Why James Bond does the best baddies
by ANTHONY HOROWITZ (about to release his seventh Alex Rider novel)
10th August 2007
Daily Mail
What are we to make of David Scaramanga, the 28-year-old owner of a Bath taxi company who claims that his grandfather, George Ambrose Scaramanga, was the model for one of Ian Fleming's most celebrated villains - Francisco Scaramanga, the man with the golden gun?
George was apparently "quiet, wellbehaved and studious".
He certainly never carried a gold-plated Colt 45. He was never paid a million dollars for a single hit.
And, most crucially, he didn't have a supernumerary - which is to say a third nipple.
Nice smile: James Bond in the clutches of Jaws
David Scaramanga seems to think that there was some feud between Fleming and his grandfather which finds its roots at Eton in the 1920s when they were classmates.
He believes the two "hated each other".
This may be the case - but it's also certainly true that Fleming lifted names wherever he found them.
Auric Goldfinger, for example, was named after the Marxist British architect and designer, Erno Goldfinger.
And Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the cat- stroking madman in charge of the terrorist organisation Spectre, may have been inspired by the father of cricket commentator Henry Blofeld, who was also at Eton at the same time as Fleming.
But I'm doubtful about Scaramanga's Etonian lineage. The Man With The Golden Gun was the 13th and final James Bond novel, written in 1963.
By that time, Ian Fleming was wealthy and world famous. He had also created some of the most iconic villains ever to appear in literature: Dr No, Goldfinger, Rosa Klebb, Oddjob, Mr Big... why would his thoughts have turned to a boy he hadn't seen for almost 40 years?
And anyway, there was another man - Pandia Scaramanga - whom he'd met on the Greek island of Hydra and seems a more likely suspect.
Fleming actually wrote to him and asked if he could use his name.
David Scaramanga's claim may therefore be wishful thinking - for who among us would not wish to be a villain in a James Bond novel?
Just look at the actors who have lined up to play the part in the films, from Joseph Wiseman, Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw through to Sean Bean and Christopher Walken.
What is it about Fleming's villains that makes them so enticing? And why have they proved to be such a hard act to follow?
Rogues' Gallery: (clockwise from top left) Goldfinger, Oddjob, Scaramanga and Dr No
In some ways, Fleming had it easy. For a start, he was writing when the Cold War was at its height and his enemies were easily identifiable.
The first Bond book, Casino Royale, was written in 1953 just as the McCarthy trials in America were gathering steam and even the notion you might be a communist could be enough to destroy your life.
It's no accident, then, that Le Chiffre, the villain in that book, was said to be the chief treasurer for the Russian spy organisation, Smersh.
Dr No, Rosa Klebb, Mr Big and Scaramanga were all Russian or working for the Russians and that didn't just make them bad.
It made them part of an all pervading evil empire.
And if they weren't dastardly Russians, they could be German with equal effect.
In Moonraker, Hugo Drax turns out to be Graf Hugo von der Drache, a survivor of a Nazi terrorist group who is out to destroy the "filthy country" that is England.
He rants and raves: "I loathe and despise you all. You swine! Useless, idle, decadent fools, hiding behind your bloody white cliffs while other people fight your battles. Too weak to defend your colonies."
No modern writer could characterise an enemy like that.
And what hero could respond as Bond does? "Get on with your story, Kraut!"
The difference is that when Fleming was writing, the British were more confident of ourselves and our place in the wider world.
We had just won a global war against impossible odds and Bond had been born at the heart of that conflict, when Fleming was working inside intelligence in the Special Operations Executive.
That same confidence might explain the ease with which Fleming can depict any foreigner as inferior or even brute animal.
Oddjob, for example, is described as having "an almost mad glare in dramatically slanting eyes, a snout-like upper lip". As a treat, he eats cats. But then he is Korean and, as Goldfinger cheerfully adds, they are "the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world".
Ultimate villain: Scaramanga
Was Fleming a racist? It seems almost impossible to deny it and sometimes this can be uncomfortable particularly when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.
The club where Goldfinger plays cards is restricted to Jews.
Fleming mentions this with no comment. One of Drax's first victims was a Jewish moneylender who got a "crack on his bald skull".
