When Joseph Heller Wrote James Bond
If you listened to my recent interview with The 00 Files podcast, you might have wondered about the James Bond-related research project I was somewhat cagey about revealing. Well, wonder no longer.
Several books mention that one of the writers who worked on the 1967 version of Casino Royale was Catch-22 author Joseph Heller. It’s a rather obscure piece of information, and I’d always assumed his contribution was probably minimal. I did so for a few reasons: so many writers were said to have had a hand in it, he wasn’t credited on the film, and if someone of his stature and fame had done a lot surely we would know about it by now. But never assume! Heller, working with a friend, the novelist George Mandel, in fact wrote over 100 pages of material for the film, and it was a significant contribution.
How was this not known? As often happens, things get lost in the mix, and this film was especially messy and difficult to trace. It turns out all of Heller’s material has been sitting in the Charles K Feldman Collection of the Louis B Mayer Library, part of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. I knew of this collection because in 2011, when I was researching Ben Hecht’s work on this film, I contacted them to ask about correspondence between Hecht and Feldman. Unfortunately, the archivist at the time informed me that the Feldman collection was closed to the public, and would likely remain so until at least 2012. The inability to access the collection’s archive material had even warranted a furious academic article. 2012 came and went, but in 2017 a new archivist, Emily Wittenberg, finally prepared a finding aid for the collection, which by its url looks to have been placed online in August 2019.
I came across this a few weeks ago when I was researching an article about well-known writers who have written for Bond films. I was amazed to see it, and especially excited that, in Box 121, were four folders containing material by Joseph Heller. On contacting the library, Ms Wittenberg told me that nobody other than her had looked at any of this material since it was deposited there by Feldman’s family in 1969, and that even she hadn’t read it when compiling the catalogue. The collection opened to the public a couple of years ago, but is currently closed again due to Covid-19.
My article on Heller’s material is published in today’s issue of The Times. If you live in the UK and would like to read it, you can pick up a copy in newsagents and supermarkets. If you’re a subscriber, you can read it online (which is a slightly longer version than in print by a few sentences). If neither of those are options, you can try the subscription for a month for free.
I hope you enjoy the article, and it provides some interest and entertainment in these crazy times. I’ve tried to get as much I could into it, but there is plenty more to examine here. Hopefully, that work can be done someday soon.
Introducing... A Spy Is Born
Update: you can now read the whole book on this website, or download it for free, as part of Need to Know.
It’s the weekend, so I’m publishing something about the British thriller. In fact, this is a short book over a decade in the making. Here’s the blurb:
During the Second World War, he worked in the upper echelons of Britain’s intelligence establishment, helping to plan ingenious operations against the Nazis. He was one of the most popular thriller-writers of the 20th century, but his literary reputation has faded in recent years, with critics lambasting his novels as xenophobic, sexist fantasies. And he created a suave but ruthless British secret agent who was orphaned at a young age, expelled from his public school, smoked exotic cigarettes, had a scar on his face, bedded beautiful women and repeatedly saved the world from the threats of megalomaniacal villains.
His name? Dennis Wheatley.
In A Spy Is Born, Jeremy Duns follows the trail of a largely forgotten writer through memoirs, newspaper archives, declassified M.I.5 files and dog-eared paperbacks to reveal the surprising literary roots of one of the most iconic characters in fiction: James Bond. In the process, he takes us on a journey through the history of the spy story, and back to a time when real espionage operations and their fictional counterparts fed off each other, and best-selling novelists lived out their fantasies against a backdrop of double agents and femme fatales.
An earlier version of this was published on the website Spywise.net in 2010, and you can still read a PDF of that for free here if the link works (it hasn’t for me today). But that’s a bit of a strain on the eye, with a near-10-year-old web layout, and since its publication I’ve done a lot more research and thinking: the version published today is more than double the length. So if you want the really deep dive, please buy the very reasonably priced paperback or ebook of A Spy Is Born (links below). In expanding it, I’ve tried to give a more detailed look at how these writers crafted their stories, but also more context and texture for the extraordinary times in which they lived, worked, and sometimes dined together. I hope you enjoy it and, if you do, please spread the word.
A Spy Is Born can be bought as an ebook from Amazon UK or Amazon US, and is also available as a handsome paperback, again from Amazon UK and Amazon US, as well as other international Amazon sites.
Some Due Diligence on Aaron Bastani
Aaron Bastani at The World Transformed in 2017 (Image: John Lubbock, Wikimedia)
With over 50,000 followers on Twitter and often acting as a stand-in for the Labour front bench in the media, Aaron Bastani has become an influential voice in British politics. He’s the co-founder of Novara Media, where he is also a senior editor and contributor. In 2017, The Guardian reported that Novara had ‘200 contributing writers, 700 supporters and 10,000 committed viewers and listeners’, while Bastani claimed its Facebook content reached three million people during the last general election.
Since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s leader, Bastani has also become a frequent pundit in the mainstream media, with appearances on the BBC’s Daily Politics and This Week , Sky News, Channel 4 and others. While many see him as a fresh new commentator on the left, he has been criticised for, among other things, airing various conspiracy theories about the novichok attack in Salisbury and calling the British Legion’s annual poppy appeal ‘white supremacist’.
In 2019, Bastani will have a book published by Verso, titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. He’s in a strong position to replicate the success of books by Owen Jones, Laurie Penny and other left-wing commentators. His credibility both as a commentator and writer is heavily bolstered by his impressive-seeming academic credentials. Verso’s website states that he ‘holds a PhD from the New Political Communication Unit, University of London, examining social movements in the digital environment which fail to correspond to the traditional logic of collective action’, and his doctorate has often been cited in his media appearances and articles, as can be seen at The Guardian, The London Review of Books, appearances at academic institutions and on panel discussions, and in Novara Media’s bio of him.
Bastani is a public figure, and his credentials are worth scrutinising. Especially as it turns out that he is hiding something. On reading his PhD thesis, I found that he had committed several extremely serious breaches of ethics in it. The details are below, but in summary he deliberately concealed the prominence of his own role in the field he was researching. He:
Omitted key facts about the extent of his involvement in events he analysed;
Failed to discuss or cite multiple sources relevant to his research because they identified his true role;
Failed to discuss or cite any of his own articles that revealed his true role;
Failed to take into account that his activities shaped and disrupted the events he was analysing;
Failed to declare his very clear conflict of interest as a result of the above, because it would have invalidated the entire thesis.
I think these omissions and deceptions are an obvious breach of Royal Holloway’s regulations on academic misconduct, notably clause 2(f).
I put my points to Bastani via email last week. He denied one point: that he had written or even known about two pseudonymous articles in The Guardian that used his initials for its name and cited his work. It is likely unprovable either way, but it’s hard to see why else it isn’t in his thesis: one would think two articles in the national press by one of his main case study organisations would have to be included as part of his narrative of its success in spreading its message, so the omission points the finger squarely at his being the author.
Other than that point, he refused to answer my questions. Instead, he became evasive, abusive and finally blocked me from emailing him. I’ve informed the university of my findings and they have acknowledged receiving them, but as they might take a long time to address while Bastani is likely to continue his high-profile punditry and publish his book, I’m presenting what I found here as a form of due diligence for the media. Even while he was accusing me of suffering from a mental disorder, Bastani repeatedly told me that he welcomed public scrutiny of his research and that he was looking forward to me publishing this article. Here it is.
*
I’ve been aware of Bastani for some time, and often been baffled that such a high-profile journalist, commentator and soon-to-be published author could so often make pronouncements that seemed to be extremely poorly researched. My Twitter feed seemed to throw a lot of these up, such as his claim in 2013 that the UK government armed Assad’s regime with sodium chloride (ie table salt).
But I knew he had a PhD. That’s no small thing, and so I recently wondered on Twitter about the discrepancy. Almost at once, a mutual friend put me in touch with Sam Taylor. A few days earlier, he had asked Royal Holloway’s library for a copy of Bastani’s thesis. They didn’t have it, for reasons that remain unclear: Bastani initially claimed this was because of outstanding library fines, then that it was unavailable because he might later publish a book drawing on some of the research in it. He eventually sent Sam a copy of it, after which he immediately took to social media to insult him, including recording an Instagram video in which he said ‘this guy has a face like a slapped arse, glasses, balding, looks like the paradigmatic example of a technocrat, a boring moderate’, adding ‘there is something very strange in politics when people like that are actually the biggest paranoiac fantasist cranks out there’.
This reaction seemed like a gigantic red flag to me: people who genuinely welcome scrutiny of their research and have nothing to hide from it don’t generally resort to bullying. I asked Sam if he could forward me a copy of the thesis, which he did. Bastani also offered to send it to me, although by then I already had it.
Titled Strike! Occupy! Re-Tweet! The Relationship Between Collective and Connective Action in Austerity Britain and written under his then-name Aaron Peters, Bastani completed it in March 2015 and passed his viva in September that year, with no corrections requested. While reading it, I asked Sam for advice and followed up various points he had spotted.
Bastani had two ‘case studies’: the UK student protest movement, including the UCL occupation, and events staged by UKUncut. He explains that he collected data for these via ‘participant observation’ and stresses that while doing so he had made clear ‘whenever necessary’ that his ‘primary reason for participating was observation.’
He observed that these two movements didn’t have leaders per se but instead a core of influential activists, or ‘networked individuals’, including the likes of Owen Jones, who had previously worked for Labour MP John McDonnell’s leadership campaign. Bastani interviewed many of these people, some of whom were by his own admission friends. Even with the acknowledgement, this seemed like a clear conflict of interest: the familiar problem of being an embedded reporter exacerbated by the natural instinct to side with those we know and like. One of his main interviewees was his friend Guy Aitchison, who he identified as a key activist and, along with journalist Laurie Penny, a prime mover in making a demonstration outside TopShop in London on 29 November 2010 happen.
Much of the thesis read less like academic research and more like the minutes of organizing demos written by a hanger-on, with excruciatingly detailed chronologies of meetings in pubs and retweets from the likes of Johann Hari. My first impression was that Bastani had conned a university into giving him a PhD for researching some demos organized by his friends, concluding from his ‘fieldwork’ (going on the demos with them) that – quelle surprise! – said friends were at the vanguard of a radical new way of organizing protest (largely coordinating online and tweeting hashtags).
But after discussing it with Sam and digging a little deeper, we realized it was a lot worse than that. Bastani had gone against his own caveats, misleading and omitting crucial information. He wasn’t simply researching his friends’ activities, and he wasn’t merely a hanger-on. In fact, he was just as much of a key player in these events as the people he was ‘researching’, and he had gone out of his way to hide it.
This wasn’t simply a hunch: there was ample proof of it. If his thesis has one key theme, it’s the connections, mediated through social media, which allowed ideas to cross-pollinate between groups like the UCL Occupation and UKUncut. But Bastani was a huge part of that connective tissue, and he systematically covered it up by leaving out anything and everything that exposed his pivotal role. He did this because he knew that an observer-participant researcher can be a member of the orchestra, but they cannot be the conductor. Even if there’s more than one conductor, as here. Bastani had frequently tweeted back and forth with Guy Aitchison, Ben Beach, UKUncut and other ‘networked individuals’ he had identified as key to the movement, and in many of these he was clearly organizing events with them. Yet although several tweets are cited in the thesis, none of these were.
There was a lot more he had chosen to omit. In 2011, Laurie Penny had written an article for The New Statesman about the most prominent activists in the UK student protest movement. She focussed on two: Ben Beach, who she called ‘the Justin Bieber of the new left’, and Aaron Peters, ‘a former member of David Miliband's Labour leadership campaign team with a tendency to pull an Incredible Hulk act when out on protests’. In the photo accompanying the article, Bastani posed with a mask, black bloc style. Penny wrote that ‘Peters and Beach are the sort of leader that this staunchly leaderless movement would otherwise have.’ This is an article in a mainstream left publication about the movement Bastani was studying in his thesis, but he didn’t mention or cite it once.
Bastani had also co-written an article with Guy Aitchison. This wasn’t cited in the thesis, either, but not only is it on the same topic, it even opens with an image of the phrase Bastani used for his title. The article was also collected in Fight Back: A Reader on the Winter of Protest. In its review of that book, The Islington Tribune noted that contributors included ‘Guy Aitchison and Aaron Peters, key figures in the UCL occupation and tax justice pressure group UKUncut’.
And that demo at TopShop? In this Youtube clip, you can see that Bastani wasn’t just there – he actually led the demo.
That video, Penny’s article and the other evidence (such as multiple press images like this) all destroy his claim in the thesis to have upheld ‘the highest standards of objectivity’, and also prove he was dishonest about his role. To top it all off, Bastani openly boasted about helping to direct UKUncut to the Daily Mail, adding ‘I am quite fortunate in that my PhD is all about this. I am almost my own case study.’ So he knew exactly what he was up to: there is no suggestion in the finished thesis at all that he is in any way one of its chief subjects.
It now seemed clear that this was someone who had conned a university into giving him a PhD for researching a protest movement and its most prominent members, while concealing that he himself was one of them. Bastani’s PhD was really a study of himself and a few mates.
I decided to email Bastani. The university wouldn’t be able to help me if he had deceived them by concealing all this, but it was possible I had got some or even all of it wrong, and I wanted to give him the opportunity to set the record straight. The emails started out cordially enough, but despite his repeated claims to welcome scrutiny of his research it soon became clear this wasn’t true. On sending him my list of concerns, he was very dismissive, proclaiming himself disappointed by my ‘bland’ and ‘silly’ questions.
As the email exchange went on Bastani became more evasive, and more aggressive. Then, in what felt like a panicked attempt to preempt anything I might write, he went after me on Twitter. He started by tweeting to suggest I was a sad sack loser, then suggested I was a ‘fruitloop’ and finally threw out the idea I was racist because he’s ‘a working class brown guy’.
As well as these insults and attempts to undermine my questions, he also tweeted that my claims about his research were ‘beyond outlandish’ and ‘completely unsupported’. In private, he’d dismissed them to me as silly and bland – now he was saying they were serious. I asked him if he could explain that discrepancy, and said he was free to quote publicly from our emails to show where I’d alleged anything outlandish or unsupported. He didn’t take me up on that, but instead blocked me via email and shortly afterwards on Twitter.
By this time I had found yet more evidence of his deceptions, most of which I’ve discussed above. I couldn’t press him any further on these, but I think his reaction to my initial set of questions has already done my work for me. As he gave me permission to make our emails public, you can read them through and see for yourself. If you want to read the thesis to check my claims against them, you’ll have to ask him for a copy. I think my points are very clear, and his resorting to insult and other tricks to avoid answering them tell their own story.
[Edit: Bastani has now made it available to download, so it seems the embargo wasn’t that important after all. The version he has now made available does contain references to Paolo Gerbaudo’s work, but the version he sent to Sam did not.]
*
Me to Aaron Bastani, December 28 2018
Dear Dr Bastani,
Sam Taylor forwarded me your PhD thesis, which I've been reading with great interest. I'm thinking of writing about it, because it appears to me it has several serious misrepresentations, omissions and ethical transgressions. On the other hand, it could be that I've misunderstood or misinterpreted these issues, and I don't want to make allegations publicly without checking with you first if I possibly can. May I call you, and if so on what number, to ask you some questions on the record, or email you them at this address? Either works for me. If you'd rather not respond to my questions, that's of course your prerogative. But I thought I'd ask.
Yours,
Jeremy Duns
Bastani replies, December 28
Hello Jeremy. Please put these in writing and I will respond fully. Regarding ‘ethical transgressions’ these tend to be addressed in the literature review.
Best, A
Sent from my iPhone
Me to Bastani, 29 December
Dear Dr Bastani,
Thank you for your response. As I said in my previous email, it may be that I’ve misinterpreted or misunderstood some or even all of the following issues, in which case thank you for clearing them up, and my apologies for the inconvenience of doing so.
Some background: after seeing quite a few over-the-top and ill-researched tweets from you, I wondered how you had managed to get a PhD. Someone put me in touch with Sam Taylor, who by coincidence had wondered the same and was interested in reading your thesis. You know the real sequence of events, and it doesn’t reflect well on you at all. Yes, he asked Royal Holloway if you had a PhD, but accepted their answer that you had at once. While I wouldn’t like what appeared to be someone gearing up to criticise me for my research much either, as I have nothing to hide what I most certainly wouldn’t do is immediately make a false claim about them publicly (that he didn’t believe you had a PhD, something he never alleged) and then publicly abuse them several times, including attacking their physical appearance on video to my sizeable number of followers. Your response was to bully, and such shoddy behaviour immediately suggested to me you had something to hide. I think my instinct was right.
Here are my questions:
At various points in your thesis, you try to defend yourself from an obvious criticism of it: that as a participant in the protests you were writing about, your research is biased. You never claim to be entirely objective or impartial, as that would be absurd, but you repeatedly try to dismiss the issue as a problem in your case, as in this section:
‘A further purported deficiency of participant observation is that critics view the kinds of data that it collects as personally subjective, incapable of replicability and therefore unscientific. Such a criticism stems from the perceived centrality of the attitudes and perceptions of the researcher in data collection, with the claim being that different researchers in identical field settings will inevitably see and record different data, something that would not occur with the application of questionnaires or in-depth interviews (Gobo 2008). This same criticism could be levelled against almost any qualitative method however and reporting or describing what one observes in the field is not the same as interpreting it. Indeed it is reasonable to say that data collected by participant observation, or indeed any ethnographic method, is replicable so long as the researcher attempts to uphold the highest standards of objectivity and is clear as to how data is collected.’
My main concern is that I don’t think your claim to have attempted to uphold ‘the highest standards of objectivity’ holds water, mainly because you have gone to some lengths to conceal that you were a much more significant participant in this movement than you pretend. My current view is that you’ve misrepresented your role in the movement you write about, both as a participant and as a writer about it. You’ve done this by omitting several key books and articles from your thesis’s body text, endnotes and bibliography, as well as several key facts. You appear to have been deliberately, repeatedly deceptive about this, and I think it creates several serious conflicts of interest.
