Ian Fleming on Crime and Spy Fiction (and non-fiction!)

Books Ian Fleming
56

Delinquents and Smugglers (Sunday Times, Sept. 18, 1955)

From IAN FLEMING, Special Representative of The Sunday Times at the International Police Conference

ISTANBUL, Saturday.

Despite the respective resignation and dismissal of its joint hosts, the Turkish Minister of the Interior and the Istanbul Chief of Police, the Twenty-fourth General Assembly of the International Police Commission tactfully averted its gaze from the surrounding shame and chaos, completed its labours and on Wednesday, discreetly thankful, took to its heels. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the secretariat much was achieved and many criminal loopholes have been blocked. But the most solid achievement was not in the final minutes of the assembly but in the public and private airing of the problems and cases of the police chiefs from 52 different countries.

Here, without committing Governments, and without the befogging intrusions of national sentiment, embarrassing topics could be discussed on the technical level. Thus the head of the Australian delegation could talk over piracy from the Pacific pearling grounds with the Police Chief of Tokyo, the head of the Egyptian Sureté could raise with the Inspector-General of Police of Tel Aviv the increased drug traffic from the Arab countries, and Mr. Donald Fish, B.O.A.C. chief security officer, could offer private advice to the director of the new Delhi intelligence bureau on certain ingenious ruses used for concealing gold bars in aircraft.

Juvenilia

Unofficial pooling of experience and knowledge is far more important and practical than the adoption of joint resolutions by representatives of 52 different countries with widely varying customs and legal systems. For example, juvenile delinquency sounds an easy topic to discuss. Everyone agrees that there should be less of it. But no resolution will cover even the words “juvenile” and “delinquency” as applied to, say, India, Scotland and Norway, let alone the other 49 States.

What about the criminal status of juvenile homosexuality, for instance? When you come to statistics, how do you explain that as against an international norm of 17 per cent., the percentage of crime committed by juveniles is 0.5 per cent. in Denmark and 44.5 per cent. in Scotland? In fact, the age of puberty—much later in Denmark—comes in as well as the differences in criminal law and the relative stringency of Scottish courts, and perhaps the Irish element in Glasgow. That is an example of the difficulty of codifying crime and therefore of codifying methods of prevention.

Illicit Gold

On the other hand, on a matter like gold-smuggling Interpol can be of real value, and it is probable that India, which is the chief target for the traffic, as America is for narcotic smugglers, will get real co-operation as a result of the remarkable facts her delegation laid before the assembly. It seems that she is being deluged with illicit gold. During 1954 nearly 40,000 ounces, valued at about £6 million, were seized by customs and police in 229 cases, involving 236 foreign nationals, and the delegation admitted that this haul can represent only a fraction of the illegal imports. Apparently it is coming in from all the gold-producing countries of the world— from Australia by steamship via Macao, Hongkong and Singapore; from Africa by fast lugger via Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf; from America by air via London, France, Switzerland and the Middle East. All this represents one of the most fabulous criminal networks in history, and the many Interpol States involved will now co-operate to crush it.

Other smaller points of interest that came up in discussion include the following. The U.S. Customs are particularly troubled by diamond-smuggling from Belgium and by the smuggling of watches and watch-movements from Switzerland. Regarding the latter. Dr. Grassberger, from Vienna, where next year’s Interpol conference will take place, observed that it is better to get real smuggled Swiss watches than counterfeit ones. For the past two years an Austrian gang have been running a side-line to the smuggling of watch-movements: they put cheap watch-movements in formerly discarded watch-cases, forge famous names on the dials and smuggle these too.

The United Nations delegate reported an interesting technical process for discovering the geographical origin of smuggled narcotics. The U.N. Narcotics Division has discovered that by alkaloid and spectrographic analysis the nature of the soil in which captured opium was grown, and thus its country of origin, can be determined, greatly facilitating the pursuit back down the pipe-line.

Policing Air Routes

Sir Ronald Howe, deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, presented the common-sense view of the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office on many recommendations where a conservative voice was needed. For instance on the occasion when the delegate from Chile suggested that your finger-prints should be verified before you could cash a cheque! As chairman of the sub-committee on policing the air routes, he fought for the rights and comforts of the passenger, and as a result we may see a simplification of the dreadful embarkation and disembarkation cards and a check to the practice in some countries of depriving the transit passenger of his passport during overnight stops.

