We all know that James Bond is the classic example of what a perfect spy should be, at least once upon a time. But let’s be real, times have changed. We thought it would be perfect to ask a real former spy (one who loves a good novel), to read the new Bond novel Trigger Mortis, and report back his findings.
As a career spook, I’ve always felt conflicted about the James Bond brand and have never read a Bond novel before this one. On the one hand, the notion that British secret agent James Bond has anything remotely to do with the reality of the espionage game is absurd. On the other, the Bond phenomenon is great marketing for a profession that is at best misunderstood, and often reviled. For most of my career, newspapers, authors, politicians and self-proclaimed experts wrote and spoke about intelligence professionals as all but criminals and idiots – even when they knew better. So, anything that portrays us in a good light is a net positive - James Bond is better than Maxwell Smart.
There is no doubt that the Bond image has been a boon for my British friends in MI-6. I have seen how the dashing British spy persona has helped them attract volunteers willing to help them in far-flung lands. I even had a senior MI-6 friend who had a cinema-size Bond poster in the living room of his home.
I have to admit that the Bond image was nice even for professional case officers to think about while plodding along dark snowy streets on the way to an agent meet, or spending hours writing reports for headquarters. The Bond mystique provided a nice backdrop for our profession and allowed us to justify indulging occasionally in top-shelf booze or driving a bit too fast. It gave a sense of elegance to an otherwise inelegant profession.
For me, the notion of James Bond also has a personal resonance. My wife-to-be’s first gift to me when we met in Moscow was a copy of Fitzroy Maclean’s “Eastern Approaches.” Maclean, the Scottish diplomat, commando, writer, and politician, has been said to have been Ian Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond. Maclean’s descriptions of his unauthorized travels through 1930s Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and his World War II work with Tito and his Partisans in Yugoslavia, is well worth a read. More importantly for me, the excellent choice of Maclean’s “Eastern Approaches” convinced me that I had found the right mate.
Of course, risking everything to commit real espionage (or convincing others to risk everything by committing espionage for you) requires much more than an ability to project urbanity and sophistication while sipping a martini. If you are looking for spy fiction which captures the complexity of the spy game and conveys authentically the every-day work of case officers and their agents, then Anthony Horowitz’s newest incarnation of Bond in “Trigger Mortis” may be as dissatisfying for you as it was for me.
Anthony Horowitz—the popular author of a revival Sherlock Holmes series sanctioned by the Conan Doyle estate, the principle writer of the BBC detective series “Foyle’s War,” and the author of the Alex Rider series for young adults—was tapped by the Ian Fleming Foundation to write the latest Bond novel. Horowitz has endeavored to write the book as closely to Fleming’s style as possible and even includes previously unpublished material by Fleming. “Trigger Mortis” is written as a sequel to “Goldfinger” and features the return of Pussy Galore and the introduction of Jeopardy Lane, an American, as the new Bond girl. By putting the “new” Bond in the 1950s, Horowitz follows the path already proven popular by such retro hits as “Mad Men” and “The Americans” (which is great, by the way).
Horowitz gets some of the Cold War era details right. Sadly for me, I’m old enough to find many of the particular references to that era familiar. I recall senior males smoking in their offices as they dictated to their female secretaries, and we were still using pneumatic tubes to send memos hurtling around the building when I started my career. There are surely Top Secret memos still stuck somewhere in walls of CIA.
Bond finds himself squaring off with a Korean villain who is in cahoots with the diabolical Russian spy organization SMERSH (which, by the way, was a real organization established by Stalin in WWII to uncover spies in the Red Army). Bond tangles with the Russians at a Grand Prix race event at post-war Germany’s Nurburgring, and later in the U.S. when he finds out that they have infiltrated the U.S. rocket program.
Although Horowitz mimics Fleming’s style, he also seems to have adopted the product placement so familiar from the many Bond movies. Do we really need tedious descriptions of every brand of cigarette the characters smoke, the size of the engine and model of every car that shows up, what everyone drinks, what type of razor and pipe tobacco Bond uses, as well as what watch he wears, what binoculars he prefers, and on and on?
However, if you can get past the pandering and bubblegum nature of the Bond merchandising empire, the plot wasn’t all bad. A few scenes were entertaining, even if Horowitz relies too heavily on the predictable artifice wherein the villain elects to relate the entire conspiracy prior to leaving the protagonist to a slow death...and a daring escape.
The most obvious difference between spy novels and real espionage – besides the violence – is that the fictional heroes always break into places themselves, steal their quarry, and then heroically extricate themselves. Real spies know that it is more effective – if not always easier - to recruit someone inside to do your dirty work for you.
