Bring Back James Bond!

When, Fleming—in urgent need of money to support his extravagant new wife—sat down, in 1952, at Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, to write a thriller, he drew on his WWII experiences in British Naval Intelligence. Plot and characters can all be traced back to those years, the most intense of Fleming's life. (Goldeneye itself was named after a WWII operation Fleming had planned.) So Bond was born: a commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve(wish fulfilment—Fleming himself only made lieutenant rank), who went into action on orders from his superiors. Even Bond's flinty superior, M, was modeled on Fleming's boss in wartime Naval Intelligence.

Bond, in short, was no lone operative. He was a lethal instrument on Her Majesty's service. Fleming's portrait of Bond was a composite of characters he had known from those WWII days. "Moonraker" gives the most extended depiction of the man. A loner in consequence, it's hinted, of a dislocated social background; now essentially affectless—making love "with cold passion" to any one of three complaisant married women— enjoying a life of comfort, tended by a "treasured" Scots housekeeper in his apartment on one of Chelsea's posher squares. Spending all he earns, because he knows that the price of 00 status is that he is unlikely to survive to retirement.

Between missions, though—which means for most of his year—Bond is a bureaucrat, sitting at a desk ploughing through intelligence reports, honing his marksmanship in sessions on the firing range. And when M summons him to another mission which will quite likely result in his death, he goes armed with nothing but his Beretta.

Fleming's Bond is a character of his time: the cold-war years of a brutal subterranean struggle between the rival intelligence services of the West and the Soviets' KBG and GRU. Fleming, never short of WWII friends, who were still in the business, drew on their gossip. Yes, there was in those days a small group of British agents used for killings, though 00 wasn't their designation. And at least one Bond short story—"The Living Daylights"—was so sufficiently close to an actual mission in Berlin that it raised eyebrows in Whitehall.

All that period setting vanished, inevitably, when producer Cubby Broccoli made the first Bond movie, "Dr. No," in 1962. Refashioned to suit a global popcorn audience, the movie-Bond was born. Fleming's Bond has never reappeared. (Though the opening sequence of Casino Royale, in which Daniel Craig earns his 00 spurs by killing a traitor in the service, gives a glimpse of what might yet be resurrected.)

So I envision my favorite Bond movie of the future, in black and white, of course, not unlike "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold," the 1965 screen version of John Le Carré's classic tale, with Richard Burton, heartrending, as the agent who realizes he is doomed. (Le Carré is Fleming's successor in setting his agents so firmly within a bureaucracy. And in pillaging stories from the secret history of those times as the bases for his plots—though Le Carré adds the twist that the bureaucracy itself is the amoral betrayer of its agents' lives. Charles McCarry, the modern American master of the genre, toys with the same notion.) My favorite, yet-to –be-made Bond movie would be a period piece, but a cautionary tale, perhaps. A story that would give people a glimpse of the brutal struggles that went on, beneath the headlines, in the cold war. Struggles that the James Bonds of our own day are now fighting against Osama Bin Laden. A story worth telling. Daniel Craig, who so clearly models his Bond on Richard Burton's performance 40 years ago, would make a fine hero.

© 2008