(Incidentally I found unanimity among the senior delegates that Sir Ronald should be invited to become President of Interpol when M. Louwage of Belgium in due course resigns. This will be a great tribute to the prestige abroad of Scotland Yard.)

The corridors of the ornate Chalet Palace where the meetings were held were a splendid listening post. Here the Chief of Police of Thailand told me of the two elephants which form his riot squad. “Very effective against small villages,” he explained. Mr. Charles Siragusa, head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, explained his methods for “leaning on” Lucky Luciano, the famous American gangster who was deported from America and now lives in Naples. “He won’t explain how he happens to stay so rich,” said Mr. Siragusa; “so my Italian police friends have interpreted this as withholding information from them and have put him on parole. That means that he may not consort with criminals and has to be indoors by 11 o’clock every night. One day soon he will happen to talk to a waiter with a police record or get home a few minutes late and will find himself in gaol. That is what we call ‘leaning on’ someone.”

The Director of the Paris Sureté talked of the iron-clad conspiracy of silence among the Dominici family. The Australian delegate complained of the expense of the Petrov case, which has not only left Australia with the burden of keeping Petrov alive but has meant the abstention of Russia from Australian wool sales for over a year. The famous Professor Soedermann, from Sweden, told me of a hitherto unpublicised plot to kill Hitler in 1942, and so on.

Ignorance is Bliss

The one police chief who has been sadly missed this year is the delegate from Burma. Last year at Rome the assembly was discussing sex crimes, and one by one delegates from the major Western powers reeled off their formidable and grisly statistics. Finally the Burmese delegate diffidently climbed to the rostrum. “I must apologise to the assembly,” he said, “for I have no statistics on this subject. We are a backward nation and have no sex-crimes. But as our civilisation catches up with those of the distinguished delegates who have been speaking I hope we may do better. Next year I will try to bring some good statistics on this matter.” Perhaps this year he was ashamed to come back still empty-handed.

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Remarkable how much times have changed - and how much they stayed the same. Counterfeit watches, drug smuggling, organised crime, so on so forth. And lots of it even reaching back to the 1930s. One wonders about Fleming’s optimistic tone in these reports; how much of that reflected actual opinion of these heads of police when their experience should have told them better?

Over 60 years later none of the problems mentioned have been solved. Forgeries are more prevalent than ever, from currencies to brand stuff to documents and industrial items. I’d like to hear what Fleming would have made of similar events today; how the organisation has changed; how things have become so complex that they had to be broken down to regional and topical themed conferences; how politics and crises are shaping the entire field of policing now.

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I think the late 50s/early 60s was definitely a time of optimism, soon to be dashed by the unrest of the later 60s. As you note, none of the problems mentioned have been solved; technology has only exacerbated them. The one exception might be juvenile delinquency, which was a big scare in the 50s but seems to have disappeared with the dip in crime rates (one positive feature of our modern world). Fleming was a man of great curiosity, and were he around today I’m sure he’d be fascinated at how crime as mutated to keep up with the times. Organized crime for instance has now taken a backseat to state-sponsored crime.

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Revelator thank you again for these gems. I’ve actually taken to doing a cut & paste of these into a word document for my files. So wonderful of their time but also oddly very timely. Makes one wonder what Interpol meetings are like these days. Probably not too far removed.

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I’ve done the same. I have separate copies of each article, as I love going back and re-reading IF’s words every now and then.

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You’re both very welcome, and I’m delighted to hear you’re archiving the posts. Part of my reason for sharing these articles was to make them accessible as texts that can be copied and pasted and easily shared. That wouldn’t have happened if Talk of the Devil had been made available to anyone besides millionaires. Anyway, I’ll be posting Fleming’s last interpol article at the end of the week.

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Gangs Cock a Snook at Interpol (Sunday Times, June 10, 1956)

By IAN FLEMING, The Sunday Times Special Representative

VIENNA, Saturday.

Allegorical figures representing industry, thrift, invention and wisdom look down on the police chiefs of 55 countries gathered in the Academy of Sciences here for the 25th assembly of the International Police Commission. The dark goddesses of sex, greed and narcotics would have been more appropriate witnesses.

The international drug traffic, gold smuggling, counterfeiting and prostitution are on the agenda, but much (too much) of this meeting will be occupied with a revision of Interpol’s statutes and with the election of a new president. Sir Ronald Howe, deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard, would have taken the place of the veteran M. Louwage of Belgium, but Sir Ronald is retiring to join a firm of merchant bankers, and M. Erie Ros, Stockholm’s chief of police, is likely to be elected.