Most notably, you didn’t cite any of your own previous writing on this topic, which is highly unusual. There are several reasons to do so. One, of course, is connected to ego - ‘look, I do know my onions on this stuff and have published quite a bit already on it, go me!’ A more serious reason connected to that is that in showing you have already conducted research in this field you bolster your credibility, especially if previous relevant writing is in high-impact or widely read publications. Another reason for self-citation is that the examiners can see how you have developed your arguments and research. And another is transparency: that you aren’t simply cutting and pasting from previous work. This is very widely established practice, and as you will be aware most of the time it involves people citing themselves far too much, so it’s very surprising you don’t do it at all, especially as you had written a lot of articles that are very relevant to cite.
You discuss Left Foot Forward and Open Democracy as being key to the movement because, despite not having large readerships in comparison to the mainstream media, they were being read ‘by the right people: editors, producers and journalists’, and this enabled more coverage. You write that, along with Liberal Conspiracy, Left Foot Forward was ‘crucial in filtering the UCL occupation to the mainstream media and with it a wider audience’. You cite three articles from Open Democracy, and have no citations for Left Foot Forward at all. There are a lot of articles from both these sites you should have cited – those written by you:
https://leftfootforward.org/2010/12/2011-open-source-political-activism-progressive-politics/
https://leftfootforward.org/2011/01/open-source-consensus/
https://leftfootforward.org/2010/11/the-student-movement-2010-the-rise-of-the-dissent-entrepreneur/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/aaron-peters/and-so-occupy-everything
This is a significant body of work, all exploring the topics of your thesis, in publications that you yourself identify in it as being key to promoting the message of the protesters. On top of all those reasons to cite them, in many of these articles you also wrote about precisely the same events as your thesis, often providing what would be very useful contemporaneous accounts of them and the way they were received. Several also act as blueprints for points you develop further in the thesis. One of these articles even features a logo with your thesis title, while another was even tweeted by your PhD supervisor:
https://twitter.com/andrew_chadwick/status/9673922383454208
Some of your articles were even republished in a book, Fight Back: A Reader on the Winter of Protest, published in 2011. Again, there is no citation from you of this. It’s a gaping omission, and the reason for it is fairly clear, I think – you’re concealing how large a role you played in disseminating the message, and that you were a prominent writer on websites you identify as being key to the movement’s success.
Then there’s this article in The Guardian, by ‘Alex Pinkerman’:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/03/topshop-philip-green-tax-avoidance-protest
There are several reasons you should have cited this article, and this one by the same author:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/27/uk-uncut-peaceful-protests-against-cuts
That first Guardian article is a call in a national newspaper by a spokesperson for UKUncut to attend one of the key events you write about as one of your cases studies as an ‘observer first, participant second’, ie the Topshop protest on November 29th 2010. This article had a far greater reach than many others you cite, and is much more directly relevant than almost any you cite. You discuss in some detail the article in The Guardian by UKUncut coordinating committee member ‘Sam Baker’. You cannot have possibly missed the two by UKUncut spokesperson ‘Alex Pinkerman’, and yet you don’t mention them at all, or list them in your bibliography.
Isn’t this because Alex Pinkerman is you? Firstly, the initials are AP, and your name was Aaron Peters at the time (and in the thesis). Secondly, you made precisely the same points as the first few paragraphs of the first article, barely rephrased, at the protest itself, as can be seen in the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Z3kBqurIY
You also link to one of your own articles under your own name:
That’s an ego-driven citation, I think, and with the two other points it’s quite the tell.
Even if Pinkerman wasn’t you – and come on, it obviously was – that video has you stating the same points as the article begins with, showing you had read it. You didn’t cite it, or the video, for the same reason: they seriously damage your thesis. In the video, you are not simply attending a protest you write about as you claim in your thesis: you are the leader of that protest. Among other things, you cajole the crowd:
‘All of us are being fleeced by these oligarchs! Hundreds of them are screwing an entire nation!’
It’s you leading the protest, and you who wrote an article in the national press asking people to come to it.
You didn’t discuss or cite your articles in The Guardian, or those you wrote for other websites during the period you were researching, or that video, because all show that you weren’t simply researching friends and acquaintances, but your own activities. It’s hard to imagine a stronger conflict of interest: it’s virtually impossible to remove bias when the subject of research is oneself.
You were claiming to research a movement you were peripherally involved in, when in fact you played a leading role in it. Far from trying to address this, you concealed it. You did that because any semblance of impartiality falls apart when you read those articles or watch that utterly damning video. You write in detail about an event, without revealing your role in drumming up support for it in a national newspaper and leading it on the day. It’s also impossible to take you seriously when you discuss the aims of the black bloc and don’t reveal you were a part of it, or when you criticize a spokesperson for UKUncut for her interview on Newsnight, without saying you too were a spokesperson for UKUncut, albeit under a pseudonym, and that she was discussing behaviour you had indulged in, when you don’t reveal either of these crucial pieces of information.
More concerning is that your adviser was evidently aware of this – the tweet I link to above is to an article by you that prominently features the video of you leading the Topshop protest on November 29th.
Some of the direction of these questions will of course be familiar to you from Daniel Boffey’s 2010 article in The Mail, for which you were interviewed on the record:
You don’t mention or cite this article in your thesis, either, I think for obvious reasons: it too destroys your claims to any kind of objectivity or as an ‘observer first and participant second’. The idea that you were simply going on these protests and asking some questions while there is blown out of the water by you repeatedly boasting that you were integral to organising them. You also kicked a massive hole in the ethics clauses in your thesis by admitting to the Mail you were, in effect, studying yourself.
The article states you spend ‘60 hours a week helping to direct UK Uncut.’
And quotes from you as follows:
‘UK Uncut is going to grow beyond anyone’s imagination. There will be lots of things going on [during the Christmas period]. The goal is to try and get billionaires to pay tax to the exchequer, but also to educate the average Brit.’
‘I’m a reasonably good orator and my knowledge, organising and understanding of the direction in which we are going forward is quite useful.
‘I am quite fortunate in that my PhD is all about this. I am almost my own case study.’
In addition, you boasted about organising a UKUncut action in one of your Left Foot Forward articles:
‘A UKUncut event by the name of ‘The Feeling is Mutual’ was recently organised by myself and several other participants within the network to highlight co-operative models of business as being superior to those that seek merely to extend shareholder value and little else.’
https://leftfootforward.org/2011/01/open-source-consensus/
In your thesis you say you participated in UKUncut events, but not that you organized any of them. There are also numerous tweets between you, the UKUncut account and others in the lead-up to events you write about – but while you list them all as being key players in the movement, you’re virtually the only one who isn’t. (Another is Chris Coltrane, but perhaps he was one of your anonymous informants.) You even claim in the thesis that:
‘In the case of UKUncut I was somewhat less fortunate and enjoyed less of an inside- track than I had done with the student movement, although my ability to access the field was made possible by my participation in the latter and the crossover - as I will later make clear - between these two episodes at their most connective.’
This is a misrepresentation. You didn’t just have an inside-track, but were a leading light in UKUncut: writing as a spokesperson for them in a national newspaper, legitimizing their aims and spreading their message through web publications you yourself identify as instrumental to doing just that, and being closely involved in organizing several UKUncut events.
An additional ethical concern here is that you were also influencing the course of your own research. Without your article as ‘Alex Pinkerman’ in The Guardian, it may have been that that TopShop protest would have been attended by far fewer people. By calling for people to turn up in a national newspaper, you were influencing what you were writing about. Even taking in the idea you were not Pinkerman, your actions at the protest show you whipping up the crowd and stirring them on. If you had simply been on the protest, rather than leading it, there might not have been as much to write about. This is a clear conflict of interest.
Some of your other omissions are also interesting. I find it very surprising that you make no reference anywhere to Regeneration, edited by Clare Coatman and Guy Shrubsole (Lawrence & Wishart, 2012). This has a chapter by Guy Aitchison and Jeremy Gilbert reflecting on the student movement. Gilbert discusses the black bloc problem in depth, and would have been very useful to have quoted, even if to disagree with (as your conclusions broadly do). Aitchison is a friend of yours who you discuss at length in the thesis and even interviewed for it – you can’t have not known about this contribution from him to the field, so why have you ignored it? He even cites you in the discussion!
‘We could talk here about out how networked, rhizomatic forms of organisation, encouraged by what Aaron Peters and myself have termed the ‘open-sourcing’ of political activism, are well suited to short energetic bursts, whilst bureaucratic, arborescent forms allow for long-term strategy development, learning and planning.’
Of course, this reveals that you, like he, are someone deeply involved with and leading the debate within the movement you’re pretending to be even slightly dispassionately observing for the purposes of getting around the problem that you’re really ‘researching’ you and your friends’ own ideas and activities.
Similarly, Chris Coltrane’s chapter in that book is a case study on the same topic as one of your case studies, UKUncut, and you are well aware of him as you tweeted him many times during the period in question, including asking him to come to events and sharing event information with him. Together, these both cover your two case studies in depth, by significant players. Why have you missed all this out?
You also don’t discuss or cite any of the work of Paolo Gerbaudo, most obviously Tweets on the Streets, published in 2012. That is not just a key text in this field, but is on exactly the same area as you cover in your thesis. Did you not even know about it, or is there some other reason for the omission?
In essence, your field work consists of you attending some demos, some of which you don’t reveal you were instrumental in organising, promoting and leading, and pretending that a few interviews you conducted with ‘informants’ constitutes anything other than anecdotal and highly partial evidence for your conclusion that, what a surprise, you and your mates are forging a radical and important new path ahead.
You make no mention in your thesis of your two arrests, one of which led to a conviction for a public order offence and a suspended sentence. You’ve publicly admitted that happened in at least two places, but not in your thesis. It’s highly relevant to it, though, because despite your T-shirt being grey, you were clearly a member of the black bloc, something you discuss in detail in the thesis without ever mentioning your own involvement. In accusing the police of violence but not revealing your own violence in this movement, you concealed a serious conflict of interest in your research.
Those are my chief concerns. I’d be delighted for you to prove me wrong about all this.
Yours,
Jeremy Duns
Bastani to me, December 29
These are surprisingly bland, silly questions Jeremy. If you want to publicly criticise misapplication of a methodological method please feel free to.
Regarding ‘Alex Pinkerton’ I’m not him and have never heard of him. As you can see where I have been involved I have been perfectly happy to use my own name.
Regarding Paolo Gerbaudo, he is mentioned in the final chapter. The literature review builds on a literature of dozens of relevant academics going back to the 1960s (Mancur Olson) and even the 19th Century (Durkheim). In terms of the ‘collective action literature’ he is marginal and that isn’t his research agenda in ‘Tweets in the Streets’ (I presume you know how a PhD works).
In fact Paolo Gerbaudo was one of two external examiners for my viva.
As a robust piece of research I look forward to my PhD being criticised. It was not in the RHUL library as I intend to write a book where its findings are a major part.
I trust your no doubt excellent contribution to the literature will be in a peer-reviewed journal? Presumably you have a PhD in social science too?
Finally, would you also like to read my excellent MSc thesis on EU trade and aid policy? I think you’d enjoy it.
Let me know if I can help you any further. I look forward to reading the piece.
Best wishes, Aaron
Me to Bastani, 29 December
Thanks for the swift reply, Aaron. I note your denial of ever having even heard of 'Alex Pinkerton' despite him citing your work in The Guardian and you then parroting his first few paras almost word for word while leading the demo he called people to attend. It's not the most convincing of denials, let's say.
I note you didn't answer any of my other questions, but instead chose round dismissal and an appeal to authority. I don't have a PhD in any field, just a lowly BA in English literature and language. However, I have worked as an editor for many years, including for a peer-reviewed journal, and this gave me more than enough experience to spot your massive conflicts of interest, fudges over your own role in the movement and prominent omissions to conceal it. You haven't denied any of that, I notice. It's also given me enoguh experience to spot an attempt to close down an uncomfortable set of allegations by high-handed dismissal.
I might well publicly criticise your 'misapplication of a methodological method', but if I do I probably won't use that language.
What page do you mention Gerbaudo's work on? I can't see that anywhere. As he was one of your examiners, no discussion of Tweets and the Streets would seem to me to be even more striking - in terms of full-length books on the rise of social media and its use in emerging protest movements, I would have thought he'd disagree that his research was 'marginal' to your thesis, which covers precisely the same area. You could very easily switch the titles of his book and your thesis, in fact. You can throw in some more jargon to try to bluff me if you fancy, but I doubt it will work. Straight answers are usually a better bet.
Yours,
Jeremy
Bastani to me, December 29
Regarding Paolo it should be towards the end. I defended the PhD for 4 years Jeremy, that’s the point of the exercise.
Publish whatever you like. In the academy, which is where this document was forged, that is done with peer review by scholars. I can only repeat I look forward to an English BA critiquing a political science PhD with little knowledge of the literature or research universe.
Good luck. A
Sent from my iPhone
Me to Bastani, 30 December
Hi again, Aaron. I still don't see any reference to Gerbaudo's work. What page/s, please?
You seem to think citing the authority of a PhD will impress me, when you forget that I've read yours. My brother-in-law has a PhD in theoretical physics that I admit is far beyond my comprehension - but yours is just you 'researching' activities by your friends and acquaintances while concealing your own role as a leader in the movement. It's not as hard to follow or as you think, especially as I've edited dozens, if not hundreds, of peer-reviewed articles. I can spot bluffs and fudges in academic writing from a distance. Peer review by scholars can be wrong, even in hard science that involves researching concrete facts and not 'demos I've been on', but part of the process is also how authors respond to questions. You insist you look forward to any criticism of your 'robust piece of research', but have now twice refused to answer any of my questions other than the one about 'Alex Pinkerman'.
I got something wrong about that article, incidentally, though it looks to me to be even more damning than I first thought. 'Pinkerman's first article was on December 3, so was calling for attendance at the December 4 TopShop demo rather than the one a few days earlier. You were at and write about both of these demos. But 'Pinkerman' starts their article by making precisely the same points you did in person when leading the protest outside TopShop in Oxford Circus on November 29. So is it your claim that this UKUncut spokesperson drew on your claims about Green to write their article, while also citing one of your articles, while using a pseudonym with your initials, to call for people to attend a demo you went on and then wrote about... and you knew nothing about any of this and that is why you didn't cite it? It's not as if the Guardian was irrelevant here: you write in detail about 'Sam Baker's article in the paper. How did you miss 'Pinkerman'?
If my questions were truly 'bland' and 'silly', you'd have answered them instead of trying to swerve them by suggesting my little brain can't possibly hope to understand your research - or, say, a video of you leading a demo you claim to have been an observer of first and participant second.
So, sorry, but this bluffing won't work on me. You're a self-described chancer.1 I think people will be more than able to make up their minds about whether or not my questions have misunderstood your 'methodological methods', and how rigid the peer review process was here. I will simply note you twice refused to answer my detailed questions and instead dismissively appealed to authority in this way. It's rather a telling reaction, I think. If you do fancy changing your mind and answering my questions, I will of course be all ears.
Yours,
Jeremy
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GS_yXcmbLY This promotional video by Novara Media also includes footage of you leading the November 2010 TopShop demo, and the voice-over also positions you as being a central part of the student movement rather than, as your thesis tries to suggest, some bod who just went along and interviewed some folk while you were milling in the crowd. Oops.
Bastani to me, December 30
You’ll have to forgive me Jeremy but I don’t understand the nature of the questions. You are questioning the veracity of the data collected? The appropriateness of the research method? The weaknesses of the conclusions? These are relevant questions, hopefully mitigated in anticipation in the literature review, rather than your gibbering nonsense.
I’m afraid you are going to have to get it through your thick, conspiratorial head, that people you don’t like and disagree with can and do meet the criteria for successful doctorates. ‘Chancers’ don’t survive a robust, prolonged process - not that you would have the first idea.
Best wishes, Aaron
Me to Bastani, 30 December
'Glibbering nonsense' now! 'Thick' and 'conspiratorial'. It's not exactly the same as welcoming criticism, this. 'Chancers' was your description, not mine, incidentally, or do you not read footnotes either? You would not be the first chancer to have been awarded a PhD, especially as you have concealed crucial information in the thesis.
How can you not understand my questions? They're straightforward. The appropriateness of your research method, broadly, yes - but I'm asking more specifically why you failed to cite all your own previous writings on this topic, failed to cite others, including Gerbaudo (who you repeatedly state you do, but refuse to say where), why you concealed that you were instrumental in organizing and even lead events you write about, and how you square your claims to have been an 'observer first, participant second' with all of that? They aren't mitigated in the literature review.
You've presented yourself as a student who went on some protests and are doing your best to impartially examine the movements involved, while hiding that you played a key role in them and even wrote as an observer about a demonstration you are on film as leading - weren't you?
I hope that is a clear enough question for you to understand.
Jeremy
Bastani to me, December 30
Paolo is in the final chapter. He was also, as said, the external supervisor. You are perfectly welcome to contact him.
Secondly, I don’t quite get why one has to cite blogs one has previously authored in a PhD, do you think this is a requirement of some kind?
Thirdly, I say in PhD - in the literature review - what my political commitments are and discuss replicability. As it is an exploratory study, not a quantitative generalisable one, there is a different emphasis - namely to generate hypothesis for later academic investigation by others (again, this is how PhDs work). This is all very clearly explained and three separate academics viewed it is sufficient to receive a pass with no corrections.
Participant observation isn’t ‘impartial’, rather the limits of it are triangulated with interview data. Again, this is all documented.
I’m very keen to read the ‘expose’. When will it be up?
Me to Bastani, December 30
Where in the final chapter? I see no reference to Paolo Gerbaudo or his work anywhere. Which article or book do you reference, and on which page? Third time of asking now.