Was he homophobic? Almost certainly. Eating in Miami, Bond is served by a "pansified Italian" while Rosa Klebb appears as a hideous parody of a lesbian, "her feet enclosed in pink satin slippers with pompoms of orange feathers" as she attempts to seduce Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love.
And then there are the disfigurements.
The third nipple showed perhaps faint signs of desperation but until then, Dr No had steel claws instead of hands, Donovan Grant had white skin and an excess of body hair and Rosa Klebb was hideous.
Drax also had a problem with body hair as well as deformed teeth, Le Chiffre had weird eyes with white showing all round the irises.
Oddjob had a cleft palate. And so on. But whatever you want to call them, all these descriptions were a deliberate part of Fleming's style, what Alan Bennett so memorably called 'snobbery with violence'.
He could get away with them in the society that he was writing for. His villains can never be re-created because our morality - the way we're supposed to view how our multi-cultural society - has irrevocably changed.
This makes it much, much harder for a modern writer.
Although I greatly envy Sebastian Faulks - who has been commissioned to write a new James Bond novel - I think he's going to have his work cut out.
And that's before you start thinking of modern attitudes to women and the absence of cigarettes!
But even if Fleming's attitudes are sometimes questionable, there can be no doubting his originality.
Later films lost their track by exaggerating what Fleming had done so artfully.
The real Scaramanga's grandson and Ian Fleming
And so, the disfigurements got sillier and sillier (remember Jaws with his metal teeth?), the homophobia became trite and distasteful (Wint and Kidd hold hands as they leave the murder scene in Diamonds Are Forever) and characters like Oddjob were simply copied, much less successfully with Nick Nack, the midget manservant in The Man With The Golden Gun.
That's the point, really. Ian Fleming did it all first and, as one of the film theme songs may have put it, nobody did it better.
Incidentally, the tenth James Bond novel - and by far the least successful - was The Spy Who Loved Me.
But it does have a great villain, a brutal thug called Sol 'Horror' Horowitz. I wish I could say he was based on my grandfather or one of my relatives, but sadly he wasn't.
*****************************************
• Snakehead, Anthony Horowitz's seventh Alex Rider novel, published by Walker Books is due in November.
dailymail.co.uk
by ANTHONY HOROWITZ (about to release his seventh Alex Rider novel)
10th August 2007
Daily Mail
What are we to make of David Scaramanga, the 28-year-old owner of a Bath taxi company who claims that his grandfather, George Ambrose Scaramanga, was the model for one of Ian Fleming's most celebrated villains - Francisco Scaramanga, the man with the golden gun?
George was apparently "quiet, wellbehaved and studious".
He certainly never carried a gold-plated Colt 45. He was never paid a million dollars for a single hit.
And, most crucially, he didn't have a supernumerary - which is to say a third nipple.
Nice smile: James Bond in the clutches of Jaws
David Scaramanga seems to think that there was some feud between Fleming and his grandfather which finds its roots at Eton in the 1920s when they were classmates.
He believes the two "hated each other".
This may be the case - but it's also certainly true that Fleming lifted names wherever he found them.
Auric Goldfinger, for example, was named after the Marxist British architect and designer, Erno Goldfinger.
And Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the cat- stroking madman in charge of the terrorist organisation Spectre, may have been inspired by the father of cricket commentator Henry Blofeld, who was also at Eton at the same time as Fleming.
But I'm doubtful about Scaramanga's Etonian lineage. The Man With The Golden Gun was the 13th and final James Bond novel, written in 1963.
By that time, Ian Fleming was wealthy and world famous. He had also created some of the most iconic villains ever to appear in literature: Dr No, Goldfinger, Rosa Klebb, Oddjob, Mr Big... why would his thoughts have turned to a boy he hadn't seen for almost 40 years?
And anyway, there was another man - Pandia Scaramanga - whom he'd met on the Greek island of Hydra and seems a more likely suspect.
Fleming actually wrote to him and asked if he could use his name.
David Scaramanga's claim may therefore be wishful thinking - for who among us would not wish to be a villain in a James Bond novel?
Just look at the actors who have lined up to play the part in the films, from Joseph Wiseman, Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw through to Sean Bean and Christopher Walken.
What is it about Fleming's villains that makes them so enticing? And why have they proved to be such a hard act to follow?
