Ian Fleming on the thriller & The Riddle of the Sands

Bond’s creator on the thriller
Ian Fleming, The Spectator, 1955

Quote :

Some people are frightened by silence and some by noise. To some people the anonymous bulge at the hip is more frightening than the gun in the hand, and all one can say is that different people thrill to different stimuli, and that those who like The Turn of the Screw may not be worried by, for instance, The Cat and the Canary.

Only the greatest authors make the pulses of all of us beat faster, and they do this by marrying the atmosphere of suspense into horrible acts. Poe, Stevenson and M.R. James used to frighten me most, and now Maugham, Ambler, Simenon, Chandler and Graham Greene can still raise the fur on my back when they want to. Their heroes are credible and their villains terrify with a real ‘blackness’. Their situations are fraught with doom, and the threat of doom, and above all, they have pace. When one chapter is done, we reach out for the next. Each chapter is a wave to be jumped as we race with exhilaration behind the hero like a waterskier behind a fast motorboat.

Too many writers in this genre (and I think Erskine Childers, on whose The Riddle of the Sands these remarks are hinged, was one of them) forget that, although this may sound a contradiction in terms, speed is essential to a novel of suspense, and that while detail is important to create an atmosphere of reality, it can be laid on so thick as to become a Sargasso Sea in which the motorboat bogs down and the skier founders.

The reader is quite happy to share the pillow-fantasies of the author so long as he is provided with sufficient landmarks to help him relate the author’s world more or less to his own, and a straining after verisimilitude with maps and diagrams should be avoided except in detective stories aimed at the off-beta mind.

Even more wearying are ‘recaps’, and those leaden passages where the hero reviews what he has achieved or ploddingly surveys what remains to be done. These exasperate the reader who, if there is to be any rumination, is quite happy to do it himself. When the author drags his feet with this space-filling device he is sacrificing momentum which it will take him much brisk writing to recapture.

These reflections, stale news though they may be to the mainliner in thrillers, come to me after rereading The Riddle of the Sands after an absence of very many years, and they force me to the conclusion that doom-laden silence and long-drawn-out suspense are not enough to confirm the tradition that Erskine Childers, romantic and remarkable man that he must have been, is also one of the father-figures of the thriller.

The opening of the story — factual documentation in the preface and the splendid Lady Windermere’s Fan atmosphere of the first chapters — is superb.

At once you are ensconced in bachelor chambers off St James’s at the beginning of the century. All the trappings of the Age of Certainty gather around you as you read. Although the author does not say so, a coal fire seems to roar in the brass grate: there is a glass of whisky beside your chair and, remembering Mr Cecil Beaton’s Edwardian decors, you notice that the soda-water siphon beside it is of blue glass. The smoke from your cheroot curls up towards the ceiling and your button-boots are carefully crossed at the ankles on the red-leather-topped fender so as not to disturb the crease of those sponge-bag trousers. On a mahogany bookrest above your lap The Riddle of the Sands is held open by a well-manicured finger.

Shall you go with Carruthers to Cowes or accompany him to the grouse-moor? It is the fag-end of the London season of 1903. You are bored, and it is all Mayfair to a hock-and-seltzer that the fates have got you in their sights and that you are going to have to start to pay for your fat sins just over the page.

Thus, in the dressing-room, so to speak, you and Carruthers are all ready to start the hurdle race. You are still ready when you get into the small boat in a God-forsaken corner of the East German coast, and you are even more hungry for the starter’s gun when you set sail to meet the villains. Then, to my mind, for the next 95,000 words there is anticlimax.

This is a book of great renown; and it is not from a desire to destroy idols or a tendency to denigration that this review — now that, after the statutory 50 years, The Riddle of the Sands has entered the public domain — is becoming almost too much of an autopsy. But those villains! With the best will in the world I could not feel that the lives of the heroes (and therefore of my own) were in the least way endangered by them.

Dollmann, villain No. 1, is a ‘traitor’ from the Royal Navy, whose presence among the clucking channels and glistening mudbanks of the Frisian Islands is never satisfactorily explained. His job was ‘spying at Chatham, the blackguard’, and the German High Command, even in 1903 when the book was first published, was crazy to employ him on what amounts to operational research. He never does anything villainous. Before the story opens, he foxes hero No. 1 into running himself on a mudbank but, at the end, when any good villain with his back to the wall would show his teeth, he collapses like a pricked balloon and finally disappears lamely overboard just after ‘we came to the bar of the Schild and had to turn south off that twisty bit of beating between Rottum and Bosch Fat’. His harshest words are, ‘You pig-headed young marplots!’ and his ‘blackness’ is further betrayed by the beauty and purity of his daughter, with whom hero No. 1 falls in love. (It is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have.)

Von Bruning, villain No. 2, is frankly a hero to the author, and is presented as such; and No. 3, Böhme, though at first he exudes a delicious scent of Peter Lorre, forfeits respect by running away across the mud and leaving one of his gumboots in the hands of hero No. 2.