They're not just 'blogs', Aaron - you wrote those articles on sites that you yourself identified as being instrumental to the student protest movement and UKUncut, and cited three articles from one of them written by others for that very reason. A requirement? No. But all of your articles on those sites are highly relevant, as they are about the topic of your thesis, provide contemporaneous information and were published on websites you identified as being significant to the events you write about. I explained all this before. It's very unusual not to cite your own relevant work at all, and I think the reason you didn't is because to do so would have made it clear you were a much more instrumental voice and part in these movements than you claim in the thesis. My question is: what is your reason for not citing them?
You keep stating, in effect, that you having a PhD means that your PhD must be fine. Adding in some jargon doesn't change that academics can get things wrong, and can also be misled, which is what I think you've done, and which your response so far only seems to suggest further. Most people would have answered the questions rather than publicly attach the questioner as a 'fruitcake' and privately call them 'thick'. I explained in my initial list of questions that you pay lip service to your political commitment and do not claim to be wholly objective, which would be impossible and absurd - the point, of course, is that you concealed just how involved your role was, eg you write about a demo as an 'observer first, participant second' when anyone can see from the film of it that you were leading the demo. Use of words like triangulation don't magically make this not so.
I'm not sure when it will be up, or even if I'll write it, or where. So far you're providing quite a lot of extra material on Twitter and in this exchange, and I'm still vaguely hoping for some actual answers rather than bluffing and abuse. Can I quote from our emails? You've referred to them on Twitter just now in a dismissive way.
One last question: you claim your PhD was not in the RHUL library because you ‘intend to write a book where its findings are a major part’, ie that it was embargoed in case you want to use material in it in a book in future. Do you stand by this? Because a) you told Sam Taylor it wasn't there due to outstanding library fines and b) it should then have been listed in the catalogue marked as embargoed, which it wasn't. So what's the truth here?
Jeremy
Bastani to me, December 30
Regarding your last question, both. There's been no impetus to do it because I plan to convert it into a book (as my supervisor will attest).
You are free to share private communications, I can hardly stop you, but that will mean I won't be communicating further with you as generally I distrust anyone sharing verbatim details from non-public disclosure.
Warm wishes and good luck, Aaron
Me to Bastani, December 30
Hi again.
If it's both, the library should have marked it as embargoed - any idea why they didn't? I'll ask them, I guess.
I generally don't like sharing personal communications, either, verbatim or not. The verbatim is a nice add by you, as of course without it you are contradicting yourself because you referred to our emails here in public earlier today, when you tweeted in reference to them:
'Because the nature of assertions made in private communications are beyond outlandish and completely unsupported. The idea it’s equivalent to academic inquiry is equally outlandish.'
I've replied to that tweet as follows:
'Aaron, I don't think you can show this from our emails at all. Please feel free to quote anything you think I've asked you that is either outlandish or unsupported, or admit you're misrepresenting my questions to you.'
I'll be interested to see if you can take me up on that offer. I doubt it, somehow.
I note you once again ignored all my other questions and points, and refused to indicate where you have cited Paolo Gerbaudo's work (for the fourth time, I believe).
Jeremy
Bastani to me, December 30
they aren't quoted though, are they, Jeremy - which is what you are asking. As someone with evidently obsessive-compulsive tendencies you might notice that? Nor do I mention you.
thats enough from me. I'll be blocking this email.
best, A
Me to Bastani, December 30
No, they aren't quoted - which is why you added 'verbatim' to your email. You won't quote these emails because there's nothing outlandish or unsupported in my questions at all, and you know it. You just claimed it in public, and I've called your bluff on it. You didn't mention me by name because, as you well know, it was in a thread replying to me, and in which I had just made it clear I was the one asking you questions about your thesis.
You've so far resorted to calling me sad, thick, conspiratorial, a fruit-loop and are now going even further in suggesting I have a mental disorder. All for asking you rather straightforward questions about your thesis. As with Sam Taylor, your response to enquiry about your thesis is to pretend to welcome them while dishing out abuse and distractions. In throwing your proverbial toys out of the pram in this way, you've repeatedly avoided a series of valid questions about your research. I don't know who you think you're fooling - but it isn't me.
I'm sending this to you despite you saying you're blocking it because I suspect you'll read it anyway.
Thank you for the revealing responses,
Jeremy
Thanks to Sam Taylor and Guy Walters for their generous and helpful guidance on drafts of this article.
The Dark Interrogation
Last year, I was asked by the slightly mysterious ‘Samuel Carver’ if I would be interested in an interview on Goodreads. Sam runs The Orion Team, a discussion group devoted to thrillers on the site, and he had written several very generous and in-depth reviews of my novels. I agreed, and the interview went ahead in January. It can still be read in full on the site, but as it’s a little buried there and the format isn’t all that easy to follow I thought I’d reproduce it here, with Sam’s permission and some very light editing. I really enjoyed this interview, and hope it will be interesting if you’ve enjoyed any of my fiction and are interested in how I work. I tried to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve never read a Dark novel this probably isn’t the best place to start.
Samuel: You write Cold War spy fiction and created a unique protagonist, that of a jaded washed-out traitor who is trying to save his own skin, and along the way happens to do some good deeds in the situations he got himself thrown in. It’s rare to find such a morally compromised protagonist in 21st-century spy fiction. How did you create Paul Dark and how did he come together when writing him?
Jeremy: Basically, I came to the conclusion after reading a lot of spy fiction that I wanted to write some. The spy fiction I most enjoyed was set during the Cold War and I thought I’d give that a crack—it occurred to me that it was becoming ‘period’ in the same way the Second World War had done for thriller-writers in the ’60s and ’70s, and there might be something new to do there. But what? I didn’t want to write a Bond clone, but I am fascinated by Bond. Ian Fleming’s wife Ann had been worried about Kingsley Amis writing a new Bond novel because of his politics, and wrote of him making a ‘Philby Bond’. John le Carré had also written in the ’60s of Bond being an ideal defector. That idea crystallised, and so I decided I wanted a protagonist who was a villain. Like Tom Ripley. Outwardly he might appear like Bond, and even have a Bond-clone kind of name that you’d expect from a ’60s spy, but then you’d soon realize he was a wrong ’un. That idea seemed to have legs to me, and I started researching Free Agent.
Paul Dark is a traitor to Queen and Country and for all intents and purposes is a disgrace to SIS. However, you humanize him in several ways, chief among which includes making the ‘good’ guys that are trying to hunt him down bad, if not worse in the first two books. Was that contrast between a traitor who seeks repentance and the lawful authorities who are unforgiving and nefarious an intentional decision on your part, or did it come together by itself?
Intentional. Initially, my idea was for Dark to be much more of an outright villain than he is. More like Frederick Forsyth’s Jackal: a cold-blooded killer you had no empathy for at all. But I felt that over the course of several books that wouldn’t work, and readers would find it unremitting. I wanted to give him some flickers of humanity. The situation of being a double agent had in-built suspense to it, but for that to work the character had to be afraid of getting caught and so on—I wanted the reader to be in his shoes to some extent. I thought I would try for a character who you weren’t entirely sure about. He could repulse you and scare you, but you could also find yourself, perhaps against your will, rooting for him. And I thought that one way to do that would be to make some of the characters trying to catch him a shade grey, too.
Ah, yes. Shades of the treatment by the SDCE Action Service paramilitary unit can be seen in what Italian military intelligence does in Song of Treason. It can be argued that your novels are a genre-bending hybrid mix of historical fiction and spy novel, blending real-world incidents like the Nigerian civil war and the 1975 Victoria Falls conference with fictional events. Is it easy or hard to use real-world occurrences as the backdrops for fictional plots or not at all?
I mostly find it hard, as I spend a long time finding the right events to use, and then researching them once I have. I initially decided on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba as being a key event in Free Agent, for example, before deciding that didn’t work. I worked on Spy Out The Land for months before realizing that summit had to be the major event in it. But once you have them in place there are some advantages: it’s a bit like a still life you can work around, if that makes sense.
Delving into some of the parts of the Cold War that not even John le Carré covered, have there been any ‘no way’ moments when your jaw dropped and you found a piece of information or an event that astounded you in the writing process? Your second book was full of these things due to the subject matter and how the central real-life element that the scheme hinged upon could have been easily perverted despite officially being used to preserve the liberties of democratic nations against godless totalitarianism.
I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but yes. Particularly in The Moscow Option, the Madman exercise and the mathematical calculations of winning a nuclear war both made my jaw drop. When I find things in research that astonish me, that’s when I start trying to figure out how to make them work in a novel.
There was a detour between the first three Paul Dark books and the fourth one. What caused that? Also, who is the new cover artist? I must say they’ve done a bang-up job on enhancing the look of the books.
The Moscow Option (Dark 3) features quite a bit of MI6’s activities in Moscow in the Sixties. When I was researching that to try to make it feel authentic, I found that the best source of most tradecraft from around that time was via the running of Oleg Penkovsky. I became fascinated by that operation and eventually pitched the idea of writing a non-fiction book on it. So I did that—it’s titled Dead Drop in the UK and Codename: HERO in the US—and it came out next. Then I went back to Dark for the next book, having taken that detour and recharged my batteries a little from writing Dark, as well.
The cover art for the new UK ebooks is done by the art team at Simon & Schuster, but I had a fair amount of input into them. It’s a long process, and I discussed it back and forth with my editor and agent via phone and email for quite a while. But I’m really happy with how they turned out: I think they look clean and minimalistic, but give a clear idea of what kind of book you can expect.
Spybrary Podcast: Jeremy, who do you think is the most under-rated spy/thriller author either living or dead? Which author do you wish more people were aware of?
Do I have to pick just one? I’d go for three: Joseph Hone, Adam Hall and Sarah Gainham. Hone is quite similar to le Carré in some ways, but they have lots of twists and turns, and are just wonderfully written. As good as le Carré, Ambler and Greene for my money. Gainham is also in the Ambler/Greene vein and her prose is extraordinarily good. Lots of horrifying male characters. My character Rachel Gold in Spy Out The Land is partly a tribute to her—both her life and her characters, which were often intertwined.
Hall’s series about British secret agent Quiller has obviously been a huge inspiration for me. I think they’re the most exciting spy novels ever written. And the writing is amazing, albeit very different from Hone and Gainham.
Samuel: I haven’t asked about three people I’ll call ‘the Sharks’, as they work at the only Aquarium in Moscow that the public is not allowed into. The father, the son, and the unholy ghost of a false lover. How did you create these three very smart but very terrifying and brutal Cold War antagonists? Most Cold War antagonists are a bit over the top here and there, but ‘the Sharks’ of the Aquarium most certainly couldn’t be accused of such a crime.
That’s very kind of you. I needed an emotional anchor for Dark and I wanted to connect with his past and his own family, so that is how one of them emerged. Sasha came about from researching double agents, in particular Kim Philby’s peculiar memoir My Silent War. There’s not a lot of tradecraft in that, but there is some, most notably his Kafkaesque travel routines to meet his handler. So I started thinking about who Dark’s handler would be, and what their relationship would be. How would he react once Dark started turning against the cause he had supposedly signed up for? And once the books gathered steam, I felt I wanted to see things more from his perspective, and that he would also have paternal issues, like Paul. That was also from research into Philby and others—many of the handlers of real double agents in Britain were summoned back to Moscow and purged. So I wanted to think through how Moscow would be viewing Dark, and they sprung from that.
As a writer who writes books in the ‘retro spy fiction’ sub-genre, you immediately distinguish yourself from the pack in mainstream thriller fiction which focuses on the 21st century and contemporary threats that may or may not be done to death now and then. In your view, what does ‘retro spy fiction’ set in the Cold War offer readers compared to the contemporary post-9/11 thriller? And what does it offer you as a writer in terms of benefits in terms of story and appeal?
My initial thinking behind it was in part to stand out from the pack, but also because that is just what I liked reading best, and was most familiar with. It also meant I could research it more easily, as a lot of Cold War stuff has been declassified. Of course, you can invent things if you’re writing about intelligence agencies now but, even so, I thought it would be fun to revisit the Cold War with what we now know. I’d seen the Bourne films with Matt Damon and thought they felt similar to conspiracy thrillers from the Sixties and Seventies in tone, as well as to the likes of Quiller, with chases through the Berlin U-bahn and so on.
For readers, I’d hope it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference if a book is set in 1969, 1976, 2002, 2018 or 2051 as long as the story and characters are compelling. But perhaps there’s some interesting history you’ll learn about or get interested enough in to investigate further. And I don’t think the books date quite the same way, which feels like a bit of a safety net in terms of longevity. That may be wishful thinking, though.
Ah, that last point is bang on the money. Dating has always been an issue. Out of all the real life traitors you must have looked up when writing the Paul Dark series, name one who was the most damaging of the lot. Then name another who you would say is the most audacious at his work. Then out of all of them would you say that with traitors, there is a common motivating thread among the ones you have researched?
Great question. I think I’ll have to be a bit obvious, though, and say Kim Philby was the most damaging. Some have claimed George Blake did more. Andrew Lownie makes a very persuasive case for Guy Burgess in his excellent biography of him. But damage isn’t only about the number of documents they handed over, or even agents’ lives. Philby rocked British intelligence to the core, and to some extent the whole of the British establishment. It took them decades to recover. His friendship with James Angleton was also crucial—that gave him a lot of information, but it also meant that when he was finally exposed Angleton was shattered by the revelation. That led pretty directly to Angleton’s paranoia about other moles, which ripped the CIA apart for years to come. Philby caused all of that.
Most audacious? Probably Burgess. To flaunt the fact he was gay and promiscuously so at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and on top of that to be drunk and rude to everyone, pretty much constantly… these aren’t strategies most double agents would employ, as they want to keep as low a profile as possible. Burgess went the other way.
The common motivating thread would probably be intellectual superiority or arrogance, coupled with stubbornness. Even now Blake thinks he was right and knows better than everyone else. Also, I suppose, a gift for self-delusion: to continue to believe with such certainty even when all the evidence tells you otherwise. This is why I decided to try to make Dark a little more sympathetic, incidentally. He realizes the cause is nonsense, and he regrets it. To have a Blake would change the dynamic completely, and I think it would be very hard to keep the reader along for the ride.
The first three novels in the Dark series were told in first person. The fourth novel, however, which could be considered a ‘soft reboot’ of the series after a long hiatus, was told in third person. What prompted the change in storytelling perspective? And was it easy or difficult to adapt to this change?
The BBC optioned the first three books for a TV series quite early on, and they got as far as a pilot script for Free Agent but no further. But that involved a lot of discussions, and the producer said early on the series would have to be very different from the books because you can’t really do first person on screen. He mentioned the dynamic of the Bourne films, where you switch between Bourne’s perspective and the CIA crow’s nest hunting him. That stuck with me. After three books from Dark’s perspective, I also thought it would be good to open things up—and to see what the world made of him.
With each book I have a tone in mind from the start, and the kind of thriller I want it to be. With Free Agent, I had Adam Hall and Deighton in mind, for example. With Spy Out The Land, I wanted to write a fast-paced third-person man-hunt thriller in the vein of The Day Of The Jackal, and I was also inspired by some of Ted Allbeury’s stuff. So that was the basic idea going in. I found it much harder to write than the first three, though, because I had become used to Dark’s voice. I doubted I could even write a third-person novel at all, and felt like I had been a fraud for being published with first-person narratives. A third-person novel was a Proper Book! But I got there in the end.
Ah, intriguing. I agree, the so called ‘rules’ about third person, first person and hybrid third person and first person perspectives are rather tricky.
The tactics Paul Dark utilizes in his attempts at saving his neck are the foundation of what even in the era of SVR cyber-trolls and PRC artificial intelligence is considered modern tradecraft. From your research for your novels and journalism, would you say modern espionage techniques and tradecraft hasn’t changed much despite the bells and whistles that the services pay for? Or has it evolved beyond recognition since the Cold War?
I’m probably not the best person to ask about modern tradecraft, because I don’t know nearly as much about it—I’ve spent significantly more time looking at the Cold War. But I would say that a lot of the techniques are pretty similar, and made easier or at times complicated by changing technology. But you still need dead drops and forged papers and spies on the ground and all the rest of it. The Moscow Rules that were developed after the Penkovsky operation haven’t fundamentally changed, even if the nature of threats has.
Can you name any contemporary-set mainstream published spy fiction which has gained your approval in recent years? Or are you a fanatical vintage purist who does not wish to be sullied with works set in the post-9/11 world?
I’m not a purist in that sense, but I don’t read nearly as much spy fiction as I used to—I tend to find it distracting. An exception is Tim Stevens, who I’ve mentioned in a few places before and who I know a little: he’s a really terrific writer. Start with Ratcatcher. I also love the French TV series Le Bureau des Légendes, which is a contemporary classic, I think. Oh, and I really enjoyed Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, and am looking forward to reading the rest of that series when I find time.
Looking at the spy fiction genre today, what could be done to help improve the genre? Or if you had the power to warp reality, what would you do to improve the genre?
I’m honestly not qualified to answer that one. I just don’t know enough about what other writers to do to offer any kind of suggestions, and even if I did—well, it’s just me. There’s room for a lot of different kind of writing in the genre, I think, and that’s partly why I fell in love with it in the first place. It’s so much richer than I’d thought it was.
Paul Dark isn’t intended to be a nice man and for the first three books, his fundamental motivation is (very understandably) selfish self-preservation. He also wallows in self-pity that most people would find contemptible. On the other hand, he’s aware of his crimes and mistakes and wants to make them right and seek absolution for his big sin, despite the cruel world he’s in trying to squish him like a bug. What elements of Paul Dark’s characterization came from you? The Oxbridge education? The details-orientated professionalism that Dark maintains despite the near panic he’s in through the original three books? The vague centrism in a world where’s he’s surrounded by loonie lefties and shot at by right wing whack-jobs? Or is it something else? And what quality, if any, do you most admire about Paul Dark? Reason for this question is because when writing a character, most writers past and present make the viewpoint protagonist their fictional alter ego, like Ian Fleming or Brad Thor. And even those who try to avert this like Tom Wood with his assassin Victor still have bits and pieces of themselves end up in their creations.
