Mike Ripley - Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed

Fleming’s publishers (Jonathan Cape) were confident enough to have produced an initial print run of 15,000 copies of From Russia, with Love and it is difficult now, knowing how famous the title became, to understand how the book could not have been the top-selling thriller of 1957. The problem was that Bond was being out-gunned and out-actioned – if not ‘out-sexed’ – by another sort of thriller. The Guns of Navarone , a rousing, wartime adventure thriller and the second novel by a newcomer called Alistair MacLean, reputedly sold 400,000 copies in its first six months.

MacLean was just one of several new thriller writers to make their mark in the decade of James Bond’s creation – along with such as Francis Clifford, Berkely Mather, John Blackburn and Desmond Cory (who does have something of a claim to having beaten Fleming to producing the first ‘licensed to kill’ secret agent). None were, in the long run, likely to seriously compete with Fleming and Bond, but for a while, MacLean certainly did. However, once Fleming’s books started to be filmed (something Fleming had been very keen on from the start – perhaps, as it turned out, too keen), Bond’s iconic status was assured of immortality.

Fantasist though he might have been, even Ian Fleming could not have seen the future and the scale of the industry his creation would become, but he did have the wit to acknowledge the man who had shaped the more realistic modern spy thriller: Eric Ambler.

As James Bond faces execution at the hands of assassin Red Grant across a compartment on the Orient Express in one of the most famous scenes in From Russia, with Love, both men have books to hand. Grant has a copy of War and Peace which is actually a cunningly-disguised pistol (Bond has given his own gun to Grant, proving perhaps that he wasn’t always the sharpest throwing-knife in the attaché case) but Bond has a copy of Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios , into the pages of which he slips his gunmetal cigarette case. When the assassin shoots, Bond whips the armour-plated book over his heart and stops the fatal bullet.

It would be stretching a point to say that without Eric Ambler there would have been no James Bond, as Fleming took his inspiration from a more fantastical school of ‘blood and thunder’ thrillers and played up the fantasy element, rather than down. But in one way one could have said in 1957 that without Eric Ambler there would have been no more James Bond …

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