Austrian Teddy-boys

Just as last year the criminal elements of Istanbul cocked a snook at Interpol by smashing up the city around the delegates, so, this year, have Austrian Teddy-boys shown their disdain by raiding the police museum at Graz and taking the pick of the modern revolver exhibits. These teen-age gangsters are known here as “halb-starke”—the half-strength ones—and their uniform is shiny leather jackets, shoes with two-inch soles and long greasy hair. The public is terrified.

A more attractive criminal element is the band of desperadoes who act as guides through the Iron Curtain. Their expert knowledge of safe routes through the minefields has so exasperated the Russians that they are moving the Hungarian curtain fringe a mile back. A conducted tour through the Hungarian Iron Curtain is cheap. I have been offered, and reluctantly rejected, a one-way passage for £2.

Greatest Safe-breaker

Vienna has a peculiar affinity with the mythos of crime. Over 100 years ago, a Viennese; Hans Gross, the first scientific criminologist, wrote his “Criminal Investigation,” and it remains the bible of the modern detective. Interpol itself was founded here in 1933, and today Vienna is the home of the greatest safe-breaker in the world—Joseph Bieraaus, who plies his trade as a locksmith.

His is a name to conjure with in the strongbox world, and he earns rich fees from the great safe-making firms. When the invasion of Britain was being planned he was asked if he could open the safes of the Bank of England and the Mint. On promising that he could, he was promoted sergeant and remained peacefully “on call.”

Then, of course, we have Nicholas Borrisov, alias Benno Blum, the original model for the Third Man, Harry Lime, who has opened his own cafe. Vienna is just the place for Interpol to meet.

Interpol, with its 250,000 card archives, seems to be increasing its cunning. Since its last meeting it has helped to come down on diamond smuggling from Africa, it has developed a new electronic method for detecting cheque forgeries and it has had some amazing successes against the drug traffic.

Drug “Shuttle-service”

One of the drug cases is interesting, because the gang used doctored cars—two Jaguars, two Buicks and a Fiat. Their own car body builder welded dummy crossbars to the chassis, capable of hiding away on each car up to 441 lb. of opium—a fortune’s worth. For two years these cars ran a regular shuttle-service between the Middle East and Marseilles. Then the police seized them all except the leader, a Lebanese “K,” who escaped.

Perhaps this summer, as you take your tryptique into some frontier office, that travel-stained Jaguar with the swarthy man and pretty girl which edged in just in front will be the redoubtable “K” with his latest girl, and perhaps if you follow their car to the next petrol station your keen eyes will notice that their tank takes only half as much petrol as your Jaguar does. Interpol in Vienna puts ideas into your head.

Fleming later wrote that his first Interpol conference, in Istanbul, “was great fun” and "by scraping together fragments from official papers and speeches and tying them up with informed gossip, I was able to write two long dispatches on ‘The Secrets of Interpol’ whose success was assisted by the Istanbul riots which took place conveniently over that week-end and on which I was able to give a scoop to my paper.

"The next year I went again to the conference, this time at Vienna, but my ‘revelations’ of the year before had put the police chiefs on their guard and, on this occasion, I was only able to produce a pretty thin three-quarters of a column. The learned papers read by the police chiefs had been more rigorously censored than before and were more carefully guarded, and the gossip dried up in my presence.

“I skipped the next year’s meeting in Lisbon, and that was the end of my acquaintanceship with Interpol.”

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It’s astonishing Fleming even got as far as he did. The only explanation is that most of the police chiefs were ignorant in whose presence they talked; you can hardly expect a journalist and thriller writer to keep mum about everything he heard during that conference.

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It probably helped that Fleming had not yet become a best-seller. Plus his friendship with Ronald Howe must have helped ingratiate himself with the other policemen.

Incidentally, I found the idea of “Austrian Teddy Boys” very funny. I’m sure in real life they were awful, but in my mind I picture them wearing frock coats and periwigs, joyriding around town on Lipizzaners and smashing windows to grab Linzer tortes.

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Mudscape with Figures (The Spectator, August 5, 1955)

By Ian Fleming

Some people are frightened by silence and some by noise. To some people the anonymous bulge at the hip is more frightening than the gun in the hand, and all one can say is that different people thrill to different stimuli, and that those who like The Turn of the Screw may not be worried by, for instance, The Cat and the Canary.

Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the atmosphere of suspense into horrible acts. Poe, Stevenson and M.R. James used to frighten me most, and now Maugham, Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Graham Greene can still raise the fur on my back when they want to. Their heroes are credible and their villains terrify with a real “blackness.” Their situations are fraught with doom, and the threat of doom, and, above all, they have pace. When one chapter is done, we reach out for the next. Each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier behind a fast motor-boat.

Too many writers in this genre (and I think Erskine Childers, on whose The Riddle of the Sands these remarks are hinged, was one of them) forget that, although this may sound a contradiction in terms, speed is essential to a novel of suspense, and while detail is important to create an atmosphere of reality, it can be laid on so thick as to become a Sargasso Sea on which the motor-boat bogs down and the skier founders.

The reader is quite happy to share the pillow-fantasies of the author as long as he is provided with sufficient landmarks to help him relate the author’s world more or less to his own, and a straining after verisimilitude with maps and diagrams should be avoided except in detective stories aimed at the off-beta mind.

Even more wearying are “recaps,” and those leaden passages where the hero reviews what he has achieved or ploddingly surveys what remains to be done. These exasperate the reader who, if there is to be any rumination, is quite happy to do it himself. When the author drags his feet with this space-filling device he is sacrificing momentum which it will take him much brisk writing to recapture.

These reflections, stale news through they may be to the mainliner in thrillers, come to me after rereading The Riddle of the Sands after an absence of very many years, and they force me to the conclusion that doom-laden silence and long-drawn-out suspense are not enough to confirm the tradition that Erskine Childers, romantic and remarkable man that he must have been, is also one of the father-figures of the thriller.

The opening of the story–the factual documentation in the preface and the splendid Lady Windermere’s Fan atmosphere of the first chapters–is superb.

At once you are ensconced in bachelor chambers off St. James’s at the beginning of the century. All the trappings of the Age of Certainty gather around you as you read. Although the author does not say so, a coal fire seems to roar in the brass grate; there is a glass of whisky beside your chair and, remembering Mr. Cecil Beaton’s Edwardian décors, you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass. The smoke from your cheroot curls up towards the ceiling and your button-boots are carefully crossed at the ankles on the red-­leather-topped fender so as not to disturb the crease of those spongebag trousers. On a mahogany bookrest above your lap The Riddle of the Sands is held open by at well-manicured finger.

Shall you go with Carruthers to Cowes or accompany him to the grouse-moor? It is the fag-end of the London season of 1903. You are bored, and it is all Mayfair to a hock-and-seltzer that the fates have got you in their sights and that you are going to start to pay for your fat sins just over the page.

Thus, in the dressing-room, so to speak, you and Carruthers are all ready to start the hurdle race. You are still ready when you get into the small boat in a God-forsaken corner of the East German coast, and you are even more hungry for the starter’s gun when you set sail to meet the villains. Then, to my, mind, for the next 95,000 words there is anticlimax.

This is a book of great renown; and it is not from a desire to destroy idols or a tendency to denigration that this review–now that, after the statutory fifty years, The Riddle of the Sands has entered the public domain–is becoming almost too much of an autopsy. But those villains! With the best will in the world I could not feel that the lives of the heroes (and therefore of my own) were in the least way endangered by them.

Dollmann, villain No. 1, is a “traitor” from the Royal Navy, whose presence among the clucking channels and glistening mudbanks of the Frisian Islands is never satisfactorily explained. His job was “spying at Chatham, the blackguard,” and the German High Command, even in 1903 when the book was first published, was crazy to employ him on what amounts to operational research. He never does anything villainous. Before the story opens, he foxes hero No. 1 into running himself on a mudbank, but at the end, when any good villain with his back to the wall would show his teeth, he collapses like a pricked balloon and finally disappears lamely overboard just after “we came to the bar of the Schild and had to turn south off that twisty bit of beating between Rottum and Bosch Fat.” His harshest words are “You pig­headed young marplots!” and his “blackness” is further betrayed by the beauty and purity of his daughter, with whom hero No. 1 falls in love (it is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have.)

Von Bruning, villain No. 2, is frankly a hero to the author, and is presented as such; and No.3, Boehme, though at first he exudes a delicious scent of Peter Lorre, forfeits respect by running away across the mud and leaving one of his gumboots in the hands of hero No. 2.