I think it’s inevitable there are bits and pieces of me in the character, because they just seep in whether you want them to or not. I’m usually trying to figure out what I would do in his shoes, so of course that makes him more like me from the off. I deliberately gave him a background I shared some elements with, even if twisted, like his knowledge of Sweden and a particular archipelago nearby. He went to the same school I did, so I could use some of my knowledge there. I did all that because, fundamentally, I’m of course nothing like him: he’s a ruthless professional secret agent, and a traitor to his country.
I don’t see Dark as a fantasy version of me in any way, but occasionally he does things—I have him do things—I admire in one way or another. It would be quite nice to be able to know how to avoid the world’s intelligence agencies, even if I’m never going to need those skills. I’d quite like to be as quick-witted, fit and have his line of laconic humour sometimes. I am also probably less harsh on him than readers, because I’m in his head and he’s ‘My Guy’ in a unique way, because I created him. I want him to be very flawed, but not a complete monster. At points in writing the books I have felt like I am under his skin. Maybe he was under mine. The vague centrism hadn’t occurred to me—quite a good point. I guess that might have seeped in. I tend to be sceptical of left and right, it’s true.
What’s your preferred writing style? Outliner like Robert Ludlum, or seat of the pants like Fleming and Vince Flynn?
Some outlining, a lot of improvisation along the way (including more outlining). Too much outlining in advance and I find I’m bored and see it as pointless to write the book. But I need a tone and some central ideas or I’m totally lost and end up wasting lots of time rewriting. Did Ludlum outline? For some reason that surprises me a little.
Oh, yes. Had literal dossiers and files of the plans he made on his trademark yellow legal pad paper which he worked on. As for that vague centrism, well Ian Fleming said James Bond would probably vote for the Labour party, and I’d say it’s rather beautifully (but unintentionally) symbolic as Dark is hounded by the two political extremes in a world that was far more polarized than this century.
Now to the next question. Having written my reviews of your work listening to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie and Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March 1 (possibly the most inappropriate, ironic musical choice ever considering who Paul Dark is), do you have a reading playlist?
Didn’t know that about Ludlum—interesting. I listen to music when I read and write—always instrumental, usually a very long playlist I have on Spotify that mixes classical, jazz, electronica and so on. I listen to a lot of music when away from my desk and thinking about writing, and there’s a public playlist on Spotify with songs that inspired me when writing Spy Out The Land. Thank you very much for your excellent reviews, by the way. Much appreciated.
What is the general future direction of Paul Dark?
I have a couple of ideas. We’ll see. I like him in the ’70s—there’s a lot to explore.
Name a real world Cold War event and one country that Dark hasn’t been to yet, that you know about and would love to write a story around.
There are at least two but it’s because I want to do them that I can’t tell you, sorry. I don’t want someone else to beat me to it! But one’s in the Middle East and one’s in the Far East.
A wise decision, keep cards close to the vest. Okay, the next few questions will focus on writing matters. To any aspiring writers out there who may seek to follow your path and become a published writer, what advice would you give them on what to expect, what difficulties if any may ensue and what they should look out for to get the most out of their publisher?
Everyone’s experience is different, but I suppose my main piece of advice would be not to expect the world to fall at your feet—there are a lot of books out there—and also to keep your integrity. Some people like to take shortcuts, and the internet has made that easier, but these things have a habit of coming back and hitting you in the chops. Be enthusiastic, get stuck in, do all you can to promote your work and attract readers and so on, but try to keep your scruples intact. All publishers are different, but I think they all like their writers to be professional, to listen, to pick their battles and... to be nice. It’s a good idea, generally, I think.
Dialogue and word choice are probably the bit that aspiring writers fall down on. How do you come up with the right thing to say for the right scene without it sounding clunky or messy? And how long would you say it took to find your own prose style that was distinct as it is today?
Read a lot, write a lot, hone your voice. Read your work aloud, especially dialogue. Cut anything that sounds unnatural. Resist the temptation to show off, i.e. purple prose. I don’t want any fat in my work. ‘For me, anyway, I want there to be absolutely no fat at all in my books’ was my first draft of that sentence. Thank you for saying my style is distinct. It took me around seven years to get a draft of Free Agent I was happy with. Keep at it until you’ve written something like the book that you envisioned in your head.
Action scenes are, if not the heart of the thriller, the blood and veins. Tell us about your process in crafting an action scene.
I try to think of how I can make such a scene have these elements:
Advances the plot: everything has to do that. Don’t drop your guard just because people are using their bodies as well as their minds.
Exciting: it should have some stakes the reader thinks Dark might reasonably come out on the wrong side of. Harder to do in first person as of course we know he will survive.
Plausible: He’s not a superhero. I often use martial arts guides from the period for plausibility and authenticity’s sake.
Unusual: Is he simply being chased down a street? That’s not very interesting. What if he’s being chased down a street by one person and then realizes a completely different enemy is chasing him from the other end? It’s a fight on a rooftop, okay. What if the rooftop is the dome of St Peter’s in the Vatican?
Historically relevant: I don’t always do this, but like to have it so the scene can’t have taken place today, or even can only have taken place at the time I have it. So it’s Rome in 1969, not Rome now. The topmost dome is no longer open. I want every element of the novel to be necessary for this story, and this story alone, not interchangeable.
These aren’t hard and fast rules.
The first three Dark books brought to life 1969 beautifully. Whether it being the exotic but very murky Lagos, the intimidating but dark heart of Rome (pun not intended) or a run across the snow-swept wastes towards the Russo-Finnish border, how do you go about building your setting? And what’s the key to building a fictional universe in your opinion?
That’s very kind, thank you. In my case, a lot of research on the basics. So I spent a long time looking into how one could get across that border, for instance. How long was it, how many watchtowers, dogs, what was the border guards’ routine, who had tried to do this before, etc. I look up weather, contemporary street maps, sometimes visit the place if it makes sense—I did that with Rome—watch films from the time that feature the setting. Then there’s sense memory—I grew up in Lagos—and of course imagination. I throw out a lot of research. You want to hone in on the most vivid details you can. A phrase or even a single word can bring somewhere to life if you place it properly. If there is a key, it might be that when it seems real to you it will to the reader.
What’s your editing process and what sort of things do writers need to do to edit properly?
I don’t have any real process for this. I try to get to the end of a first draft with as little editing as possible, because otherwise you can get hung up. But sometimes that happens despite my best intentions. After the first draft I just keep editing it until I’m happy. Apart from the obvious things like attention to typos and other errors, I watch for voice—the characters should sound distinct. Plot holes, of course. And that the novel feels like a coherent whole.
All writers have their own writing routines, the most famous being Fleming and Hemingway (recently there was an article in Publishers Weekly about someone trying to follow the writing routines of famous writers and he said it sucked—perhaps it was the alcohol). Can you describe your own writing routine?
I don’t have one. In the research phase, I tend to read a lot in the day and search for things online late into the night. In the initial writing phase, I try to write every day, sometimes using a word-count as motivation. In the editing stage, edit every day if I can. But none of it’s in stone. Sometimes the key is to get away from the desk and go for a walk or a swim or have a coffee or just stare into space for a bit. For me, writing a book is a cross between being disciplined enough to write that many words, and undisciplined enough to have the inspiration and creativity to do that. The friction between routine and no routine is what makes it work—but it’s a lot easier said than done.
Dead Drop Optioned
I said this on Facebook a while back, but just a heads up that my non-fiction book Dead Drop (Codename: HERO in the US) has been optioned for a feature film. The plan is to focus on an unusual friendship that developed in the most tense of situations, that between Soviet agent-in-place Oleg Penkovsky and British businessman Greville Wynne, who was acting as a liaison between Penkovsky and MI6 and the CIA. In the background: the growing Berlin crisis, the Wall going up, and finally the shadow of nuclear armageddon with the Cuban Missile Crisis...
I said this on Facebook a while back, but just a heads up that my non-fiction book Dead Drop (Codename: HERO in the US) has been optioned for a feature film. The plan is to focus on an unusual friendship that developed in the most tense of situations, that between Soviet agent-in-place Oleg Penkovsky and British businessman Greville Wynne, who was acting as a liaison between Penkovsky and MI6 and the CIA. In the background: the growing Berlin crisis, the Wall going up, and finally the shadow of nuclear armageddon with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The script is being written by Anton Diether, and the working title is Alex and Greville (Penkovsky liked to be called ‘Alex’ by Westerners, and it was even used as a codename for him at one point, rather unwisely). Thanks to my literary agent, Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton, and to Sayle Screen.
There’s not much more to say about it at the moment, but I will update when I have any more news.
An Excerpt From Free Agent
Sunday, 23 March 1969, Hampshire
As I edged the car onto the gravel, the front door of the house swung open and Chief's steely grey eyes stared down at me.
"What the hell took you so long?" he hissed as I made my way up the steps. But before I could answer, he had turned on his heels.
I followed the sound of his slippers gently slapping against the floorboards, down the dark oak-lined corridor. I knew from years of working for him that the best thing to do when he was in this sort of mood was not to react...
This is the first chapter of the first Paul Dark novel, Free Agent.
Sunday, 23 March 1969, Hampshire
As I edged the car onto the gravel, the front door of the house swung open and Chief's steely grey eyes stared down at me.
"What the hell took you so long?" he hissed as I made my way up the steps. But before I could answer, he had turned on his heels.
I followed the sound of his slippers gently slapping against the floorboards, down the dark oak-lined corridor. I knew from years of working for him that the best thing to do when he was in this sort of mood was not to react - his gruff tone usually gave way quite quickly, and more often than not he ended our sessions treating me like the son he'd never had. So I resisted the temptation to tell him I had driven up in record time, and instead hung my coat on one of the hooks in the hallway. Then I walked into the living room and seated myself in the nearest armchair.
It had been a while since I'd last visited Chief out here, but little had changed. There were a couple of porcelain birds I didn't remember, and a new bois clair bookcase that looked similar to the one he had in his office. But the framed photographs on the piano, the portrait of his father above the mantelpiece and the golf bag propped against the fireplace were all still in place. A selection of books and papers were spread across a garish Turkish carpet at the foot of one of the armchairs, and a sideboard within easy reach was home to a telephone, an inkwell and what looked like a half–eaten egg sandwich. He still hadn't learned to cook since Joan's death, it seemed.
I imagined him nibbling the sandwich as he had barked down the telephone at me less than two hours earlier. He had refused to give any hints as to what he wanted to discuss, and I was naturally intrigued. What could be so urgent that it couldn't wait for tomorrow's nine o'clock meeting? One possibility that had nagged at me all the way from London was that he had somehow found out I was seeing Vanessa and was so furious he wanted to sack me on the spot.
I thought back over the day. Had I been careless somewhere? We had visited a small art gallery in Hampstead in the morning but there hadn't been another soul in the place apart from the owner, and after that we had spent the entire afternoon at her flat, pushing the sheets to the bottom of the bed. Then I'd headed to mine for a quick shave and change of clothes. We had arranged to meet at Ronnie Scott's at midnight: there was a hot young group from the States she wanted to see. But then the call had come through, with the request to come and see him at my "earliest convenience".
It wasn't convenient at all, of course. Vanessa and I rarely had a whole weekend together, and it had taken careful planning – perhaps not careful enough, though.
"Something to drink?" Chief called over his shoulder from the sideboard. "I have some Becherovka, which I remember you used to enjoy."
What was going on? A few moments ago he had been furious; now he was buttering me up. When he'd been Head of Station in Czechoslovakia in '62, we had often shared a few glasses of this local liqueur in his office.
"Good times," I said. "Have you kept some back since then? I can't imagine anyone stocks it in the village shop."
He poured a few glugs of the stuff into a tumbler and passed it over. "Barnes finds it for me," he said.
Barnes was a Mau Mau veteran he had reluctantly taken on as a minder when he had been appointed Chief. He had resisted all entreaties for Barnes to be allowed to move into the house, claiming that the place had been his weekend retreat for years and he wasn't about to have it invaded by a stranger. So Barnes rented a cottage in the neighbouring village, and popped his head in as regularly as he could without annoying the old bugger too much. Apparently, he also made sure he never ran out of booze.
Chief settled back into his armchair and raised his glass solemnly towards me, seemingly in toast. As I lifted mine in return, I was surprised to catch the scent of Vanessa's sex still on my fingertips. I breathed it in, and its rawness overcame me for a moment.
"One never quite gets used to it," he said softly, "does one?"
I looked at him blankly. "I'm sorry, sir?"
He pointed at his glass. "My Prague poison, Joan used to call it. Do you remember?"
He gave a short uncharacteristic laugh, which I did my best to imitate.
"Yes," I said. "I do remember."
I was relieved, but also, I realized, a little disappointed that he apparently wasn't about to sack me, after all. I'd become so bloody soft I had actually been looking forward to a bit of drama.
Chief was leaning down, running his hand through the papers at his feet. Then he gave a triumphant snort and edged a manila folder out from beneath a copy of The Sunday Telegraph. He fished it up and placed it on his knees. It was a file from the office — a new one, by the look of it.
"Bad news, I'm afraid," he said, handing it to me. "Traitor country."
The folder had been sent by diplomatic bag from our station in Nigeria and concerned one Vladimir Mikhailovich Slavin, a cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. He had turned up at our High Commission there on Friday evening and announced that he wanted to defect.
It was a slim folder: as well as a transcript of the interview with Slavin in Russian and an English translation of the same, it contained a page of notes by the Chief of Station, Manning, and two grainy, passport–sized photographs that had been taken at some point in the previous two years as part of the station's routine surveillance of foreign diplomatic staff. It had a very restricted distribution: just Chief and Heads of Section.
It took me a good ten minutes to get through it. I found that I desperately wanted a cigarette, but as there was nothing more certain to get Chief's dander up than that, I made do with drumming my hands on the arm of the chair.
"High stakes," he muttered, tapping his glass with his fingers.
That was an understatement. Slavin claimed to be a colonel in the KGB and was asking to be smuggled out of Nigeria to a new home in England. In return, he was promising to reveal information about a British agent who had been recruited by Moscow in 1945.
Since Burgess and Maclean had fled to Moscow in '51, several Soviet agents had been uncovered in the Service, Five and elsewhere. Philby had been the biggest blow — he had been tipped by many for the top. In the six years since his disappearance, the Service had become almost paralysed by the fear that other traitors remained undetected. I'd lost count of the number of officers whose pasts had been put under the microscope; I had even faced questioning myself.
"Has Henry seen this yet, sir?" I asked. Henry Pritchard headed up Africa Section; as Slavin was in Nigeria, he would be heavily involved.
Chief nodded. "I had it hand–delivered to the homes of all Heads of Section a few hours ago, apart from Edmund, who's still away — his went to Smale instead. Because you and Henry will be taking the lead on this, I attached invitations to your copies asking you to come round this evening. Station 12 told me you'd been out when they called round, which is why I rang you up myself."
Station 12 was the messenger service. "I see," I said. "Sorry about that — I was at a concert for most of the afternoon. Was Henry not in either, then?"
He shook his head briskly. "No, he got it. I scheduled him for a bit later, though, because I wanted to talk it through with you first. See what you made of it."
I stood up and walked over to the fireplace, trying to think of a suitable answer.
"Could Slavin be a plant?" I asked, but when I turned round I saw he was already shaking his head. It surprised me he felt so certain: several recent defectors were suspected of being Trojan horses, sent over by Moscow to make outrageous allegations so the Service would chase its own tail.
"It's something Slavin said in his interview," he explained, seeing my confusion. "'In 1945, we recruited a British agent… '" He waved at the dossier impatiently. I walked back to my armchair, picked up the papers and scanned them until I found the place.
"'…We recruited a British agent in Germany and gave him the code-name Radnya.'" I thought for a moment, trying to see what he was getting at. "Radnya is Russian for 'kindred', or 'related'. They go in for clever code-names, don't they — perhaps this means he's related to the Cambridge gang? Recruited later, but part of the same network?"
He shook his head. "Nothing to do with the code-name. Have a look at that part in the original, and see if you can spot anything."
I sat down again and searched for the line in the Cyrillic. "What am I looking for?"
"I think that sentence has been mistranslated."
"Deliberately, sir?" Had he called me out to deepest Hampshire for a rant about the quality of staff in the colonies?
"I"m not sure," he said. "It's possible, but I think it's more likely to have been a slip-up. I wanted to hear your view. It's the phrase 'tajnaya sekretnaya sluzhba'. How would you translate that?"
"Secret service," I said. "Only… "
He leaned forward slightly. "Yes?"
"Only tajnaya and sekretnaya both mean secret. A literal translation would be more like 'Secret secret service'… "
"Exactly!" He beamed at me. "I suspect the translator thought that a British agent would by definition have been working for intelligence, so he dropped it. But that is precisely the point. What Slavin seems to have been suggesting is that this chap was a member of a secret intelligence agency. And as all intelligence is, by definition, secret, what could that mean?"
"I'm afraid I don't know, sir," I said. I had a feeling he was about to share his own theory. Sure enough, he immediately leaned forward and pinched the knees of his pinstripe trousers, revealing two strips of pale skin above his woollen socks.
"Back in '45," he said, "I was chief of the British army's headquarters in Lübeck. A couple of months after the war ended, I was walking out of the mess and ran straight into an old friend from my days in Cairo: your father, Lawrence."
"Father? You've never mentioned this before."
He coughed into his hand abruptly, which I knew meant he was extremely anxious. "No," he said. "And I"m sorry about that. I know how hard it's been for you, but I could never find a way to… It's very delicate, you see."
My father had last been seen in the bar of White's in May 1945, just a few days after victory in Europe. Nobody had ever discovered what had happened to him.
"Did you talk?" I asked, and Chief raised his head and looked me in the eye.
"Yes, we talked. He seemed extremely agitated. He asked me to take a walk outside with him, whereupon he told me that he was on a vitally important job — extremely hush–hush. He didn't divulge any more details, but said that the entire operation had been compromised by a Russian nurse who was working in the Red Cross hospital in Lübeck."
"He wanted your help?"
"Yes," he said after a few moments. "He asked if I could take some men round to the hospital under cover of darkness, detain the nurse, and have her transported to the War Office's interrogation centre over in Bad Nenndorf."
