Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1952

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

Ian Fleming is a good writer, and the James Bond books are good books. That needs to be said, because everyone seems to assume that they are pulpy shlock.

Not at all. They’re gritty, low key British noir. Bond might be a secret agent sent to foreign locales to thwart larger than life villains, but he is a complex and sometimes uncomfortable character, aware of the dehumanising aspects of his job, revulsed by murder, grieved by the deaths of his friends.

There are four or five really stand-out novels, but I choose this just because it’s the first and here we see Bond grow into his persona. The plot is very simple, the first outing of the formula – a villain with a plan, a girl, a glamorous locale. In this case, Le Chiffre the communist banker needs to win big at cards at a casino on the French riviera; Bond is sent to stop him. This simple plot is able to carry the book because of Fleming’s fantastic technique. He gets you to believe everything that happens by describing it exhaustively and precisely, in an uninflected style; the writer here is a camera, an expert recorder, and a master of technical jargons – it all assures you that he knows of what he speaks. And nowhere more so than when describing sprts cars, fine dining, foreign travel – it must have been absolutely intoxicating when it came out, in the post-rationing 50s.

There are some fantastically tense gamblng scenes; a couple of murders; a brutal torture scene; an intense love affair with its emotional parabola poignantly evoked – only this one ends with betrayal and death. And at the centre is this fascinating, cool, cruel fish, Bond, who must annihilate his finer feelings to be better at his work. He succeeds, at the end of this, setting up the rest of the series.

And I heard they’ve made a film of it.

Strangers on a train, Patricia Highsmith, 1950

The train tore along with an angry, irregular rythmn

Guy is good egg; a talented young architect on the up – the only flaw in his life is his vicious estranged wife. On a train journey he meets decadent mother’s boy Bruno, who impulsively plans the perfect double murder – he’ll knock off Guy’s wife, if Guy takes out his father. Without apprarent motive, they’re bound to get away with it…

This was the first and maybe the best of a long list of psychological thrillers. Instead of the traditional antagonist/protagonist Highsmith gives us two men locked in a destructive bond. The strange relationship that develops between Guy and Bruno is like an illicit gay affair; they are said to be joined ‘closer than brotherhood’. Bruno says he loves Guy but after he kills Guy’s wife insists that Guy honour his half of a bargain that was never made – then blackmails the man until he cracks. Guy can never quite break away from Bruno’s grip; in one sequence he even saves Bruno from drowning. Cornered, forced into murder and about to be caught, Guy can still describes Bruno as ‘his own cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.’

As in many of Highsmith’s books, the interest is in the perverse psychology of the characters. Her novels are always astute, well written and twisted. Graham Greene called her a ‘poet of apprehension’.

Hitchcock filmed this one, of course, and though it’s a decent film he neutered its perversity by having Guy refuse to kill anyone. Shame.