Rogues' Gallery: (clockwise from top left) Goldfinger, Oddjob, Scaramanga and Dr No
In some ways, Fleming had it easy. For a start, he was writing when the Cold War was at its height and his enemies were easily identifiable.
The first Bond book, Casino Royale, was written in 1953 just as the McCarthy trials in America were gathering steam and even the notion you might be a communist could be enough to destroy your life.
It's no accident, then, that Le Chiffre, the villain in that book, was said to be the chief treasurer for the Russian spy organisation, Smersh.
Dr No, Rosa Klebb, Mr Big and Scaramanga were all Russian or working for the Russians and that didn't just make them bad.
It made them part of an all pervading evil empire.
And if they weren't dastardly Russians, they could be German with equal effect.
In Moonraker, Hugo Drax turns out to be Graf Hugo von der Drache, a survivor of a Nazi terrorist group who is out to destroy the "filthy country" that is England.
He rants and raves: "I loathe and despise you all. You swine! Useless, idle, decadent fools, hiding behind your bloody white cliffs while other people fight your battles. Too weak to defend your colonies."
No modern writer could characterise an enemy like that.
And what hero could respond as Bond does? "Get on with your story, Kraut!"
The difference is that when Fleming was writing, the British were more confident of ourselves and our place in the wider world.
We had just won a global war against impossible odds and Bond had been born at the heart of that conflict, when Fleming was working inside intelligence in the Special Operations Executive.
That same confidence might explain the ease with which Fleming can depict any foreigner as inferior or even brute animal.
Oddjob, for example, is described as having "an almost mad glare in dramatically slanting eyes, a snout-like upper lip". As a treat, he eats cats. But then he is Korean and, as Goldfinger cheerfully adds, they are "the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world".
Ultimate villain: Scaramanga
Was Fleming a racist? It seems almost impossible to deny it and sometimes this can be uncomfortable particularly when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.
The club where Goldfinger plays cards is restricted to Jews.
Fleming mentions this with no comment. One of Drax's first victims was a Jewish moneylender who got a "crack on his bald skull".
Was he homophobic? Almost certainly. Eating in Miami, Bond is served by a "pansified Italian" while Rosa Klebb appears as a hideous parody of a lesbian, "her feet enclosed in pink satin slippers with pompoms of orange feathers" as she attempts to seduce Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love.
And then there are the disfigurements.
The third nipple showed perhaps faint signs of desperation but until then, Dr No had steel claws instead of hands, Donovan Grant had white skin and an excess of body hair and Rosa Klebb was hideous.
Drax also had a problem with body hair as well as deformed teeth, Le Chiffre had weird eyes with white showing all round the irises.
Oddjob had a cleft palate. And so on. But whatever you want to call them, all these descriptions were a deliberate part of Fleming's style, what Alan Bennett so memorably called 'snobbery with violence'.
He could get away with them in the society that he was writing for. His villains can never be re-created because our morality - the way we're supposed to view how our multi-cultural society - has irrevocably changed.
This makes it much, much harder for a modern writer.
Although I greatly envy Sebastian Faulks - who has been commissioned to write a new James Bond novel - I think he's going to have his work cut out.
And that's before you start thinking of modern attitudes to women and the absence of cigarettes!
But even if Fleming's attitudes are sometimes questionable, there can be no doubting his originality.
Later films lost their track by exaggerating what Fleming had done so artfully.
The real Scaramanga's grandson and Ian Fleming
And so, the disfigurements got sillier and sillier (remember Jaws with his metal teeth?), the homophobia became trite and distasteful (Wint and Kidd hold hands as they leave the murder scene in Diamonds Are Forever) and characters like Oddjob were simply copied, much less successfully with Nick Nack, the midget manservant in The Man With The Golden Gun.
That's the point, really. Ian Fleming did it all first and, as one of the film theme songs may have put it, nobody did it better.
Incidentally, the tenth James Bond novel - and by far the least successful - was The Spy Who Loved Me.
But it does have a great villain, a brutal thug called Sol 'Horror' Horowitz. I wish I could say he was based on my grandfather or one of my relatives, but sadly he wasn't.
*****************************************
• Snakehead, Anthony Horowitz's seventh Alex Rider novel, published by Walker Books is due in November.
dailymail.co.uk
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