"That's quite a favour to ask," I said. "Did you oblige?"
Chief carefully placed his glass on the nearest side table. "Well, I tried. He provided me with a dossier containing her photograph and particulars - her name was Maleva - and I assembled a small team immediately. We took a jeep round to her quarters that same night. Unfortunately, when we arrived we discovered that she was already dead."
I paused for a moment to take this in.
"Suicide?"
He shook his head. "Shot through the chest. Quite messy. Of course, I got my men out of there as fast as I could. British officers kidnapping a Russian nurse would have been bad enough, but if we'd been caught with murder on our hands there would have been all manner of problems." He looked down at his drink a little mournfully. "And that was that. I never saw Larry again. I've often wondered whether I was the last person to see him."
"I"m glad you told me," I said. "And it sounds like this operation he was on may be the key to his disappearance. But I don't quite see how it relates to the situation in Nigeria."
"Oh," he said. "Didn't I mention? The nurse Slavin's claiming recruited the double — it's this same damned Maleva woman!"
I stared at him uncomprehendingly. "But how can that be?" I asked. "I mean, if she was shot in the chest… "
"I know," he said. "And it had me stumped for a bit. But SOE had a section for camouflage and make-up techniques — perhaps the Russians had similar expertise."
"Perhaps," I said. "But what about her pulse? Presumably she wasn't just lying there with her eyes closed, holding her breath."
Chief took another sip of liqueur. "That had me stumped for longer. In the end I rang Bill Merriweather and asked him how he would have done it." Merriweather was our man at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence's chemical laboratory — back in '56, he'd developed a nerve gas to use on Nasser. It would have worked, too. "He told me about a discovery someone on his team made a few years ago. Using a very strong tranquilizer called haloperidol, they found a way to stimulate what he referred to as 'a temporary state of death'. The Russians have apparently been using the stuff on uncooperative prisoners for years, but if it's administered correctly, it can induce catalepsy, which looks like death even to a trained eye. Bill thought there might be other drugs that could produce the same effect."
"I see," I said, although it all sounded a little fantastic. "But I don't understand why you think this is the same woman Slavin is referring to. He doesn't mention what name she was going under in 1945… " I picked up the folder again and found the place on the page. "'During and after the war, Irina Grigorieva, currently the assistant third secretary at the embassy here in Lagos, worked as a nurse in the British Zone of Germany. There she fell in love with a British officer, according to her the one true love of her life. She succeeded in recruiting this man into the NKVD… ' It doesn't say which hospital she worked at, and there must have been dozens in the Zone. Lagos Station's photograph of her is also a little blurred—what makes you so sure she's this Maleva?"
"Instinct," he said. "Instinct and experience. I've spent half the afternoon examining her photograph—I can't be one hundred per cent certain it's her until I check its counterpart in Registry tomorrow morning, but I'm fairly close to that. It has to be her."
He was looking at me expectantly. And that was when I saw what had been staring me in the face since he had answered the door. Why he'd called me out here tonight instead of leaving it until tomorrow morning. Why he was drinking more than usual. And why I had to act now.
"You needn't worry, sir," I said.
His broad face reddened immediately, and I knew I'd hit the mark. "Worry? What makes you think I should do that?"
"You're quite right about the interview," I said. "Whoever translated it got it wrong. In the original Russian, Slavin quite clearly states that the double was recruited while involved in some sort of black operation in Germany at the end of the war. It sounds like he might have been part of Father's junket and become entangled with this woman. Did Father give you any idea how many people he had out there with him, if any?"
Chief shook his head. "He didn't tell me anything at all about the operation — just that it was vital it continued."
"All right. Still, the fact that you were openly working at British headquarters clearly rules you out as the double. I'll explain the whole thing to Henry as soon as he gets here. When was it you said he was coming over, again?"
"Henry? Nine."
I glanced at my watch. It had just gone half eight. Pritchard might even be early, knowing him.
Chief was taking a congratulatory draught of Becherovka: he was in the clear now. He must have read the file this morning and panicked — not that another traitor on his watch would lead to calls for him to resign, but that his being stationed in the British Zone in '45 might bring him under suspicion of actually being the traitor. His position as head of the Service was no guarantee of protection: Five's deputy head had almost lost his mind after being investigated by other officers in '66. Even a Chief could be brought down. He had probably spotted the omission in the translation some time during the afternoon. It exonerated him, but he knew it would cut more ice if someone else pointed it out. Of the officers who would be hunting the double agent, I was the only one with good enough Russian to spot it — outside Soviet Section, 'Tolstoy' and 'Turgenev' were about all anyone could muster. Additionally, I would have good reason to protect him, as he was a family friend and my father had apparently asked for his help. So he had called me in to get his story straight before tomorrow's meeting. "It can't possibly be Chief," I'd tell them. "There's been a translation cock-up." Good old Darkie.
"Of course," I said, "Henry won't be the only one who will need convincing."
He looked up, alarmed. "What do you mean?"
"Osborne and Farraday," I said.
"Yes, yes, of course. I see that. But can't you explain it to them, too?"
"I thought you'd already discussed it with them," I said lightly, raising my glass. It was empty, and I made sure he noticed.
"What? No, not yet." He stood up and walked over to the drinks cabinet. "I thought it best to sound you and Henry out first."
"Very wise," I said, lifting my glass. He poured a generous measure, and as he stepped away I took out the Luger, disengaged the safety, aimed between his eyes and fired in almost the same moment. The kick pushed me into the armchair and I felt one of the springs dig into my back as the crystal shattered on the floor and his body slumped to the ground and the liqueur began to seep into the carpet.
It was very quiet then. I could hear the wind whipping against the trees outside and a joist creaking somewhere in the house. My head was pounding, the blood careering around it. There had been a moment, a fraction of a moment before I had fired, when he had stared into my face and I'd thought he might have understood what was about to happen to him — that he had realized who I was.
I replaced the Luger and stood up. Pritchard was due to arrive in twenty-eight minutes, and I had to clear up the mess and be well away before then.
I set to work.
Cold Male
This is an assessment of Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale. It first appeared in Issue 1 of the magazine KKBB in Autumn 2005, in advance of the 2006 film adaptation starring Daniel Craig. I have also written about the novel and attempts to film it in Rogue Royale.
‘The one with the carpet-beater...’
This essay on Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was first published in Issue 1 of KKBB magazine in Autumn 2005, in advance of the 2006 film adaptation starring Daniel Craig. I have also written about the novel and the various attempts to film it in Rogue Royale, which can be read on this website or downloaded as part of the free ebook Need to Know.
‘The one with the carpet-beater.’ For too long, Casino Royale has been defined by one (admittedly brilliant) scene. The novel’s place in the canon of espionage fiction is assured by simple virtue of it being the first novel to feature James Bond, but apart from the infamous torturing of its hero, it is rarely given any serious analysis. This is a shame, because although it was not as commercially or critically successful as Fleming’s subsequent novels, there’s a strong case to be made for it being the first great spy thriller of the Cold War.
That the case hasn’t been made is probably due to several factors. Most obviously, many elements of the book don’t easily fit the genre: the setting is not Berlin or Budapest, but a small seaside resort in northern France, and the plot involves gambling for high stakes in a casino rather than stealing documents or smuggling a defector across a border. With its champagne and caviar, casino chips and cocktail dresses, it sometimes seems more like an F Scott Fitzgerald story than a spy novel.
But it is a spy novel—Fleming marks it out as such in the first chapter, ‘The Secret Agent’, in which James Bond practises some fairly nifty pieces of tradecraft. He doesn’t take the lift up to his hotel room, because it would warn anyone on that floor someone was coming. And, once he has established that no one is in the room, he checks that his traps have not been disturbed: a strand of hair wedged into a drawer in the writing desk, a trace of talcum powder on the handle of the wardrobe, and the level of water in the lavatory cistern.
Bond is in Royale-les-Eaux—a fictionalised counterpart of Deauville—on a mission to bring down the mysterious Le Chiffre, who M.I.6.’s report describes as ‘one of the Opposition’s chief agents in France, and undercover Paymaster of the “Syndicat des Ouvriers d’Alsace”, the Communist-controlled trade union in the heavy and transport industries in Alsace, and as we know, an important fifth column in the event of war with Redland’.¹
Le Chiffre is in trouble, although he’s unaware just how much. SMERSH, ‘the most powerful and feared organisation in the U.S.S.R.’² knows that he has embezzled some 50 million francs of party funds, which he has lost in the prostitution racket. Le Chiffre’s scheme to extricate himself from this mess—to win the money back at baccarat—is utterly implausible, and M.I.6.’s idea to send an agent out to France to make sure he loses even more so. But, in a trick that Fleming was to make his trademark, we don’t dwell on the absurdity, because it’s surrounded by such a wealth of verisimilitude. SMERSH was a real organisation, now best known (outside the Bond novels) for having hunted down suspected traitors to the Soviet Union in the months following the Second World War.³
Fleming used his own experiences and knowledge of espionage throughout the novel, and even the most sensational elements are grounded in reality. In Chapter Nine, Bond tells Vesper that he earned his Double O prefix by killing a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm. In 1941, Fleming had visited the New York offices of the M.I.6. offshoot the British Security Coordination (B.S.C.). He was shown around the headquarters by the organisation’s ‘M’, Sir William Stephenson (the famous ‘Intrepid’), and witnessed the burglary of an office belonging to a cipher expert working in the Japanese consul on the floor below.⁴ According to one former B.S.C. officer, the B.S.C. did carry out at least one assassination in New York during the war.⁵ Bond’s mission to bankrupt Le Chiffre was inspired by another of Fleming’s wartime experiences, when he attempted to take on some German agents he had recognised in the casino in Estoril in Portugal—unlike Bond, though, Fleming lost.⁶
Note, too, that Le Chiffre is not just an agent of an opposing power, but of ‘The Opposition’. In 1952, when Fleming started writing Casino Royale, the Cold War was entering its seventh year—it started in the closing stages of the Second World War. M.I.6.’s report refers to ‘the event of war with Redland’. This is no thriller hyperbole—it was a very real fear in British military and intelligence circles at the time. Just five days after the Nazis’ surrender in 1945, Winston Churchill was considering a study drawn up by his Joint Planning Staff for a war against Russia. The date for the start of the Third World War was pencilled in for July 1, 1945.⁷ Although Churchill’s chiefs of staff rejected the idea, the feeling that the Cold War with the Soviet Union may at any moment turn hot was common during the 1950s.
But the most significant espionage element in Casino Royale is that of betrayal. A year before Fleming sat down to write the novel, the British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean vanished. Although it was not publicly confirmed that they had been Russian agents until their appearance in Moscow in 1956, there was widespread speculation that this was the case, and Fleming, with his intelligence contacts, would likely have been better informed than most about M.I.6.’s attempts to track down the remaining members of the ‘Cambridge Ring’. Vesper Lynd represents the shadow of treachery that would haunt British intelligence for the next two decades. It also haunted British spy fiction: scores of thrillers in the ’60s and ’70s focussed on the hunt for a ‘mole’ in M.I.6. Casino Royale got there first.
That said, the novel has its own weight of influences. It is, of course, impossible to know all the books Fleming read and what he thought of them, but we can piece together some of it. It is often said that Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond was one of the primary models for Bond, but an interview Fleming gave to Playboy shortly before his death refutes that:
‘I wanted my hero to be entirely an anonymous instrument and to let the action of the book carry him along. I didn't believe in the heroic Bulldog Drummond types. I mean, rather, I didn't believe they could any longer exist in literature. I wanted this man more or less to follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler's or Dashiell Hammett's heroes—believable people, believable heroes.’⁸
The final phrase, ‘believable heroes’, is Casino Royale’s real innovation. Prior to its publication, there had been plenty of unbelievable heroes in spy fiction, and plenty of spy thrillers featuring believable characters – but they hadn’t been heroes. By merging the existing two schools of spy fiction, the heroic and the believable, Fleming forged an entirely new kind of spy thriller.
Beyond its innovation in the genre, beyond its unerring prose style, it is a novel about what it takes to be a man
The ‘believable’ school had been born in 1928, with W Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories about the British writer-turned-agent Ashenden. This was the first piece of fiction to present espionage as a sordid and shabby line of work: until then, its depictions had been closer to propaganda (and in many cases were used as such). Ashenden is sceptical of the spying game from the start, when a colonel in British intelligence known only as R. tells him a story about a French minister who was seduced by a stranger in Nice, and lost a case full of important documents in the process:
‘“They had one or two drinks up in his room, and his theory is that when his back was turned the woman slipped a drug into his glass.”
Ashenden laconically notes that such events have been enacted in a thousand novels and plays: ‘“Do you mean to say that life has only just caught up with us?”’ R. insists that the incident happened just a couple of weeks previously.
‘“Well, sir, if you can’t do better than that in the Secret Service,” sighed Ashenden. “I’m afraid that as a source of inspiration to the writer of fiction it’s a washout. We really can’t write that story much longer.”’⁹
Writers did continue to create variations of the story, of course, and Casino Royale is one of them. With the Ashenden stories, Maugham changed the rules of earlier thrillers—works by the likes of William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, whose romantic tales of derring-do had been best-sellers in the run up to the First World War. Both writers were fond of aristocratic heroes with refined tastes who saved England, usually from German plans to invade.
*
Another master of the heroic vein was John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, although his heroes were not usually professional spies, but gentlemen adventurers thrown in at the deep end. More relevant to Fleming, and Casino Royale in particular, is Dennis Wheatley, who wrote a string of Buchan-esque thrillers from 1933 until his death in 1977.
Wheatley, like Fleming, worked in intelligence during the Second World War, and had a fondness for the bizarre: as well as spy thrillers, he also wrote occult novels, and even merged the two genres in Strange Conflict (1941), which one can easily imagine a younger Fleming eating up. It features a privileged group of British and American agents trying to discover how the Nazis are predicting the routes of the Atlantic convoys. The trail leads to Haiti, but before the group even arrive on the island they are attacked by sharks. They are saved by a Panama-hatted Haitian called Doctor Saturday, who puts them up at his house and then takes them to a voodoo ceremony, where they witness a sacrifice to Dambala. Two women wearing black are shooed away by the priest; one of the group of agents asks Doctor Saturday why:
‘He replied in his broken French that they were in mourning and therefore had no right to attend a Dambala ceremony, which was for the living. Their association with recent death caused them to carry with them, wherever they went, the presence of the dreaded Baron Samedi.
“Lord Saturday,” whispered Marie Lou to the Duke. “What a queer name for a god!” But the Doctor had caught what she had said and turned to smile at her.
“It is another name that they use for Baron Cimeterre. You see, his Holy Day is Saturday. And it is a sort of joke, of which the people never get tired, that my name, too, is Saturday.”’¹⁰
It is, of course, not a joke at all: Doctor Saturday, they soon discover, is the physical incarnation of Baron Samedi, and the villain they have been trying to track down. In Live and Let Die, published in 1954, Ian Fleming featured a villain with the same name transplanted to Jamaica, where he wrote all his books.
*
All of Wheatley’s work is now out of print, perhaps partly as a result of the sometimes virulent racism in his work. But leaving aside his politics, Wheatley was a considerable thriller writer—his chapters came thick and fast and almost always ended with ingenious cliff-hangers. He was also very successful: by the time Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale, Wheatley had over 20 best-sellers to his name, seven of them featuring a dashing British secret agent called Gregory Sallust, who travelled around the world stopping plots against England. This kind of character was very common throughout the 40s and 50s: in the 1951 novel The Sixth Column by Ian Fleming’s brother Peter, one of the characters is a retired army officer who makes a living writing thrillers featuring a Colonel Hackforth, who becomes involved in ‘violent and, to say the least of it, curious events’ that have ‘far-reaching implications’¹¹. But the similarities between James Bond and Wheatley’s character Gregory Sallust are more striking. Both are lean, dark, handsome, ruthless and high-living. In Contraband (1936), we meet Sallust gambling at the casino in Deauville, ten days before la grande semaine. The first chapter, “Midnight at the Casino”, finds Sallust attracted by a girl at one of the tables:
‘Probably most of the heavy bracelets that loaded down her white arms were fake, but you cannot fake clothes as you can diamonds, and he knew that those simple lines of rich material which rose to cup her well-formed breasts had cost a pretty penny. Besides, she was very beautiful.
A little frown of annoyance wrinkled his forehead, catching at the scar which lifted his left eyebrow until his face took on an almost satanic look. What a pity, he thought, that he was returning to England the following day.’¹²
Casino Royale, of course, opens in the same casino three hours later. And in Chapter 8, Fleming describes Vesper Lynd in very similar terms:
‘Her dress was of black velvet, simple and yet with the touch of splendour that only half a dozen couturiers in the world can achieve. There was a thin necklace of diamonds at her throat and a diamond clip in the low vee which just exposed the jutting swell of her breasts. She carried a plain black evening bag, a flat oblong which she now held, her arm akimbo, at her waist. Her jet-black hair hung straight and simply to the final inward curl below the chin.
She looked quite superb and Bond’s heart lifted.’
The woman in Contraband is a Hungarian called Sabine Szenty, and she turns out to be part of a smuggling gang. We learn that she has ‘sleek black hair’, a ‘fresh and healthy’ complexion, and wears ‘light make-up’¹³. In Chapter 5 of Casino Royale, we are told that Vesper is ‘lightly suntanned’ and wears no make-up, except on her mouth. Bond and Sallust are also similar, in that they are both attracted to richness that is both understated and simple. This is a repeated theme in Casino Royale:
‘He dried himself and dressed in a white shirt and dark blue slacks. He hoped that she would be dressed as simply and he was pleased when, without knocking, she appeared in the doorway wearing a blue linen shirt which had faded to the colour of her eyes and a dark red skirt in pleated cotton.’¹⁴
Sallust also has a familiar hedonistic streak. During the course of Contraband, he quaffs champagne, eats duck dressed with foie gras and cherries, and is briefly held captive in a country house in Kent—although he escapes before he is dumped in a nearby river. He also narrowly avoids drowning in V For Vengeance (1942), and as a large Prussian holds his head under water he grows contemplative:
‘The game was up. He would never again know the joy of Erika’s caresses, the thrill of a new adventure, the feel of a hot bath and a comfortable bed after a long hard journey, or the cool richness of a beaker of iced champagne...’¹⁵
In Casino Royale, James Bond luxuriates in just this kind of activity, although he prefers cold showers to hot baths—he has four of them in the course of the book.