The plot is that the heroes want to discover what the villains are up to, and, in a small, flat-bottomed boat, they wander amongst the Frisian Islands (and two maps, two charts and a set of tide-tables won’t convince me that they don’t wander aimlessly) trying to find out.

This kind of plot makes an excellent framework for that classic “hurdle race” thriller formula, in which the hero (despite his Fleet-Foot Shoes with Tru-Temper Spikes and Kumfi­-Krutch Athletic Supporter) comes a series of ghastly croppers before he breasts the tape.

Unfortunately, in The Riddle of the Sands there are no hurdles and only two homely mishaps (both of the heroes’ own devising)–a second grounding on a mudbank, from which the heroes refloat on the rising tide, and the loss of the anchor chain, which they salvage without difficulty.

The end of the 100,000 word quest through the low-lying October mists is a hasty, rather muddled scramble which leaves two villains, two heroes and the heroine more or less in the air, and the small boat sailing off to England with the answer to the riddle. Before 1914 this prize must have provided a satisfactory fall of the curtain, but since then two German wars have clanged about our heads and today our applause is rather patronising.

The reason why The Riddle of the Sands will always be read is due alone to its beautifully sustained atmosphere. This adds poetry, and the real mystery of wide, fog-girt silence and the lost-child crying of seagulls, to a finely written log-book of a small-boat holiday upon which the author has grafted a handful of “extras” and two “messages”–the threat of Germany and the need for England to “be prepared.”

To my mind it is now republished exactly where it belongs–in the Mariner’s Library. Here, a thriller by atmosphere alone, it stands alongside twenty-eight thrillers of the other school–thrillers where the action on the stage thrills, and the threatening sea-noises are left to the orchestra pit.

Notes:

Readers with long memories might remember that I posted this article a few years ago, but no collection of Fleming’s literary journalism is complete without it, since “Mudscape” is one of his best and most sustained critical essays.

We already knew Ambler, Simenon, Chandler, and Greene, were influences on Fleming, but it’s good to hear we was also influenced by Poe, Stevenson and M R. James. What Fleming praises in these authors are his own qualities as a thriller-writer. “Above all” he values pace and in a thrilling metaphor says “each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a water-skier.” Pace is of great value in the Bond books, since it’s used to hustle the reader past implausibilities and plot defects.

Fleming’s counsel against getting bogged down in detail might sound hypocritical, but Fleming had to convince his readers of far wilder events and characters than the comparatively realistic Childers. And Fleming certainly took his own advice in avoiding “leaden” recaps. He kept his books short.

Predictably, Fleming is most entranced (and seeks to entrance the reader) by details of clothing and furnishings (“you notice that the soda-water syphon beside it is of blue glass”), down to the hero’s spongebag trousers of the hero. As many have stated, he was sometimes more interested in things than people, but his interest was deep and sensual.

Fleming’s biggest complaint against Childers involves his villains. Fleming’s own, full of “blackness,” are among his greatest strengths, and it is no coincidence that the weakest Bond books are those with the least substantial villains. We also have an amusing namecheck of the “delicious” Peter Lorre, who had already played LeChiffre by the time Fleming penned this article.

“It is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have.” Is this why Draco was made so loveable ally? And why Tracy was killed so soon after the wedding? I jest.

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Mountaineering Downwards (Time and Tide, January 2, 1954)

By Ian Fleming

British Caving: An Introduction to Speleology
Members of the Cave Research Group, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 35s.

“Down in a deep dark hole sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk.” Irreverently the dummy hexameter jingled through my head as I digested this weighty tome on a subject which should surely not be taken quite so seriously. ‘The Science of Speleology!’ The sport of exploring caves really cannot be rated a science any more than mountaineering (Montophily?) or treasure-hunting (Thesauromania?). It is true that the science of geology is involved, also physics and geophysics, biology (‘biospeleology’ to the potholers if you please!), palaeontology and so forth. But these can also be part of mountaineering and even of treasure-hunting. Somehow these underground mountaineers have been persuaded to take themselves very seriously indeed and this tome is one of the results.

I am sorry that the Reverend Cecil Cullingford, the editor, did not fight shy of the project. He is the author of that cheerful and expert little handbook Exploring Caves which deals with the sport at exactly the right level, as an entertaining pastime with undertones of romance and adventure. Now he treats us to a volume so comprehensive that the only subject connected with caves that is omitted (or avoided) is the psychology of speleologists—why people like exploring caves—which would have been far more interesting than the sections on meteorology, mammalogy and gravimetric surveying.

