Bring Back James Bond!

Please, sir, may we have James Bond back? Not the Bond of Sean Connery or Roger Moore or Daniel Craig. I mean the James Bond Ian Fleming wrote about.

The disconnect is now total. How baffling is the title of the latest movie, "Quantum of Solace?" What does that mean ? The term actually comes from one of Fleming's short stories about Bond. The setting was a dinner party in the Caribbean, during which the host spins the tale of a wayward wife who finally exhausted her husband's capacity for love and sympathy— his quantum of solace—so he took his revenge by abandoning her in the most brutal fashion he could devise. The woman, Bond learns after dinner, had been one of the other guests.

As a yarn, it's interesting mostly because it shows how much Fleming admired Somerset Maugham, a master of that sort of miniature. But its borrowed title is baffling when applied to the Bond of the explosion-packed movies in the past 46 years. (Or did the scriptwriters perhaps envisage that the death of his woman in Casino Royale had exhausted Bond's 'quantum of solace", turning him into a machine set on vengeance? If so, that reference remains on the cutting-room floor.)

So the disconnect. Because Bond—as Fleming envisioned him—wasn't a superman. He was a bureaucrat. In Britspeak, a civil servant. A man who, when he wasn't in action, might have been a guest at a stilted Caribbean dinner party at the house of the local British government official. That was what Fleming saw, correctly, as his seminal contribution to the genre: the agent as instrument of a government.

"Secret agents" as a literary genre were invented by E. Phillips Oppenheim, the wildly prolific (150 or so novels) and successful, 20th-century writer of thriller. But his agents were lone operatives —raffish cousins of Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel. John Buchan took the genre a step further. His Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot were still lone Edwardian heroes, but now it was the British Foreign Office, the shrewd Sir Walter Bullivant, who set them in motion. Eric Ambler advanced it another step: His heroes tend to be innocents caught up in events they don't understand; but in the best of his pre-WWII stories—"A Coffin for Dimitrios," for example—the background and triggers of the plot are the well-depicted workings of national intelligence services.

Somerset Maugham's "Ashenden" was the breakthrough in the genre. Published in 1928, and a lightly-fictionalized memoir of his days working for the British Secret Service in Switzerland in World War I, Maugham's was the first yarn to depict an agent trying, usually haplessly, to carry out the impossible orders of his superiors. But, perhaps because Maugham's anecdotes featured no violence and were essentially comedies of manners, "Ashenden" had no successors. Until Ian Fleming.