*
All of this is a long way from the ‘believable’ image of espionage depicted by Maugham and his successors, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, none of whose protagonists could rightly be called heroes, and who are more likely to think of their collection of rare stamps than beakers of champagne. And yet Casino Royale's prose style is far closer to the believable school than it is to Buchan and Wheatley, whose writing tends to be flat and heavy-handed. In a letter to Fleming in 1953, Maugham wrote that he had enjoyed the novel immensely, in particular the baccarat battle between Le Chiffre and Bond.¹⁶ Before Bond, there were dozens of thrillers featuring debonair spies who win the day—Casino Royale was the first that was written with real flair. Wheatley, Buchan and the others could keep you reading—Fleming keeps you re-reading.
But he wasn’t the first to try the trick of merging these two styles. From 1936, Geoffrey Household wrote several vividly written thrillers that added a dose of toughness and realism to the Buchan model. Fleming was a great admirer of Household—we know he sent at least six copies of his 1937 novel The Third Hour to friends even though Household would not become famous until two years later, with the publication of the classic Rogue Male.¹⁷
It’s not hard to see the appeal: Household had served in the Intelligence Corps in the Middle East during the Second World War, and shared much of Fleming’s outlook on life. His books are almost all in the first person, and his heroes tend to be laconic, arrogant and ruthless. In A Time To Kill (1951), the narrator is desperate to save his family, who have been kidnapped by communist agents:
‘I gave him Pink’s knife between the shoulder blades. It wasn’t quite enough. I am now ashamed that I was glad it wasn’t enough. I turned him over and allowed him to see who I was, and to watch the steel as I drove it into his throat.’¹⁸
Rogue Male, published a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, features an upper-class Englishman and amateur hunter who decides on his own initiative to assassinate Hitler. When his shot misses, he is chased across the Channel by a German agent masquerading as a British officer called Quive-Smith, and a tense cat-and-mouse tale plays out in the English countryside. To keep off the streets, the narrator burrows himself an ingenious bolt-hole, but this backfires when Quive-Smith finds him and fills the hole in—like Bond in Casino Royale, the narrator finds himself at the mercy of a foreign agent. While he is trapped, Quive-Smith tries to get him to admit that he was acting as an agent of the British government; the narrator insists he was not, which irritates Quive-Smith’s sense of order:
‘“Shall we say that your motives were patriotic?”
“They were not,” I answered.
“My dear fellow!” he protested. “But they were certainly not personal!”
Not personal! But what else could they be? He had made me see myself. No man would do what I did unless he were cold-drawn by grief and rage, consecrated by his own anger to do justice where no other hand could reach.’¹⁹
The narrator’s denial that he has acted out of patriotism immediately sets this book apart from the romantic tradition—and yet his ‘cold-drawn grief and rage’ is painted in a heroic light. In Casino Royale, Fleming took this idea a step further. The word ‘cold’ is repeatedly used to describe Bond in the book’s early stages—at the end of the first chapter, he is depicted almost as a villain:
‘Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.’
As we have already seen from the description of Gregory Sallust in Contraband, this is not entirely out of keeping with the romantic tradition—but it is still quite extreme. A turning point comes at the end of Chapter 13, when Bond’s mask is finally removed. He has beaten Le Chiffre at baccarat and apparently completed his mission, but his celebratory dinner with Vesper has turned sour. He returns to his hotel room to hide the cheque and bed down for the night:
‘He gazed for a moment into the mirror and wondered about Vesper’s morals. He wanted her cold and arrogant body. He wanted to see tears and desire in her remote blue eyes and to take the ropes of her black hair in his hands and bend her long body back under his. Bond’s eyes narrowed and his face in the mirror looked back at him with hunger.’
Bond is frustrated because he seems to have met his match—a woman more detached than him. Despite the previous references to Bond’s coldness, this passage is shocking in its intensity and aggression towards Vesper. Although it is brutal, even sadistic, it is no longer ironical or cold in the sense of being detached—Bond’s emotions have finally risen to the surface.
When, in the novel’s final chapter, Bond learns of Vesper’s betrayal, he utters an obscenity, cries, and then ‘with a set cold face’ walks to the nearest telephone booth and calls London to inform them that ‘the bitch is dead now’. Grief has turned to rage in a few short sentences, and the rage is then turned away from Vesper and directed at SMERSH.
‘SMERSH was the spur. Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and without question, you will be hunted down and killed.
It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray, and the bullet would never miss.
But now he would attack the arm that held the whip and the gun. The business of espionage could be left to the white-collar boys. They could spy, and catch the spies. He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy.’
Like the narrator of Rogue Male, James Bond vows ‘to do justice where no other hand can reach’. Things have become very personal for the cool, detached agent. In the course of his mission, he has proved, quite literally, that he has the balls for the job. The glamour of the casino and the champagne and caviar have been stripped away, and we are left with one man battling his own private nightmare.
And this, perhaps, is why Casino Royale still resonates today. Beyond its innovation in the genre, beyond its unerring prose style, it is a novel about what it takes to be a man. How to be a man in the best of circumstances—when you are in your prime, a beautiful woman by your side, winning against the odds—and how to be a man in the worst of circumstances, when you are under pressure and can’t let the side down, and the woman turns out to have betrayed you. Before Casino Royale, the hero always saved the damsel in distress moments before she was brutally ravaged and tortured by the villain; Fleming gave us a story in which nobody is saved, and it is the hero who is abused, drawn there by the damsel. Despite the implausibility of his mission and the sometimes self-consciously crude depiction of a tough man of action, in Casino Royale Fleming succeeded in creating his believable hero.
This may be another reason the novel has been so neglected by scholars of the thriller. Although it established the formula for the series, Casino Royale has a very different tone to the rest of the Bond novels. For decades, critics have painted Bond as an unbelievable hero in the Sapper or Buchan tradition but, as I hope I’ve shown, in Casino Royale he is not quite of that mould.
As Fleming’s subsequent novels and the films made James Bond the most famous secret agent in the world, other writers—John Le Carré, Len Deighton, Adam Hall—produced more ‘believable’ stories than Casino Royale. These were often acclaimed as being ‘anti-Bonds’, but in fact they followed Fleming’s lead in weaving heroic elements into the Maugham/Ambler/Greene tradition. Deighton’s The IPCRESS File (1962) and Hall’s The Quiller Memorandum (1965) were both regarded as more credible accounts of espionage than Fleming’s novels, and yet they both feature torture scenes that, consciously or not, owe a great debt to Casino Royale. With Fleming’s first novel, the spy thriller took an enormous leap forward.
Notes
1, 2. Chapter 2 'Dossier for M'.
3. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (Penguin, 2000), p177.
4, 5. M.I.6.: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service by Stephen Dorril (Touchstone, 2000), pp610-11.
6. Archive interview with Fleming in 'Ian Fleming: 007's creator', written and directed by John Cork, 2000, featured on The Living Daylights DVD.
7. Dorril, p25.
8. ‘The Playboy Interview: Ian Fleming’ by Ken Purdy, Playboy, December 1964.
9. ‘Miss King’, Collected Short Stories of W Somerset Maugham: Volume 3 (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics), pp10-11.
10. Strange Conflict by Dennis Wheatley (Arrow, 1970), p208.
11. Peter Fleming: A Biography by Duff Hart-Davis (Oxford University Press, 1987), p329.
12, 13. Contraband by Dennis Wheatley (Arrow, 1996), pp11, 18.
14. Chapter 24 ‘Fruit Défendu’.
15. V For Vengeance by Dennis Wheatley (Arrow, 1965), pp135-6.
16. The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson (Aurum Press, 2003), p264.
17. Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett (Phoenix, 1996), p85.
18. A Time To Kill by Geoffrey Household (Pennant, 1953), p95.
19. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household (Penguin, 1985), p151.
In Fleming’s Footsteps
On 5 October 1962, the first James Bond film, Dr No, had its world premiere in London – and the thriller would never be the same again. The Bond films would become the most successful film franchise of all time, and almost single-handedly led to the ‘spy-mania’ of the Sixties.
As a result, nearly all discussion of Bond’s influence on the genre relates to the films. But long before Terence Young, Sean Connery, or John Barry stepped onto the scene, James Bond was a by-word for excitement, glamour and adventure. Fleming was not merely a moderately successful writer whose work only became famous via screen adaptation: by any usual standards, his books were a wide-reaching cultural phenomenon (which is partly why the film rights were attractive, of course). In Britain, Fleming’s novels were serialised as comic strips in the Daily Express from 1958 onwards, and the same year he became a talking point in the literary world when he was attacked as vulgar by the critic Bernard Bergonzi in the Twentieth Century and accused of being a purveyor of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ by Paul Johnson in the New Statesman.¹ In its review of Goldfinger on March 26, 1959, The Times noted that:
‘A new novel by Mr. Ian Fleming is becoming something of an event, since James Bond has now established himself at the head of his profession, a secret service agent who indeed plays for England but who has much in common with the highly sexed “private eye” on the other side of the Atlantic.’
A less frequently discussed indication of Fleming’s success is that, even before Dr No came to the screen, other thriller-writers were being influenced by Bond. Just over a month after Dr No’s premiere, on 12 November 1962, Len Deighton’s novel The IPCRESS File was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Although Deighton wrote the book before Dr No’s release, Bond was nevertheless on his mind, as Michael Spencer Howard revealed in his 1971 book on the publisher Jonathan Cape:
‘Having studied the James Bond phenomenon, Deighton had devised his own formula on which to base efficiently successful thrillers, and was determined to write five of them to prove it.’²
The IPCRESS File was an unexpected smash, and Deighton defected from Hodder to Jonathan Cape, who published the sequel, Horse Under Water, the following year. Deighton later said that this ‘enraged some people, who claimed I was now going to be trained as the successor to Ian Fleming, who Cape also published.’³ This was an understandable view: The IPCRESS File even closes with a mention of SMERSH, an organisation that had featured in Fleming novels but which would not appear on film until From Russia With Love in 1963 – the screenplay of which Deighton worked on.⁴
The mention of SMERSH can only plausibly be the influence of Fleming, because although the organisation existed in real life, it had had little in common with Fleming’s fantastic depiction of it, and its existence was barely known before the publication of Casino Royale. Deighton places the organisation’s headquarters in Moscow at 19 Stanislavskaya Street, whereas Fleming had it at 13 Sretenska Ulitsa. Despite the authoritative-sounding specificity, neither can be right, as the organisation was disbanded and handed over to the Main Administration of Counter-Intelligence (GUKR) of the MGB in 1946.⁵
Deighton was not the only thriller-writer to toy with the Bond formula prior to the films. The Mythmaker by Sarah Gainham, published in 1957, featured a young, handsome half-British, half-Hungarian agent called Christian Quest, known as ‘Kit’; the name is an obvious play on the tradition of gallant spies fighting for God and country. Gainham was the pseudonym of Rachel Terry, the wife of British journalist and MI6 asset Anthony Terry, a close friend and colleague of Fleming who had helped with the research for The Living Daylights. According to Andrew Lycett, Rosa Klebb was partly inspired by an anecdote Rachel Terry had told about a hideous female Russian agent who had operated in Vienna.⁶
Several moments in The Mythmaker, published the same year as From Russia With Love, appear to have been inspired by Fleming’s work, especially Casino Royale. Quest is a handsome, young, but somewhat arrogant novice in both the spy game and matters of the heart:
‘In Kit’s many small loves his main preoccupation had been to protect himself from involvement without losing his pleasure. A vulgar concern which was not his choice but simply the accepted attitude to love of nearly all young men of his kind, and the very worst preparation possible for the feelings that now filled him. Not only was Deli a member of his own world and therefore not to be trifled with without serious consequences, but he found with a momentary fear that only traces remained of his habitual self-defence against emotion, he was defenceless against her simply because she was unarmed and brave. Yet he could not at once give up the essentially hostile posture which had hitherto been his real attitude to the women he had desired and who had desired him. This fear and this reservation showed in his eyes after the first flash of recognition, and in answer to them a familiar smile of ironical understanding came into Deli’s eyes. Kit looked away from her, shamed that he had betrayed a coarse caution in a moment that could never return, and spoilt it for both of them.
‘Let’s dance,’ said Deli, still with the ironical smile.’’
Deli’s ironical smiles are reminiscent of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, and the passage as a whole echoes Bond’s changing attitude to women in that novel:
‘With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.
But with Vesper there could be none of this.’
In the hint of Quest’s ‘real’ attitude to women – an ‘essentially hostile posture’ – he may also have been a subtle portrait of Ian Fleming. Rachel Terry thought that Fleming was ‘highly intelligent and accomplished’, but that his emotional age was ‘pre-puberty’⁷. A couple of years after she wrote The Mythmaker, Fleming tried to seduce her on a trip to Berlin, when she had been estranged for her husband. She had been tempted, finding Fleming ‘tall, good-looking, highly presentable and with the slightly piratical air given by his broken nose’, but turned him down⁷. In The Mythmaker, Quest is described as having a ‘narrow, aquiline handsome face with an arrogant but humorous expression, a mobile mouth and quick hazel eyes of unusual beauty’.
Quest travels to Vienna to find Otto Berger, a servant of Hitler’s thought to have escaped the Bunker in Berlin and hidden a cache of platinum and precious stones to be used to fund a neo-Nazi revival: the book ends with a chase through the Alps. In Fleming’s Moonraker (1954), the chief villain is Hugo Drax, revealed to have been a Nazi who survived the end of the war. Drax’s chief accomplice is called Krebs, the same name as Hitler’s last chief of staff in the Bunker.⁸
In the 1960s and 1970s, neo-Nazi revivals would become fertile ground for British thriller-writers. One lesser known example is The Testament of Caspar Schultz by Martin Fallon, published by Abelard-Schulman in the United Kingdom on May 18, 1962, nearly five months before the world premiere of Dr No. Fallon was an early pseudonym of Harry Patterson, a writer who would later become famous under another pseudonym: Jack Higgins.
While Gainham’s book was a literary thriller with a few gentle nods to Fleming’s work, The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a full-bodied homage. In the first chapter, British agent Paul Chavasse is summoned in the early hours by telephone to see his superior, who works out of a building carrying the legend ‘Brown & Company – Importers & Exporters’ on a polished brass plate outside:
‘He went up the curving Regency staircase and passed along a thickly carpeted corridor. The only sound was a slight, persistent hum from the dynamo in the radio room…’
Chavasse briefly admires the Chief’s assistant, Jean Frazer, whose tweed skirt is of a ‘deceptively simple cut that moulded her rounded hips’, before going in to see his boss:
‘The room was half in shadow, the only light the shaded lamp which stood upon the desk by the window. The Chief was reading a sheaf of typewritten documents and he looked up quickly, a slight frown on his face.’
All of this seems to be a shorthand version of the openings of several Fleming novels, such as this passage in From Russia With Love (1957):
‘As Bond put on his coat and went out into the corridor, banging the door behind him, he had a feeling of certainty that the starter’s gun had fired and that the dog days had come to an end. Even the ride up to the top floor in the lift and the walk down the long quiet corridor to the door of M’s small office seemed to be charged with the significance of all those other occasions when the bell of the red telephone had been the signal that had fired him, like a loaded projectile, across the world towards some distant target of M’s choosing. And the eyes of Miss Moneypenny, M’s private secretary, had that old look of excitement and secret knowledge as she smiled up at him and pressed the switch on the intercom.
‘007’s here, sir.’
‘Send him in,’ said the metallic voice, and the red light of privacy went on above the door.
Bond went through the door and closed it softly behind him. The room was cool, or perhaps it was the Venetian blinds that gave an impression of coolness. They threw bars of light and shadow across the dark green carpet up to the edge of the big central desk. There the sunshine stopped so that the quiet figure behind the desk sat in a pool of suffused greenish shade.’
Stylistically, these two passages are very different: Fleming almost fetishised physical detail, whereas Higgins prioritises pace. However, the content is very similar, and the character of Chavasse is also like Bond in many respects: a handsome, ruthless, highly professional British secret agent who speaks several languages, is an expert at judo, and so on. The clearest indication that Higgins had Fleming in mind, however, is the following passage:
‘‘There are men like me working for every Great Power in the world. I’ve got more in common with my opposite number in SMERSH than I have with any normal citizen of my own country. If I’m told to do a thing, I get it done. I don’t ask questions. Men like me live by one code only – the job must come before anything else.’ He laughed harshly. ‘If I’d been born a few years earlier and a German, I’d probably have worked for the Gestapo.’’
Again, SMERSH was not well known before Fleming’s use of it in Casino Royale and subsequent novels, and it was a division of Soviet intelligence mainly dedicated to interrogating suspected traitors. Like Fleming (and Deighton), Higgins treated it as though it were a still-operational and central part of Soviet intelligence.
Paul Chavasse is a half-British half-Breton secret agent. His mission in the novel is to find Caspar Schultz, a survivor of Hitler’s Bunker who has written a book naming the leaders of a neo-Nazi movement in Germany. In Higgins’ original draft, the testament’s author was Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, but at his publishers insistence he changed this to the fictional Schultz.