Personally I should guess the whole business has something to do with a return to the womb. Certainly there is a touch of infantilism involved, as one may learn from the commonsense chapter on “Caving Code and Ethics” in which the writer criticises the speleologist’s love of secrecy and the jealousy with which he keeps his caves to himself, barring and locking them from others with the result that ‘the relationship between the potholer and the ordinary country folk is now in danger’. Then:

“The manners of some of them are deplorable. At the village Saturday night dance they argue with the doorkeeper about the price of admission, or steal in when no one is looking. One party even stole in to a dance by an unattended door and were dancing in spiked boots, wearing their safety helmets!”

Stalactites are stolen from caves and gypsum flowers and cave pearls “have been filched in their hundreds from near Settle”.

But enough of deflating these excellent people. The best amongst them are incredibly brave expert mountaineers responsible for bringing to light a great deal of archaeological and cultural interest and who, in this scholarly though pompous work, remind us that our forebears lived in these caves, fighting for possession with sabre-toothed tigers, cave-lions, hippopotami, wolves, bears, rhinoceri, leopards and even mammoths. It is a thrilling and romantic sport that makes the skin crawl and the spine tingle and for those who enjoy it or who wish to become expert, and even for those who don’t know a spelunca from a hole in the ground, this book contains all the hard facts and some very beautiful photographs. I just wish that cavers wouldn’t call themselves speleologists.

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Wonders of the Deep (Sunday Times, Oct. 28, 1956)

By Ian Fleming

I have become very leery of “underwater” books. The best one was Cousteau’s The Silent World and little but trash has followed. There are three aspects of submarine literature which particularly offend—the general archness of the writing (some of those translations from the French are excruciating), the dreadful jokiness, in which Haas painfully excels, and the bare-faced cheating of the reader about the perils of the deep, heightened by trick photography.

There are sea myths still to be explored—the mile-deep battles between sounding whales and giant squids, with eyes a foot in diameter, is one that particularly attracts me—but anyone who writes with bated pen about octopuses, shark, barracuda or the manta ray is a bluffer.

Two books before me offer reassuring evidence that the literature is settling down. Above all, they are factual. James Dugan received his underwater education from Cousteau. He helped with both the book and the film of The Silent World, and his The Great Iron Ship qualifies him as one of the finest research workers in romantic fact. His Man Explores The Sea (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.) is a history of undersea exploration from Alexander the Great’s diving-bell to the bathyscaphe. It is a long book, splendidly illustrated, and it contains more excitement and adventure than any book I have read this year.

There are accounts of the great underwater treasure troves; the most dramatic incidents in the evolution of the submarine; the development of underwater photography (A catalogue sent to a South American amateur diver was returned with the notation “Undeliverable. Addressee eaten by a crocodile”); scientific underwater research on fish, minerals and oil; the great discoveries in undersea archaeology and gripping tales of underwater sabotage. Here is a sample:

There appeared before me out of nowhere a large white form. It had arms and legs, heavy and puffed like pillows. It had a dome-shaped head and a white eye. It was a Japanese diver wearing white burlap overalls over his diving dress to offer a less-attractive surface to octopi. He stayed there for two minutes watching my line strain, then he disappeared. He was going off to let me die, fouled in the kelp. I was hopelessly lost; with a tremendous effort I got to my feet. There, right behind me, with a knife in his hand, was the Jap diver. He was cutting my lines…

It is a thrilling and, with the exception of an occasional unnecessary note of farce, admirably written book which will be given for many Christmases to come to anyone who has put on goggles and gazed into this other world.

. . .

The Collins Pocket Guide to the Undersea World (Collins 21s.) is exactly what it says, and Ley Kenyon is to be congratulated on producing a really comprehensive and attractively written handbook on the sport of skin diving. There is everything here, with splendid photographs and drawings, and I am unable to fault it for common sense and basic general knowledge.

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Another great post Revelator - thank you!

Last summer I got my hands on a copy of The Silent World. I kept it on hand whenever I hiked down to the beach, and between swimming and snorkelling, I would lie in the sand under the sun and read a few passages. It’s still immensely readable. While the equipment and techniques (and popularity) of scuba have advanced greatly since the book was published, Cousteau’s words still capture the thrill of underwater exploration like nothing else can. Even some of the best modern photographs and footage of the undersea world often pale in comparison to the poetry and passion that are present in Cousteau’s vivid words. The fact that it appealed to and inspired Fleming so much is easy to understand.

