Read the previous chapters: Heroic Names Black Masks Secret Source Intermission: Carruthers Ex Machina Saving England Lone Hands Origin Story VII. Meet ‘Eric Ambrose’ Listen to this chapter ‘After Ambler things were never the same again. Instead of being about the sporting wagers of gentlemen, thrillers became realistic, set in the gutters and alleyways of Eastern Europe.’ Frederick Forsyth *…
Read the previous chapters: Heroic Names Black Masks Secret Source Intermission: Carruthers Ex Machina Saving England Lone Hands VI. Origin Story Listen to this chapter The Dark Frontier was Eric Ambler’s first published novel, but it was far from his first piece of fiction. In an interview with The Guardian in 1970, he discussed how he had left university after two years to become an apprentice…
Read the previous chapters: PART I PART II PART III INTERMISSION PART IV V. Lone Hands Sydney Horler’s novel In the Dark , published by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain in 1927, introduced a new hero. Bearing the improbable name of Buncombe ‘Bunny’ Chipstead, we are told he is forty-four years old, has a slight, wiry build, and is very wealthy – when in London he lives in a luxurious bachelor flat…
Read the previous chapters: PART i: HEROIC NAMES PART ii: BLACK MASKS PART iii: SECRET SOURCE INTERMISSION: DEUS EX CARRUTHERS IV. Saving England ‘I could appreciate the need in a strange place of some point of support, of one or two things scattered around which are familiar and understandable even if they are only Sydney Horler’s novels, a gin and tonic.’ – Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps…
Image created using Canva’s AI tool PART I PART II PART III Intermission: Carruthers Ex Machina Eric Ambler had fun parodying the spy thriller in The Dark Frontier , but he was also making a point about its constraints: geopolitics in 1936 were much more complex than were usually considered in the genre. Ambler illustrated this by creating a meta-thriller in which a physicist takes on the identity…
CLICK TO READ PART ONE CLICK TO READ PART TWO III. Secret Source In The Dark Frontier , Eric Ambler developed his parody of the thriller by creating a novel within his novel, ‘Conway Carruthers, Dept. Y’, the spirit of which entwines and then takes over the reality of his protagonist, physicist Professor Barstow. After coming across a copy of this lurid thriller in the lounge of his hotel – the…
CLICK TO READ PART ONE Part II. Buried Treasure ‘This story is set in and around Jamaica. It is a contest of wits and strength between an American Secret Agent, Commander James Gunn, and an International free-lance spy of Chinese/German extraction – Dr. No.’ [i] It’s almost impossible to read the opening lines of Fleming’s outline of ‘James Gunn – Secret Agent’ and not get a thrill. Morgenthau’s…
This is a follow-up to Looking for James Gunn . Part I. A Spy In Jamaica In February, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson announced that they were stepping down and handing creative control of the James Bond films to Amazon. Since then, there has been a lot of speculation about how Amazon might proceed: according to The Hollywood Reporter , before the deal was struck the company had…
Update : Since writing the text below, I have located the script material. Read more here . I don’t know what to file this under: perhaps ‘a near-discovery’? Discussing the possibility of Amazon making a James Bond TV series with my friend Ajay Chowdhury a couple of weeks ago, I somewhat randomly remembered that years ago I had rummaged around a bit to see if I could find anything more than…
II. Black Masks Read Part I here . In my 2010 essay Bourne Yesterday , I looked at four novels that all featured secret agents suffering from amnesia caused by a blow to the head while undercover on a mission: Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964), Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980), and two novels published in 1940, Faked Passports by Dennis Wheatley and Pray Silence by Manning Coles…
They thought he was dead. They were wrong. Spy Out The Land is now available in the United States in the following formats: Ebook: $0.99 Paperback: $9.99 Hardcover: $23.00 The prices are the minimum Amazon will allow for the length of the book. Happy reading!
In 1975, Anthony Burgess wrote perhaps the strangest treatment for a James Bond film ever penned. Jeremy Duns uncovers the story Embed from Getty Images It’s now over two years since Daniel Craig took his final bow as James Bond in No Time to Die , and there’s still no sign of what the future holds for the film series. In November, 007 producer Barbara Broccoli revealed to The Guardian that she…
I. Heroic Names When Ian Fleming sat down at his desk in Jamaica in early 1952 to write his first novel, one of the most significant decisions he made was naming his protagonist, as he explained in 1961: ‘I was determined that my secret agent should be as anonymous a personality as possible, even his name should be the very reverse of the kind of “Peregrine Carruthers” whom one meets in this type…
I wrote this essay about the Ian Fleming short story Quantum of Solace i n 2008. At the time, the story’s title had just been chosen as the title of the forthcoming Bond film, and there had been a lot of press about how ‘un-Bondian’ it was. The story is often compared to the work of Somerset Maugham, but without much explanation as to why. In the essay, I look at that a little more closely, as…
An overlooked tale of unremitting failure with a surprising impact – Jeremy Duns goes behind the lines of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War PART III (Read Part I here and Part II here .) Another writer who drew on le Carré’s novel was Ian MacKintosh, the creator of The Sandbaggers . This acclaimed TV series has often been compared to le Carré’s work, but it is The Looking Glass War in…
An overlooked tale of unremitting failure with a surprising impact – Jeremy Duns goes behind the lines of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War PART II (Read Part I here .) John le Carré was not the only one to realise that his acerbic view of spies in The Looking Glass War was not widely shared by the public – so did several other writers. As a result, the framework he pinned his satire on has…
An overlooked tale of unremitting failure with a surprising impact – Jeremy Duns goes behind the lines of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War PART I Few would deny that John le Carré’s third novel changed the face of espionage fiction. Published in 1963, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was an international cultural phenomenon, sitting on top of the US bestseller list for a whopping 35…
Last year, Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times journalist and author of All Out War and Fall Out , wrote up a list of his favourite 125 spy novelists for the website of the Spybrary podcast. It’s a tremendous piece of work, with all sorts of information – and indeed authors – I knew nothing about, and it will keep espionage aficionados occupied for years to come. One writer who appears surprisingly high…
Some fascinating news in The Bookseller today : Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) has commissioned novelist Kim Sherwood ( Testament ) to write a trilogy about the Double O Section, with the first to be released in 2022: ‘The publisher said: “James Bond is missing, presumed captured or even killed. All of Bond’s contemporaries are gone and a new generation of Double O agents has been recruited to…
Update: You can now read an extended version of the article here , or download it as part of the free ebook Need to Know here . 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…