Chavasse delivers his speech about SMERSH to Israeli agent Mark Hardt in a first-class sleeper compartment, in a scene that is highly reminiscent of Fleming’s From Russia With Love (1958). In that book, SMERSH’s dossier on James Bond described him as ‘a dangerous professional terrorist and spy’, a neat alternate look at our hero. Higgins took this further. James Bond would never say of himself that he had more in common with a member of SMERSH than with British citizens, let alone that had he been born a German earlier he would probably have joined the Gestapo. Higgins was using Chavasse to play off and comment on Fleming’s creation. He’s an answer to a writer’s musing: Are all Germans and Russians bad? And: What would a real secret agent’s motivation be? Traditionally in thrillers of this kind, it is duty, either in the form of love of country or God or, sometimes, a woman. Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond started his career because he found peacetime dull, but he was nevertheless highly patriotic. For Chavasse, however, the job comes before anything else, and he recognises that he might have been attracted to the work whatever his nationality, and whatever the cause. This is an elaboration of a point made by Fleming in Casino Royale, in which Bond worries that Le Chiffe was right when he had said Bond’s game of ‘Red Indians’ is over:
‘‘This country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.’’
The Testament of Caspar Schultz is a lean, sparsely written thriller, with one dominating theme: the conflict between conscience and the desire for adventure. At several points in the book, Chavasse is troubled by his own nature. He tells Israeli agent Anna Hartmann that he was recruited into intelligence work after bringing the relative of a friend out of Czechoslovakia:
‘‘I’d discovered things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the Czechoslovakian business I realized that in some twisted kind of way I’d enjoyed it. Can you understand that?’
‘I’m not really sure,’ she said slowly. ‘Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in the face each day?’
‘I don’t think of that side of it,’ he said, ‘any more than a Grand Prix motor racing driver does.’’
And he repeats what he told her colleague:
‘‘I’m a professional and work against professionals. Men like me obey one law only – the job must come first.’’
While the use of this idea is rather heavy-handed in The Testament of Caspar Schultz, Higgins clearly felt it was important, developing it in five further novels featuring Chavasse. In The Keys of Hell (1965), for instance, on a mission in Albania, he says to another beautiful young woman he has fallen in love with:
‘‘If I’d been born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the Gestapo. If I’d been born an Albanian, I might well have been a most efficient member of the Sigurmi. Who knows?’’
This concept eventually became one of the major themes of his work. In The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975, Higgins did not simply have the hero remark how similar he is to a German – the heroes are German. In a 1987 interview, Higgins related how one publisher was not best pleased when he heard the premise of the book, telling him:
‘‘You can’t possibly expect the public to go for a book about a bunch of Krauts trying to kidnap Winston Churchill. You don’t have any heroes – these people are Nazis, for God’s sake!’’⁹
But the public did go for it; The Eagle Has Landed was Higgins’ breakthrough, and has sold over 50 million copies to date. Part of its appeal is precisely the friction of rooting for characters who were traditionally cast as antagonists. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of The Jackal and Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, two other landmark British thrillers of the post-war period, also featured highly professional yet strangely empathetic antagonists. Higgins’ other major success has been with the character Sean Dillon, a former IRA assassin who is periodically used by British intelligence.
In peacetime Britain, when the justification for what SMERSH would classify as terrorist actions was less cut and dried than it had been during the war, there was a need for a new type of motivation for fictional secret agents. Higgins hit on the idea of an agent being driven not by traditional causes such as King, God or country, but by an addiction to the chase itself, a love of the profession. Chavasse’s other concern – the broader picture of human nature that allows him to empathise with the enemy and recognise himself in it – became a major theme of Higgins’ work.
Another writer who was influenced by Fleming was Geoffrey Jenkins, a South African who had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times in the ’40s. In his first novel, A Twist of Sand (1959), we are introduced to Geoffrey Peace, a former Royal Navy submarine captain now involved in distinctly shadier business. A flashback to the war gives us another echo of a Bond/M scene:
‘The Admiralty looked bleak and cold in the late London spring; chill it seemed to me after being used to the friendly bite of the Mediterranean sun. Bleaker still looked those eyes over the top of the desk. They reminded me somehow of Rockall, the lonely isle in the Atlantic – they only changed their shade of greyness, sometimes stormy, sometimes still, but always grey and bleak with the chill of the near Arctic.’
During the war, as Jenkins would have known, Fleming worked at the Admiralty, and M is frequently described as having ‘frosty, damnably clear, grey eyes’ in For Your Eyes Only.
Jenkins’ next book was The Watering Place of Good Peace (1960). The hero, Ian Ogilvie, is a Scot who was crippled by a shark, also while in the Royal Navy. He joins an organisation constructing anti-shark barriers ‘a fast car, a pretty girl, and half a dozen drinks’ after his accident. The plot features opium smuggling and a villain called John Barrow who is using a submarine to find uranium. Ogilvie also swims through the wreck of a ship with a beautiful woman who is naked but for goggles and scuba gear. Many of Jenkins’ subsequent novels featured such tips of the hat to his former mentor. After Fleming’s death, Jenkins was commissioned to write a Bond novel – Per Fine Ounce – but it was never published.¹⁰
Many thriller-writers have been influenced by Ian Fleming, but most have probably come to his work through the films. But Deighton, Gainham, Higgins, and Jenkins were all influenced by him before the first Bond film was released. Fleming was an influential thriller-writer in his own right, and James Bond a character that inspired his peers even before his transition to the silver screen.
NOTES
1. See ‘Enemy Action’ for a fuller exploration of the negative critical reaction to Fleming’s work.
2. p300, Jonathan Cape, Publisher by Michael Spencer Howard (Penguin, 1971), p300.
3. The Len Deighton Companion by Edward Milward-Oliver (Grafton, 1987), p14.
4. Ibid., p248.
5. KGB: The Inside Story Of Its Foreign Operations From Lenin To Gorbachev by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (Sceptre, 1991) pp350-1; and Nights Are Longest There: SMERSH From The Inside by A.I. Romanov (Hutchinson, 1972), pp192.
6. Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett (Phoenix, 1996), p371.
7. Ibid.
8. The Last Days of Hitler By Hugh Trevor-Roper (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p31.
9. Interviewed by Don Swaim on Book Beat, CBS Radio, 1987. Available at: http://wiredforbooks.org/jackhiggins/index.htm
10. See ‘Uncut Gem’ for a detailed look at this.
The Author Who Cyber-Stalked Me
Back in 2012, the best-selling British novelist Stephen Leather openly boasted on stage at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival that he used fake identities to promote his books online. The panel was recorded, but the nub of it was when Leather said this:
'As soon as my book is out, I’m on Facebook and Twitter several times a day talking about it. I’ll go on to several forums, the well-known forums, and post there under my name and under various other names and various other characters. You build up this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself.'
I didn't think this was ethical, and asked Leather on Twitter how he justified deceiving people into buying his books on the say-so of comments they had believed were from genuine fans of his - rather than simply from himself in disguise. In response, Leather quickly blocked me and became personally insulting.
Others also felt his behaviour was unethical, especially the novelist Steve Mosby, who had been on the panel with Leather at Harrogate. Mosby and Leather are both published by Hachette, incidentally, so by criticizing Leather's behaviour Steve Mosby was also sticking his neck out and criticizing one of the most successful authors at his own publisher. I think he did it politely, but firmly. Leather, on the other hand, acted viciously towards him in return, and has done repeatedly since.
As Leather was refusing to clarify what precisely he had done, I started looking myself to see if I could find some of the online identities he'd boasted about (or 'sockpuppets' as they're often called).
Leather is one of the UK's bestselling authors - in 2011, he was the second most successful British author on Kindle worldwide after Lee Child and ahead of Ken Follett, Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett. He has a hefty online presence, bolstered by the many websites he has set up:
- http://stephenleather.com - registered by Leather and his self-publishing company Three Elephants via GoDaddy.com on February 12 2000
- http://www.samleather.com (now defunct, perhaps because the name was confusing) - registered by Leather/Three Elephants via GoDaddy.com on May 11 2000
- http://www.stephen-leather.com - registered anonymously via FastDomain on January 8 2013
- http://stephenleatherbooks.com - registered anonymously via GoDaddy on January 11 2013
- http://www.authorstephenleather.com - register by Leather/Three Elephants via GoDaddy on January 24 2013
- http://stephenleatherauthor.com - registered by Leather/Three Elephants via GoDaddy on February 2 2013
- http://writerstephenleather.com - registered by Leather/Three Elephants via GoDaddy on February 2 2013
- http://stephenleather.blogspot.com - no information available for Blogspot registrations
- http://bestsellingauthorstephenleather.blogspot.com - ditto
- http://stephenleatherpublishingebooks.blogspot.com - ditto
Leather also has websites devoted to two protagonists from his books, Jack Nightingale and Dan 'Spider' Shepherd:
- http://www.jacknightingale.com - registered by Amit Khan at Mumbai Domain Hosting via GoDaddy on March 7 2009
- http://www.spidershepherd.com - registered anonymously via GoDaddy on January 11 2013
That last one is defunct in its original form, but will become important later on in this post so I'll explain it a bit now. The graphics have been lost, but you can get an idea of how the site originally looked in 2013 from this snapshot. Today, the site automatically redirects to the similarly named http://www.danspidershepherd.com. In the text of that more recent site, there's a line stating the site was 'designed by a fan of Stephen's work'. That might be true as far the design goes, but Leather set the site up himself under his own name and that of his company Three Elephants via GoDaddy on June 17 2013. The foot of the site also reads '© Copyright 2013 Stephen Leather - danspidershepherd.com. All Rights Reserved'.
To have so many websites seems confusing to me from a marketing perspective. On the other hand, having this many sites widens his online reach, in that if you Google him lots of these come up on the first few pages, which gives an impression of a writer everyone is talking about. Note, too, that most were set up after 2012. As a result of Harrogate and its aftermath Leather had a lot of bad press online, and so a plethora of sites might have helped draw attention away from them for anyone Googling his name. But note, please, the following:
- Stephen Leather has set up a lot of websites.
- All but one of those I found were registered using the company GoDaddy.com.
- Leather most often registered these sites using his name, but occasionally he withheld that information. Nevertheless, common sense tells us from the context, designs and content that he set up all of these sites.
- All the sites' domain names end '.com'. No '.nets' or 'co.uks' or the like for Leather.
- The sites have similar names, as you would of course expect, but look at how they are similar: authorstephenleather.com and stephenleatherauthor.com, for instance. He likes variations of domain names, and switching nouns to the front and back of the url. He only used a hyphen in one domain name. He doesn't use pronouns (eg 'thebestsellingauthorstephenleather' or 'theofficialstephenleather')
- He has set up a lot of websites that have very similar, though not precisely the same, content. It's an unusual strategy. Most authors I know of have just one website, or perhaps a site and a blog on the side. Leather has set up a dozen, and three blogs, and most of them are still accessible.
- But one site, spidershepherd.com, has an automatic redirect attached to it.
I looked at some of these sites back in 2012. I also saw he was active on social media, and pretty soon I came across a curious Twitter account called 'The Unknown Writer'. It claimed to be a 'wannabe writer' but, despite having 15,000 followers, almost never interacted with anyone else. Instead, it tweeted the occasional lame joke and constantly promoted Stephen Leather's books under the guise of being one of his fans. (By the way, just click on any of the screenshots in this article to expand them.)
Leather initially denied having any connection with this account, but eventually admitted he was running it. He changed the account's handle from @thirdparagraph to @firstparagraph, and continued insulting people who had criticized him. A recurring theme was that he was hugely successful, and that anyone criticizing him was a failure, and must be jealous.
The @firstparagraph account is still running. He still promotes his own work in it, but now has a theme of posting pictures of cute kittens. This means he can keep his 'official' account, @stephenleather - the one most of his readers and his publisher will know about and see - 'clean', while under his hilarious kitten guise he can throw out thinly veiled barbs at his critics without damaging his 'brand'.
Back to 2012, though. On looking deeper, I found an even more unusual sockpuppet Leather had set up. After a self-published writer Steve Roach had repeatedly criticized him for his promotional tactics on Amazon, Leather set up two Twitter accounts in Roach's name. This served two purposes: firstly, he could recommend his own books from behind the disguise, fooling people into thinking the recommendations he was making for his own books were from another writer; secondly, he could exact revenge on Mr Roach for having crossed swords with him by spamming everyone with how wonderful a writer he was while posing as Roach.
The story of how Leather used sockpuppets to promote himself, and how he cyber-bullied Steve Roach for over a year, was reported by Nick Cohen in The Observer. It even made the Danish press. The broader issue of his sockpuppeting was covered by The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Bookseller and several others. I also signed an open letter to The Telegraph with around 50 authors, in which we condemned the use of sockpuppetry and other unethical practices to deceive readers.
In August 2012, a website appeared, jerermyduns-watch.blogspot.com. This purported to have been set up by a human rights lawyer called 'Maria James', who had a Twitter account to go with it, but this was scarcely believable. After I pointed out to 'Maria' that she had spelled my name wrong in the url, they set up a similar site, which they've been adding to ever since, falsely accusing me of being a homophobe, a rape apologist and much more besides.
I don't believe Leather set up that website. But he was aware of it - he posted comments on it. And I think he could see that, despite it being filled with accusations that most sane people would never believe for a moment, it could nevertheless damage my reputation. It also takes minutes to set up such a blog, and there is no need to register a domain name - it is very difficult indeed to figure out who runs a Blogspot or Wordpress blog.
Some months after the 'Jeremy Duns Watch' website appeared, several other sites devoted to attacking me were created:
http://jeremydunsjournalist.blogspot.com (first post January 25 6 2013)
http://jeremydunsauthor.blogspot.com (first post May 5 2013)
https://authorjeremyduns.wordpress.com (first post May 5 2013)
https://jeremydunsjournalist.wordpress.com (first post May 6 2013)
The first of those claimed to have been set up by a 'Peter Williams', linking to an empty Google+ profile. I think a perusal of any of these sites show they are vindictive and filled with false accusations and misrepresentations (as well as using private photos without permission, including one taken by my daughter). They're rather more plausibly put together than 'Maria's, though. The idea behind them seems to be to simply sling as much mud my way as possible and hope that something sticks, and to make it so that if anyone Googles me - readers, potential readers, publishers, producers, etc - they might be influenced by the fact that apparently lots of people hate me and I am a Terrible Person Who Has Done Lots of Terrible Things.
The fact that the accusations are false and in most cases fairly obviously so doesn't matter much, as there is nothing I can do to take them down (I've tried); I can't comment on the sites; someone might well believe some of the accusations; and as whoever set them up is anonymous there are no negative repercussions for them. It's why sockpuppeting is so rampant. It's why Stephen Leather did it with Steve Roach, for instance.
This situation has frustrated me for a while, especially because it has become increasingly clear to me that Leather set up these websites. Notice the domain names, for example, and how they echo the form Leather has used for his own sites:
stephenleatherauthor.com
authorstephenleather.com
jeremydunsauthor.blogspot.com
authorjeremyduns.wordpress.com
Like Leather's own sites, they also repeat material, and are all really about the same thing: again, the idea is to spread their presence when you Google. But most strikingly, they all have a preoccupation with my being a failure as a writer, and in particular with my book sales. This is also a major preoccupation of Stephen Leather, many of whose blogposts are about his enormous sales. For Leather, everything is about material success, and he thinks my not having sold as many books as he has will humiliate me, or even cause trouble for me. He did this with Steve Mosby, too, as you can see in one of the screenshots I've used above. On August 24 2012, Leather left a comment here under his own name defending himself. He wrote:
'According to Neilsen, Duns has sold a grand total of 3,278 books in the UK. That's over his whole writing "career". According to Neilsen, his latest book, The Moscow Option, has sold 162 copies. I think you need look no further than that for an explanation of the jealousy that is driving Duns. I sell more copies in one week than he has sold in his life.'
Leaving aside for the moment that these figures were a) irrelevant and b) inaccurate (Nielsen doesn't capture everything, and my books also sell outside the UK), it's really quite remarkable that Leather had access to information like this at all. Publishers and literary agencies usually pay for access to Nielsen Bookscan's data, but it is very expensive. To have access to one's own figures is something very few authors can afford, or are willing to pay for. And to have access to the top 5,000 authors in the UK costs over £20,000 a year. Only very wealthy authors indeed would spend such a sum to get insights into how many books other writers are selling. But, according to his own comment, Stephen Leather is clearly in this exclusive group. Note, then, that among the false accusations presented here, the author of that website quotes and even presents screenshots of my sales from... Nielsen Bookscan.
Golly gosh, what a surprise.
On October 6 2014, someone registered two new websites with GoDaddy.com:
fuckjeremyduns.com (registered at 9:04 and 31 seconds)
and
fuckstevemosby.com (also registered at 9:04 and 31 seconds)
And then, just over five minutes later, at 9:09 and 34 seconds:
I am sure you will agree, more ingenious diversionary tactics than the latter touch have never before been seen in human experience.
As well as the five-minute delay between the first two sites being registered and the third, there is another difference between the sites. They have changed a few times and at the time of writing are devoid of content, but the ones devoted to me and Steve Mosby were very clearly attacking us. Here's what the site about me looked like when it launched:
Yes, it's pretty crap. Laughable, really. Nothing to support the claims, and a rather unflattering photo of me. Okay. But would you be pleased if a site with a similar name and content was set up about you anonymously to try to damage your career? Especially as it can be filled with who knows what, and read and perhaps believed by who knows who. Your parents, kids, friends, boss, and potential future employers.
The site is a shell now, for reasons that will become clear. The site attacking Steve had much more extensive content. After lying dormant for a year, in December 2015 it sprung to life:
Steve is in fact rather a handsome chap, one of the most pleasant people I've met and quite tall to boot. But the looming photo of him looking like a weirdo might put some readers off, of course, as well as annoy him, which I guess is also the idea with these nasty attack sites. This site consisted almost entirely of screenshots of every time Steve Mosby has tweeted or even retweeted a swear word since 2009, and ended with the following rant:
'SO THERE YOU GO. STEVE MOSBY LIKES TO USE THE MOST OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE POSSIBLE IN PUBLIC. HE ATTACKS SPORTS FIGURES, BUSINESSMEN AND POLITICIANS USING WORDS THAT REALLY HAVE NO PLACE BEING USED IN PUBLIC. IF STEVE MOSBY WANTS TO TALK LIKE THAT IN THE PRIVACY OF HIS OWN HOME, THAT WOULD BE FINE, BUT HE DOES IT IN PUBLIC WITH A TOTAL DISREGARD FOR OTHER PEOPLE'S SENSIBILITIES. HE DOESN'T CARE WHO HE OFFENDS. DOES HE DO IT TO SHOCK? MAYBE. DOES HE DO IT TO ATTACT ATTENTION TO HIMSELF SO THAT HE CAN SELL MORE BOOKS? POSSIBLY. BUT USING OBSCENE LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC SEEMS A STRANGE WAY OF TRYING TO BUILD A READERSHIP.'