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You’re very welcome! I’m happy to report that a review of another Cousteau book is in the pipeline, probably for next week. Fleming also reported on a couple of Cousteau’s expeditions for The Sunday Times and admired him greatly.

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Great to know. I can understand the kinship between Fleming and Cousteau. Both had a child-like sense of wonder and adventure, which both brought to life in their works - and passed on to the rest of us.

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Great stuff indeed. Yes, I do imagine both were much the same in some respects. Old Ian did love to snorkel in Jamaica and dive.

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Full Fathom Five (Sunday Times, April 17, 1960)

Captain Cousteau’s Underwater Treasury. By Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan. (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.)

By Ian Fleming

Swimming is really an extremely dull activity unless you are showing off to the spectators or competing at it. Swimming in the sea is just as dull as going for a walk in the middle of a snowfield or a desert. There is nothing to look at or occupy your mind, and you go on, automatically moving your limbs, until you are tired and it is time to go back.

Around 1942 Jacques Cousteau and his happy band of comrades altered all this. It was he who taught the common man to look under the sea as he swam, and, suddenly, swimming became interesting. Interest and curiosity, the act of focusing one’s eyes, and mind, have results you do not expect. I suppose I can swim for pleasure about half a mile before I get bored and therefore tired, but, with a mask on, and if the underwater territory is a new one, it is almost impossible for me to stop swimming. A mile or two is nothing, and I have a feeling that if I were to visit the Great Barrier Reef, I wouldn’t stop until a mud fish or a giant clam got me.

Cousteau, unhonoured and scantily sung, has put man back under the sea where he came from, and, from what the scientists say, he has done this by chance just at the moment in history when anyway we are being driven back into the oceans in search of more food and raw materials.

I am sure he never meant to cause this world-wide revolution, though, being the extraordinary man he is, he would certainly have been a pioneer in something. What first inspired him might, be expressed in the words of Thomas Fuller: “He goes a great voyage that goes to the bottom of the sea.”

Unfortunately, Cousteau writes far too little about his experiences. I doubt if The Silent World would ever have got written but for James Dugan, who somehow squeezed the book out of him. Cousteau just has not got patience for writing, and he is totally uninterested in the paraphernalia of fame. Fortunately, James Dugan keeps on at him, and one day we shall get his second volume of biography, the fantastic tale of his last ten years in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles, prospecting for oil for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (most successfully, I understand), plumbing the great ocean deeps, and other thrilling exploits of which we read only scraps in the newspapers.

But now James Dugan, who I am sure again did most of the work, has made him put together in this thick and beautifully illustrated volume more than sixty of his favourite underwater adventure stories from all literature. Everything is here—sharks, octopuses, treasure, submarine battles, exploration, archaeology, the glorious beauty of the coral reefs. Everyone who has ever put on an underwater mask will enjoy this fat, rich anthology, and if any teacher is looking for a wonderful source for reading aloud to boys—and girls, for that matter—of from ten to over twenty, then this, and especially now, on the threshold of the Ocean Age, is the book for him.

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Partner! You Have Triumphed My Ace… (Daily Graphic, Sept. 28, 1949)

By I.L.F. [Ian Lancaster Fleming]

Did you know that “trump” was originally “triumph”? Did you know that spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs were originally swords, cups, coins and staves, representing the nobility, the clergy, tradesmen, and peasants—the main social classes of the Middle Ages?

Have you reflected that not even the French Revolution or the Communists succeeded in replacing the kings and queens in the pack with other symbols, and were you aware that Wild Bill Hickock shot all the pips out of a ten of spades at twelve paces?

Not me, and I still don’t know the rules of “Canasta,” the new card game which is sweeping America on the heels of gin rummy, after reading The Complete Card Player, by Albert Ostrow (The Bodley Head, 15s.). Nor do I know the latest contract bridge rules and I don’t know the odds for drawing a card at “chemin de fer.” These are serious lapses in an American card encyclopaedia “which should challenge Hoyle as the general reference book.”

But if you want to play Bimbo high-low at poker, Blind Hookey, Cedarhurst Gin, Clobberyash, Double-dummy with a widow, Idiot’s Delight, Oh Pshaw, Seven-toed Pete or Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle—this is the book for you.

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74

What a curious assortment of odd games this book seems to have been…

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I tried googling those games, and in some cases the only information I found was from the book under review! Turns out The Complete Card Player is available at the Internet Archive.

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