond to be ‘an adaptation of the nail-studded devices used by the Resistance against German staff-cars’. Britain’s Special Operations Executive also had a device called the Tyreburster, a charge that was to be ‘placed on the road or in ground where vehicles are likely to move’. See Secret Agent’s Handbook, introduced by Roderick Bailey (Max Press, 2008), p42. The book is derived from Descriptive Catalogue of Special Devices and Supplies, 1944, UK National Archives, HS 7/28. S.O.E. didn’t create a shoe with a dagger, but did have an incendiary attaché case very much like the one used by Bond in From Russia, With Love; ibid., p121.
[5] Phil Baker to author, 19 April, 2007.
[6] Fyra decennier med Dennis Wheatley, p176.
[7] The Time Has Come, p628.
[8] Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel by Julian Symons (Viking, 1985 revised edition), p202.
[9] Ibid., p223.
Acknowledgements
With many thanks to: Ihsan Amanatullah, Phil Baker, Ajay Chowdhury, and the late Iwan Morelius.