The plot is that the heroes want to discover what the villains are up to and, in a small, flat-bottomed boat, they wander amongst the Frisian Islands (and two maps, two charts and a set of tide-tables won’t convince me that they don’t wander aimlessly) trying to find out.

This kind of plot makes an excellent framework for that classic ‘hurdle race’ thriller formula, in which the hero (despite his Fleet-Foot Shoes with Tru-Temper Spikes and Kumfi-Krutch Athletic Supporter) comes a series of ghastly croppers before he breasts the tape.

Unfortunately, in The Riddle of the Sands there are no hurdles and only two homely mishaps (both of the heroes’ own devising) — a second grounding on a mudbank, from which the heroes refloat on the rising tide, and the loss of the anchor chain, which they salvage without difficulty.

The end of the 100,000-word quest through the low-lying October mists is a hasty, rather muddled scramble which leaves two villains, two heroes and the heroine more or less in the air, and the small boat sailing off to England with the answer to the riddle. Before 1914 this prize must have provided a satisfactory fall of the curtain, but since then two German wars have changed our heads and today our applause is rather patronising.

The reason why The Riddle of the Sands will always be read is due alone to its beautifully sustained atmosphere. This adds poetry, and the real mystery of wide, fog-girt silence and the lost-child crying of seagulls, to a finely written log-book of a small-boat holiday upon which the author has grafted a handful of ‘extras’ and two ‘messages’ — the threat of Germany and the need for England to ‘be prepared’.

To my mind it is now republished exactly where it belongs — in the Mariner’s Library. Here, a thriller by atmosphere alone, it stands alongside 28 thrillers of the other school — thrillers where the action on the stage thrills, and the threatening sea-noises are left to the orchestra pit.

An excellant article, Ambler. Yet another peak into one man's brilliance and absolute command of his field. Thank you very much for posting it.

I especially liked this passage:
"Even more wearying are ‘recaps’, and those leaden passages where the hero reviews what he has achieved or ploddingly surveys what remains to be done. These exasperate the reader who, if there is to be any rumination, is quite happy to do it himself. When the author drags his feet with this space-filling device he is sacrificing momentum which it will take him much brisk writing to recapture."

One of my favourite aspects of Fleming's writing was the brisk clip it ran along at, the way that the novels were dense with content, yet didn't waste words. Always figured that came from his journalistic background.

The piece is mainly interesting to me because Fleming wrote it when James Bond was not particularly well known. I have another article by Fleming on How to Write a Thriller from about 1962, by which time he was an established figure. It makes an fascinating contrast. I'll post it here if anyone wants to see it.

ambler wrote:

The piece is mainly interesting to me because Fleming wrote it when James Bond was not particularly well known. I have another article by Fleming on How to Write a Thriller from about 1962, by which time he was an established figure. It makes an fascinating contrast. I'll post it here if anyone wants to see it.

I can't really see his opinions being vastly different -- but I suppose by that point he's probably a bit more self-disparaging towards the genre? That was one thing that was always tough for me to read, the remarks Fleming made later in life where he tried to lessen his work, putting himself down as it were.

No, it's a 'How to...', it does exactly what it says on the tin. The bit about never looking back is good advice for most people.

Quote :

How to Write a Thriller

By Ian Fleming

People often ask me, "How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have." I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don't think there is anything very odd about that.

We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money.

But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book, which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

The first was the attempt on Bond's life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb.

In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen's life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy, were only bruised by the blast.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat - I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.

The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.

But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.

I write for about three hours in the morning - from about 9:30 till 12:30 and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.

They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Béarnaise with asparagus.

Such mistakes are really nobody's fault except the author's, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.

But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?

First of all, they are financial. You don't make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don't have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.

Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.

© Ian Fleming, 1962

Thanks for that, Ambler! As someone currently in the midst of writing a half-hour teleplay, it was most informative and inspirational!

Thanks for sharing those, Ambler. A great insight into Fleming's thought process.

Wow, really great to read such things from the man himself.

I second the thoughts about authors tending to "recap" the reader. It's a bit insulting, and it's one of my biggest complaints with authors. It totally ruins the pacing.

Great article there. I plan to take his advice about writing continuously, rather than going back to correct things midway.

It really is distracting. I often find myself hating most of what I have written and rework the entire story. Might be why I find writing screenplays and stories to be such a hassle.

Mr. Brown wrote:

Great article there. I plan to take his advice about writing continuously, rather than going back to correct things midway.

It really is distracting. I often find myself hating most of what I have written and rework the entire story. Might be why I find writing screenplays and stories to be such a hassle.

Yeah, they teach us not to do that in Scriptwriting class.

"It is always a bad idea for the hero to fall in love with the villain’s daughter. We are left wondering what sort of children they will have."

Classic Fleming! Thanks for posting this--literary criticism from Fleming is rare and always welcome.