Considering that the person who created the site called it 'fuckstevemosby.com', their outrage over Steve's swearing seems, well, just a tad disingenuous. The idea behind the site is clearly to try to put readers off reading Steve's books. It also claimed he is a 'blasphemer' because he had used phrases such as 'Jesus wept' on Twitter. Absurd - but also an attempt, I think, to try to turn away any of his potential readers who are religious. The parting shot that swearing on Twitter sometimes is a 'strange way of trying to build a readership' is an odd complaint to make. Unless the person making that complaint is also a writer, of course. A writer who has spent years trying to promote himself online to gain new readers. Someone with a grudge against Steve Mosby, and who is dishing out advice on how he can become more successful in his career, via a website devoted to attacking him.
Finally, the supposed serious concern the site has for Steve's swearing is undermined further in the footer, which reads 'Copyright 2013. I'm a very naughty boy!. All Rights Reserved.' This, of course, is a reference to Monty Python. It's supposed to irritate Steve, I suppose, but really just indicates a glee in exacting such a petty form of retaliation.
But what about fuckstephenleather.com, I hear you ask. Surely that would attack Leather in some way in an attempt to damage his reputation, too? Surprisingly, no. It contains nothing but this image:
To borrow another Monty Python line, this is of course an oh-so-hilarious 'nudge nudge wink wink' from the person who set up the account. The person who set up fuckstevemosby.com claims to be a 'very naughty boy', and here they are accusing Stephen Leather, devastatingly, of being - oh, look - a very naughty boy. It's really subtle stuff.
I think by now you'll have figured out that Stephen Leather set up the four blogs about me, as well as fuckjeremyduns.com, fuckstevemosby,com, and just because he thought it would be a brilliant diversion that would put people off the scent, fuckstephenleather.com. But I suspect you (and Mr Leather) are wondering if I can go beyond what common sense tells us all is the case and present something more solid. Well, I think I can, yes. After three years, Stephen Leather finally tripped up and left a trail leading right back to his door.
Steve Mosby has written about the website attacking him here, and alludes to it having been set up by Stephen Leather. But what makes him think that? Well, when he noticed these last three websites had gone up in 2014, he posted about it on his Facebook page, providing links to all three sites. And several of his Facebook friends replied and said there was something very odd about the site attacking me: instead of seeing the image Steve had posted, they were redirected... to Stephen Leather's site about his character Spider Shepherd. Steve Mosby immediately went on his phone and found this was true, so took a screenshot of it redirecting. Here is the screenshot:
A few hours later, the website was scrubbed, back to an advert for GoDaddy.com.
It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. Stephen Leather set up the site fuckjeremyduns.com to smear me, but by mistake he included a redirect to another of his websites, spidershepherd.com, about his series character Dan 'Spider' Shepherd. He quickly realized the goof and so deleted the site he had planned to smear me with, meaning it reverted to the registration page. But Steve Mosby got that screenshot first, when it still redirected.
I think that, considering what I've outlined above, the chances of someone other than Stephen Leather setting up a website to attack me that redirects to one of Stephen Leather's websites, and with the evidence of that deleted shortly afterwards, is really infinitesimally small. But as if to confirm it still further, Stephen Leather then cited these attack websites himself, editing an old blog post from 2014 to do so:
This is classic 'arm's length' smearing. He set up the websites to smear me and Steve anonymously. Then he linked to them on his own website, giving them credence but not taking any of the flak for it that he would obviously have done had he set them up openly under his own name.
In 2012, I helped bring wider attention to Leather's sockpuppeting and cyber-bullying. Four years later, Stephen Leather is attacking me and a writer he even shares a publisher with... by sockpuppeting and cyber-bullying. I think his behaviour is not just grossly unprofessional but pathetic and really pretty despicable. I can only hope that either his publisher or someone else intervenes to try to persuade him to stop it.
Some Due Diligence on Mo Ansar
This is an article about the political and social commentator, civil rights activist, banker, lawyer, theologian, imam, communications specialist, school governor, sex education guide author, lecturer, marriage counsellor, prison chaplain and sheik Mohammed ‘Mo’ Ansar.[Update: If you’ve received an email purporting to be from me saying I believe elements of this article are incorrect or unwise to disseminate further, it’s fake. I stand by everything I’ve written in this article, and encourage you to share it widely.]
A couple of years ago, Ansar was near-ubiquitous as a Muslim spokesman in the British media. In May 2014, he was widely exposed as a fraud in articles by:
● Nick Cohen, writing in The Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9206741/a-guy-named-mo
● Iain Dale: http://www.iaindale.com/posts/2014/05/04/the-truth-about-mo-ansar
● Jamie Bartlett in The Daily Telegraph: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100013574/mo-ansar-and-rise-of-the-bogus-social-media-commentator
● John Sargeant: https://homoeconomicusnet.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/how-i-conspired-against-mo-ansar
● And by me on this site: www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/5/29/the-dangerous-mr-ansar
“He tweeted himself into existence. He managed, with no qualifications, experience or credentials, to become a public figure who appeared on Newsnight, the Today Programme, the Big Questions, and elsewhere. In so doing he became a de facto spokesperson for the ‘Muslim community’, a position he did not merit.” The Daily Telegraph
Many others had been onto Ansar’s ways for some time – there’s a vast encyclopedia-style entry on him online, from which a lot of information in this article is drawn – and a lot of people had seen through him because of his appearance on the BBC programme When Tommy Met Mo in 2013. During the programme, Maajid Nawaz of the counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation asked Ansar if he believed that in an Islamic state, with all the sharia conditions met, thieves should have their hands chopped off. A simple question, but Ansar was notably flustered and unable to give a yes or no answer to it. You can watch the clip here.
The combination of all of the above exposed Ansar’s real views and behaviour to a wide audience, leaving his credibility in tatters. Owen Jones called him a ‘total charlatan’, while the organisation Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks (TellMAMA), which had initially supported him, realised he had simply been using them to settle scores by levelling false accusations of Islamophobia at anyone who dared criticize him. In December 2014, the organization accused Ansar of being a ‘fantasist’ who had made ‘vexatious claims’, ‘a smear merchant who peddles conspiracy theories’ and ‘a liability and an embarrassment to Muslim communities’.
But memories are short and Mr Ansar is very persistent. His main base of operations is Twitter, which is so fast-moving he can still create enough of a head of steam with a controversial comment on current events that unsuspecting producers will catch it on the wind and invite him on, unaware he has been exposed as a fraud by credible journalists. The media cycle can itself be so fast-moving that due diligence on talking heads isn’t always carried out, and Ansar can seem like an attractive option. He also goes to extraordinary lengths to pursue anyone who gets in his path. He has a simple but extremely effective tactic: he paints anyone who criticizes him as harassing him, or as part of a sinister ‘cabal’ of ‘far-right anti-Muslim sociopaths’ arrayed against him. How the likes of Owen Jones and the Muslim activist group TellMAMA fit into that is unclear, but Ansar flings mud hoping something will stick, often in the knowledge that organisations are obliged to look into any claims of harassment or bigotry.
This article is intended as a resource to enlighten anyone who’s missed the story, and is mainly written to aid:
● Journalists and producers considering giving Ansar airtime. If you do, know what you’re getting into: a man who poses as a moderate, but holds many extremist views. He is an anti-semite and conspiracy theorist who believes there are doubts about 9/11, that Jesus wasn’t Jewish and that Muslims discovered America before Columbus, and he has endangered someone’s life and that of their family to pursue a petty vendetta.
● People who Ansar has reported to their employers or even the police for harassing/abusing/being Islamophobic towards him. If this has happened to you – as it has happened to many – please send them a link to this article to show why they should simply tell him to get lost.
● Employers who have received a complaint from Ansar about one of their employees. The man is a vindictive fraud. Unless, and only unless, he has provided screenshots or other proof of something genuinely bigoted or threatening aimed at him, please support your employee and tell Ansar to get lost. He’s wasted a lot of people’s time and even ruined careers by crying wolf like this. Please don’t buy his nonsense.
1. Hatred and threats
Prior to his media career, Ansar was a financial manager at the Lloyds-TSB branch in Winchester, but was suspended for 'sloppy' work and suspected 'deliberate falsification of assets' in 2003. He took the bank to an employment tribunal, claiming it had racially discriminated against him for asking him to repay a staff loan, but the case was thrown out and he left the company. [The previous two sentences have been edited: they originally stated he was sacked, but Ansar disputed this on Twitter in late 2015. I've seen no other evidence for this, and think leaving a company after losing an employment tribunal against them constitutes being sacked in common parlance, but let's take him at his word here and agree he "left". But as the lawyer and Financial Times journalist David Allen Green has pointed out, Ansar also admitted in those court proceedings to having lied.]
He then started to reinvent himself as a social and political commentator, with remarkable success, working up from local radio to appearances on the BBC’s Today show, Newsnight and a host of international media. Since his exposure in 2014 he is used very little, but he occasionally pops up on Russia Today or local news. He’d love nothing more than for a radio or TV show to interview him so he can grab a foothold again, but he isn’t merely a liar – he is potentially dangerous.
1.1. Stirring death threats against others
In early 2014, Ansar helped stir a campaign against Maajid Nawaz for tweeting that he wasn’t offended by an innocuous cartoon of the prophet Mohammed – Ansar’s motive for this was undoubtedly revenge against Nawaz for having exposed his inability to condemn hand-maiming for theft on the BBC. As we recently saw in Paris and Copenhagen, stirring such views over cartoons of Mohammed is no small matter: people have been murdered over this. Nothing happened to Mr Nawaz, thankfully, but he and his family still can’t return to Pakistan because of the credible death threats made against them as a result of Ansar stirring up the issue along with a Liberal Democrat named Mohammed Shafiq. I’ve seen the death threats in question: they’re real and frightening. For the full story on this, see Nick Cohen in his Spectator article.
1.2. False claims to having received death threats to silence criticism
Ansar likes to boast that he too has received death threats, specifically that Al Shabaab put him ‘on top of their kill list’, usually to silence criticism of him and prove his credentials as a moderate. But this claim is false, as I describe in detail here.
2. Extreme views
Ansar presents himself as a moderate and is superficially convincing on this front. However, he holds many extreme views, and justifies others who share them:
2. 1. Apologism for Islamist extremists
He has promoted events and members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir on social media. He defended CAGE when they offered up justifications for Mohammed Emwazi and like them he instead blamed the security services and even the Quilliam Foundation for Emwazi beheading journalists and aid workers. He has supported jail for blasphemy against Islam. He is in favour of gender segregation in British universities.
2. 2. Anti-semitism
Ansar is anti-Zionist, but he is also anti-semitic. According to this exhaustive website, during an appearance by David Miliband on Question Time, Ansar tweeted:
“It consisted of Zionist Jew Miliband avoiding qs on Israeli refusing to follow UN resolns. Unsurprising.”
Ansar has since deleted the tweet. On his blog, he wrote:
“Israel, arguably a terrorist state, is overwhelmingly core funded through the US and holocaust reparations”
and that Jews
“are meant to wander without a land.”
Ansar has voiced support for Gilad Atzmon as recently as March 2015. Atzmon is rabidly anti-semitic, a fact that has been pointed out to Ansar on multiple occasions.
Atzmon wrote on his website:
“If the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war?”
Atzmon has also claimed that Jews are to blame for the Holocaust, writing:
“Jewish politics and culture, unfortunately, is obnoxious, abusive, as well as racist, and supremacist to the bone... Many Jews around the world are commemorating the Holocaust this week. But if I am correct, maybe the time is ripe for Jewish and Zionist organisations to draw the real and most important lesson from the Holocaust. Instead of constantly blaming the Goyim for inflicting pain on Jews, it is time for Jews to look in the mirror and try to identify what it is in Jews and their culture that evokes so much fury. It may even be possible that some Jews would take this opportunity to apologise to the Gentiles around them for evoking all this anger.”
Ansar is well aware of all this, but chooses to argue his way around it and continues to offer Atzmon public support.
2.3 Conspiracy theories
Ansar has expressed doubts about the events of September 11 2001:
“We have no conclusive proof of who committed 9/11, why the towers were ‘pulled’, why airplanes were modified, why steel melted at 800 degrees not 2,300 or the relevance of ‘Operation Northwoods’. The pleas of the families for an inquiry are denied and the evidence has in the majority, been completely destroyed. However, any straw poll will almost entirely state it was the Moozlims. ”
He also believes Muslims lived in American 500 years before Columbus and Europeans arrived, has quoted a Holocaust-denying website to claim that Jesus was not a Jew and has repeated numerous hoaxes as fact, such as the idea that the first American president was black. John Sargeant has a good round-up of these and other conspiracy theories Ansar likes to propagate.
2.4 Homophobia and women's rights
Ansar claims to have worked for LGBT rights for 15 years, and yet he believes homosexuality is a sin. He also claims to be a women’s rights activist, but his advice to one woman when she approached him about her abusive husband seems extremely problematic.
3. Sockpuppetry
Ansar’s main base of operations is Twitter, where his persona often appears charming and reasonable. It is a Potemkin persona, designed to impress bookers from TV and radio shows as well as to curry favour with media figures. It’s a method he has honed over several years, and it goes like this: he sees something in the news that he feels he can use to lever himself into the media, usually something related to Islam or Muslims. Media bookers often search Twitter to see how people are discussing the news, and frequently invite pundits on as a result of conversations they have on the site. Ansar takes a position on Twitter he knows will appeal to the media, often a controversial one. In most cases, some people will disagree with him, but several users will support his points and perhaps tweet media figures directly to ask them their view of what he is saying or even to ask why he has not been featured on their programme yet. Ansar also often tries to involve high-profile figures connected to the issue in his conversations, including their Twitter handles so they will see what he is saying - if they then argue against his position, there is a strong chance someone in the media will see it and he’ll be asked on to provide ‘the other side of the story’ or simply ‘the Muslim viewpoint’.
So he casts out his lure. In some cases, nothing happens. But sometimes an unsuspecting booker for a news programme will be searching Twitter and come across the conversations he is having on the issue in question. Who is this Mo Ansar, they wonder. The name rings a bell. Is he someone they could conceivably have on? They check his profile and see he has over 30,000 followers on the site and that his profile includes photographs of himself in deep conversation with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight and with Russell Brand. Clicking through to the link to his website on his profile, they see he has been on the BBC many times, as well as Sky, Channel 4, CNN, Al Jazeera and Russia Today. A search of his name on YouTube reveals these appearances to be genuine. He even has a Wikipedia entry about him. He is someone. So they send him a tweet asking if they could have his details, and soon a car is making its way to his house to take him to the studio.
A deeper search online would have brought up the numerous exposés of him, but Ansar is counting on the fact that people booking current affairs programmes will be under pressure and in a hurry, and is hoping his exposure has passed them by or been forgotten. The above strategy is carefully constructed and relies on a series of deceptions. Several of the Twitter accounts retweeting his views, arguing in his favour with others and alerting high-profile broadcasters to him are simply Ansar himself operating aliases, or ‘sockpuppets’, as they are known. He has at least ten sockpuppets on Twitter. With some of these, he is far more open in his sympathies for Islamist extremism than he can be on his usually piously moderate account in his own name, which affects a tone of being above the fray. At least two of these identities have been foul-mouthed and abusive, and he’s used them to smear people he regards as enemies, such as Maajid Nawaz, presenters Nicky Campbell and Iain Dale and the historian Tom Holland, who he compared to Anders Breivik. Evidence and more background on how he did that from behind an acount he called ‘The Truthteller’ is here, and I describe his use of ‘Ann Fields’ and related accounts here. All his media appearances on YouTube have been uploaded by the same user, one ‘Driller Kay’ - this is also Ansar. It seems highly unlikely anyone else would go to such lengths, or have access to a recording he made of a private telephone call. In an interview on Radio 5 the day after it was uploaded, Ansar momentarily let the cat out of the bag, before correcting himself:
“Just this evening, I put on – sorry, a friend of mine put onto YouTube, and I put it onto Twitter – this woman who had left me anti-Muslim abuse on Twitter and she happened to leave her phone number so I rang her up.”
Finally, the Wikipedia entry on Ansar was nearly deleted in 2012, but its existence was argued for vociferously by one ‘Avenger786’ – yet another of his online identities.
4. Bullying via reporting to employers and police
Mo Ansar sees any criticism of him as an attack, and if you make the mistake of using any sort of swear word at him on Twitter chances are he’ll inform your employer and insist they fire you, as well as reporting you to the police. You don’t need to have harassed or threatened him for him to react this way: his threshold is remarkably low. In 2012, Ansar explained that he reported tweets that contravened the law:
“If you look at the legilsation: grossly offensive, indecent, annoying, inconvenient or even causing anxiety.”
Simply annoy or inconvenience Mo Ansar and your career might be ruined and the police could pay you a visit. This isn’t hypothetical. He has done this many times, in one case pursuing someone for six months over a single non-threatening tweet they sent him because she was annoyed he had denied the existence of marital rape. The radio presenter Iain Dale explains his experiences with Ansar reporting him to the police for ‘violating his dignity’ here: the email Ansar sent gives a very good idea of his method. In late 2014, the lawyer and journalist David Allen Green politely questioned Ansar on Twitter about his repeated false claims to be a lawyer. Ansar responded by sending a threatening letter to Allen Green’s practice citing the Protection From Harassment Act.
All the above represents the tip of the iceberg concerning Mo Ansar, but hopefully it will act as a form of due diligence. If you would like further details, please feel free to contact me.
