FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (8)

By: HILOBROW
May 12, 2024

Some years ago, HILOBROW friend Greg Rowland pointed out that the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves ought to be regarded as a sentimental remake of the 1970 revisionist Western Little Big Man. The series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY will offer additional examples of this recursive (and often, though not always middlebrow) syndrome.

JOHNNY FEDORA vs. JAMES BOND

HILOBROW readers who followed, from 2014–2020, as I wrote about my favorite adventure novels of the twentieth century, may recall that although I’m a fan of British espionage adventures, I eschewed Ian Fleming in favor of superior storytellers like John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Margery Allingham, Graham Greene, Michael Innes, Geoffrey Household, William Haggard, Len Deighton, Anthony Price, and of course John le Carré.

One of the lesser-known British espionage authors whom I shoehorned into the project (via my list of the 10 best adventures of 1951) was Desmond Cory (Shaun Lloyd McCarthy, 1921–2001), prolific author of 45 adventure novels — including 16 about Johnny Fedora: A debonair lady’s man and an expert marksman.

Fedora’s first outing, in Secret Ministry (1951; published in the US as The Nazi Assassins), sees Fedora recruited as an agent by Britain’s Ministry of Information because of his wartime activities as a Nazi-targeting assassin. Seeking the answer to mysterious accidents involving R.A.F. pilots, he stumbles upon a successful drug-smuggling operation run by former German Nazi intelligence officers — in order to wreak havoc on Britain. It’s more of a Chandler-esque mystery story than a spy story, most of the time, as Fedora investigates a gambling den perched atop the Downs overlooking Brighton, and mingles with barmen, lounge singers, and others who may be involved in the nefarious plot.

Though helmed by a handsome hitman and punctuated by bursts of violence, Secret Ministry is light-hearted, at times even madcap. The writing is reminiscent of Leslie Charteris or Dorothy Sayers; and Fedora is something of a wit, commenting on the proceedings from a meta-narrative perspective. Like Charteris’s Simon Templar, Fedora is aware that he’s in an adventure novel; he even winkingly references “Cheyney and Chandler and Chase.” He’s a cold-blooded killer… but we’re asked to admire him for his wit (and his talent at piano playing). Secret Ministry would be followed by This Traitor, Death (1952; also published as The Gestapo File), Dead Man Falling (1953; also published as The Hitler Diamonds), through to the final series installment, Sunburst (1971).

Critics would come to call Fedora the “thinking man’s James Bond” and suchlike — this, despite the fact that Fleming’s secret agent wouldn’t appear on the scene until 1953, two years after Secret Ministry. The British reading public seemed to like both characters equally… though once John F. Kennedy expressed his fondness for James Bond stories, Fleming left Cory in the dust. The second half of the Fedora series is, therefore, less amusing and playful to read than the first. Fedora himself stops dispensing quips; he becomes less like Lord Peter Wimsey and more like Bond: taciturn, over-sexed. All to no avail, sales-wise.

In one crucial respect, Fedora never did become more Bond-like. He was always more disillusioned than Bond, less of a patriot. In this, he was rather like George Smiley — whom John Le Carré explicitly created as an anti-Bond: a fat, bespectacled cuckold. In creating Smiley, one might say, Le Carré threw out the Fedora baby with the Bond bathwater. I’m a big fan of Le Carré’s Smiley adventures, which can be acerbic and drily witty — but they are in no sense fantastical, light-hearted, or remotely antic.

Casino Royale is the first novel by Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first James Bond book, and it paved the way for a further eleven Bond novels and two short story collections. This doesn’t count many Bond novels by other authors, of course,

British Secret Service agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, is sent to France to play in a high-stakes baccarat game in an effort to take down Le Chiffre, a financier for the Russian intelligence agency SMERSH (Death to Spies). Bond is partnered with Vesper Lynd, a beautiful and smart MI6 employee… with a dark secret. Bond is a heavy drinker, a misogynist, cold, and brutally efficient. René Mathis, an MI6 intelligence operative in France, says at one point to Bond: “Don’t let me down and become human, yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine.”

Like Secret Ministry, Casino Royale is a fantasy set in the world of secret agents, and situated mostly at a nightclub; and our protagonist is a sanctioned assassin. But Fleming dispenses with the meta-textual winks, the playfulness, the wit — and in doing so constructed a juggernaut.

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FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (8)

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